Ideas about gender shaped people’s lives in the medieval world: gender dictated legal status and work opportunities, and determined how medieval societies thought about sex, family and parenthood, and even religious life. However, medieval gender roles were not monolithic or static: they shifted across time and place and diverged based on socioeconomic status and religious identity. This course will explore how Jews, Christians, and Muslims negotiated and sometimes challenged expectations about gender and sexuality in the medieval world, as well as how scholars have utilized different types of medieval sources to reconstruct gender systems. Topics will include marriage, family, sexuality, and constructions of both femininity and masculinity, as well as the role of gender in piety, labor, medicine, and interfaith polemic.
Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or above