HeRstory · Holistic Research into the story of buildings, objects and people in the high medieval period of Ireland, Britain and France from a gendered perspective
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-10-01 → 2019-09-30
- EU contribution
- €195,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Holistic Research into the story of buildings, objects and people in the high medieval period of Ireland, Britain and France from a gendered perspective
In archaeology, the story of the past is largely told through the experiences of men. Explorations either implicit or explicit of the wide spectrum of gendered identities and ideologies that must have existed in the past are too few. This is not surprising, many inequalities based on sex / sexual preference / sexual identity still persist in our world today. Modern discrimination based on sex, gender or sexual orientation and lack of research on gender in the past are intrinsically linked. Our ways of being in the present inform how we see and interpret the past. In turn, the stories we create to understand the past reveals much of how we see ourselves in our world today. It is no surprise that a patriarchal society in which white men are privileged identifies a past based on a supremacy of males in highly stratified cultures. My project, HERSTORY takes an holistic approach to the study of medieval castles in NW Europe. Through analysis of buildings, objects and the historical record of case-study sites, it reveals how this material culture constructed, reinforced and renegotiated gendered roles in medieval society. Essentially this means telling the story of medieval people, especially women, through the things that they used and cared about, within the spaces they inhabited, through the lens of what we know of the medieval past. This project challenges current male-orientated views of the medieval world, so typical of castle-studies, which have largely excluded the everyday experiences and lives of women. The outcomes of this research will deepen our knowledge of gender identities in medieval Europe. Unfortunately, gendered bias is still prevalent in our world today, understanding gender, and specifically women, in the past may offer a mirror contemporary inequalities. This will provide an avenue through which people can begin to question further these imbalances: prompting people to ask are these owing to unequal societies or a result of scholarship that only concentrates on men? As Caroline Criado Perez (2019) has noted that male seems to be a default category in research. Women, and other gendered identities are now and were the medieval period part of the fabric of society, our research must endeavour to acknowledge and embrace this. The overall objectives of this project were to share new gendered understanding of medieval castles. Through many talks, short videos, published academic papers as well as collaborations with heritage professionals I feel I have achieved my goals. I highlighted how things - used by people - can shed new light on gender.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Medieval archaeology has been strongly shaped by the predominance of male-biased perspectives within academia and the modern world. Castle studies in particular is a very male-dominated discipline with out-dated approaches which reproduce exclusively male-centred interpretations, thereby resulting in an impoverished understanding of how people interacted within these spaces. This study seeks to address this problem by taking a more human centred approach which reveals long ignored nuances in social practices. This will be achieved by examining the architecture, material culture (buildings and objects) and historical record of high medieval period England, Ireland and Normandy (1066-1398). HeRstory aims, through deep contextual analysis, to highlight how the material culture of this period both constructed and reinforced gendered roles in medieval society. This will challenge current perspectives in this area of medieval archaeology which imposes typical masculine views into the medieval past such as an exclusive focus on power/status or the tendency to predominantly view this era through the lens of warfare. For the first time, these new understandings of what it was like to be a woman or man in a medieval castle will be revealed. These new perspectives can be extrapolated outwards to achieve nuanced comprehensions of this time period which are far more inclusive/cognisant of gender constructs. This research challenges existing patriarchal and unilinear understandings of the medieval world by providing an insight into how people lived in and interacted with their environments such as the access to and position of rooms within the castle as well as the personal objects that surrounded them. In particular, this research significantly enhances our understandings of gender identities in Europe during this period. By moving to Reading's Dept. of Archaeology and working with Prof. Gilchrist, the researcher will significantly enhance her skillset and career.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF READING · ReadingCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union