The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women's Roles in Society

What makes for the ideal woman? How should she look, love, and be? In this high-spirited history, medievalist Eleanor Janega unfurls the era's ideas about women. Some of these attitudes were not new to the time: beauty ideals of the Middle Ages, for instance, rested on the mythical and unparalleled Helen of Troy. Janega explores the paradox of real women being expected to look like goddesses while attention to appearance was denigrated as vanity by medieval Christian philosophers. Such men also cast Eve's shadow over contemporary women, deriding them as oversexed sinners, inherently lustful and weak. This era marked the cultural relegation of women to motherhood, but Janega shows that despite these expectations, medieval women were industrious farmers, brewers, textile workers, artists, and artisans, paving the way for new ideas about women's nature, intellect, and ability.