You are warmly invited to the first session of the 2022 Aotearoa Gender History Network!
Wednesday Rāapa 16 March, 12 pm – 1 pm NZT / 10 am – 11 am AEST, via zoom
Zoom link: https://waikato.zoom.us/j/97078105588
Speakers:
Amelia Barker
PhD Candidate, Massey University
Constance de Rabastens (d. c.1386): a woman who fought to be heard
Constance de Rabastens was a lay female visionary during the Great Western Schism (1378-1417), a period in which Western Christendom was divided between two rival papacies, and political and religious differences divided communities and even families. Unlike most female visionaries at the time, Constance’s visions supported the “wrong” pope for her region, and she was forbidden from recording her experiences. Despite this, she fought to be heard by religious authorities, challenging their decisions, and eventually disappearing after being arrested. Her recorded letters and visions reveal her agency in making her voice heard, providing historians with a clear example of how medieval women were not just silent witnesses of great political and religious turmoil in their communities, but actively engaged and desperate to influence those in power.
Amanda McVitty
Lecturer in History, Massey University
Sexual regulation and the evolution of patriarchal judicial culture: Towards a feminist history of the legal profession
In his now-classic study, Robert Moore stressed the pivotal role of lawyers in transforming premodern Europe into a ‘persecuting society’ that was heavily invested in surveilling and regulating moral and sexual ‘vice’. This new project centres lawyers’ gendered agency in this process, asking how and to what extent these men created and enabled a patriarchal judicial culture in which were born ‘sticky’ myths and stereotypes about sexual misconduct, rape and gendered violence, and about those who perpetrate it. Using feminist methods, I aim to transform the way we think about and teach this legal history across the premodern-modern divide.
Convenors: Charlotte Greenhalgh (charlotte.greenhalgh@waikato.ac.nz) and Charlotte Macdonald (charlotte.macdonald@vuw.ac.nz)