“Histories of gender, families and children: what do we still want to know?”, Dr Stephanie Tarbin (School of Humanities and Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence of the History of Emotions, UWA)

Date: 11 October, 2016
Time: 6:00pm-7:00pm
Venue: Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia
RSVP: This is a free events, but RSVPs are requested: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/tarbin

The lives of medieval people are far in the past and were often unrecorded. Nonetheless, in recent decades, gender and social historians have made enormous contributions to our understanding of the quotidian experiences and mentalities of the children, women and men of the pre-modern period. Reading conventional sources ‘against the grain’ has enabled feminist scholars to explore women’s agency and self-perception, while combining legal records with personal accounts allows us to better understand how children acted in and viewed their social worlds. The recent ‘emotional turn’ in history has re-posed long debated questions about affective relations within families and households, offering fresh frameworks for assessing the emotional lives of ordinary people.

Stephanie Tarbin has research interests in the gender and social history of late-medieval and early modern England. She has published essays on moral regulation, masculinity, women’s friendships and children’s experiences, which is the focus of her most recent research. With Susan Broomhall, she is co-editor of Women, Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2008).