Suchergebnisse

AbstractWomen have been generally relegated to the margins of traditional historiography. They have often been presented as romantic heroines - good or bad - but most of the time they were utterly neglected as historical actors. A prevalent tendency of the nouvelle histoire is the revision of these inherited and by now strongly dated approaches. Modern histori ans try to reconstruct how women lived and worked in the past; they analyze women's roles and functions as integral parts of larger socio-historical structures. While in Western Europe and in the United States women's history has become a research field on its own and produced remarkable results, in East Central Europe this change of attitude towards women in history has not yet happened. By launching a research project on "Women and Power in East Central Europe," the Central European University's Department of Medieval Studies sought to encourage young scholars of the region to study and to reevaluate the roles and positions of women in medieval history. We aimed at making the medieval experience of the region a little less "tiresome" and more interesting by including women's political and cultural presence - the role and function of queens, princesses, and aristocratic women - into the sphere of exploranda and explananda.

Lynn reviews The Worlds of Medieval Europe by Clifford R. Backman.

In the article, based on archaeological materials, written sources, toponymy, ethnography and anthropology, the ethno¬cultural zones of medieval Karelia are distinguished. The process of formation of three large areas is characterized: North-Western Ladoga region, the territory of the chronicles' Korela; South-Eastern Ladoga and Southern Karelia, the lands of the ancient Veps, and the basin of Lake Onega, inhabited by hunters, fishermen and trappers of different ethnic origin.

Professor Russell was the first historian to try to apply statistical methods to analysis of the effects of epidemic plague on the composition, not just on the total size, of medieval population. He argues now that general plagues differed from the type of the disease that became epidemic after the crop failures of 1315–1317, in sharply lowering the sex ratio and in greatly increasing the burden of child-rearing.