Stanford historian says falsified medieval history helped create feminism
Through research into the first historians of medieval Europe, Professor Paula Findlen discovers that an interest in women's history began much earlier than is assumed.
By Kathyrn Dickason
The Humanities at Stanford
Today, feminism is often associated with the political protests of the 1960s or the earlier women's suffrage movement, but Stanford historian Paula Findlen's latest research reveals that the impetus to champion women started in the late Middle Ages.
A scholar of the Italian Renaissance, Findlen has collected biographies of medieval women, written in Italy from the 15th to 18th centuries, several centuries after the women lived.
Through a close examination of these texts, Findlen found that these early modern writers were so passionate about medieval women that they sometimes fabricated stories about them.
As Findlen carefully tracked down the claims in these stories, she found they varied from factual to somewhat factual to entirely false.
These invented women were often mentioned in regional histories, with imaginary connections to important institutions. They were described as having law degrees or professorships, claims that turned out to be fictitious. ...
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Detail of a miniature of medieval writer Christine de Pizan. Stanford historian Paula Findlen has studied Renaissance biographies of medieval women and says these often embellished tales represent a kind of feminism.