Making Space: Women’s Agency within a Patriarchal Hegemony, University of Notre Dame Medieval Institute sponsored panel at the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 9–11, 2024

Abstracts are invited for “Making Space: Women’s Agency within a Patriarchal Hegemony," a panel at the 2024 ICMS, May 9-11 in Kalamazoo. This in-person panel, sponsored by the University of Notre Dame Medieval Institute, seeks to highlight the agentic force of medieval women who operated within the patriarchal norms of their time. It is our conviction that the "well-behaved" women of the medieval period who did not overtly resist or bypass patriarchal expectations still led multifaceted and complex lives deserving of scholarly attention. Specifically, how did religious women, lay or monastic, live their own lives, create their own spaces, and make their own choices within the medieval patriarchal hegemony? We encourage submissions which prioritize case studies of hitherto understudied women or women’s communities.