Herstory: exploring the material life of Gundrada de Warenne

Dempsey, Karen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9025-3535 2021. Herstory: exploring the material life of Gundrada de Warenne. Relations of Power, Göttingen: Bonn University Press, pp. 169-196. (10.14220/9783737012423.169)

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Abstract

Scholarly work on castles draws on multiple sources from history, archaeology, art and architectural history to literary and religious studies. This places it in a unique position to be able to bring different threads together to tell full stories of women’s lives. But a challenge exists to explore medieval women’s gendered roles and their lived experience without falling prey to the trap of inserting women into traditional narratives of male power. As a first step in response to my own call for fuller archaeological accounts of women’s lived experiences, this article focuses on one elite woman – Gundrada Oosterzele-Scheldewindeke, later de Warenne (d. 1085). It endeavours to capture her world through an examination of the material connections and relationships of her life. While people and places are important in this, the emphasis here is placed on our knowledge of the things that shaped Gundrada’s life and death. These range from castle architecture, her much-discussed Tournai stone tombslab, an assemblage of hairpins and a devotional text, the Crowland Psalter, as well as an archaeological object with possible amuletic properties. Drawing these different strands of evidence together shows how we can foreground women, not by marking them as exceptional but to highlight that they were part of and participative within the networked material world. Peer reviewed

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	History, Archaeology and Religion
Publisher:	Bonn University Press
ISBN:	9783847112426
ISSN:	2626-4072
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	7 October 2022
Last Modified:	11 Nov 2022 09:05
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/152945

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