Invisible Women of the Middle Ages: Hidden Actors in History from Eileen Power’s Perspective

When flipping through the pages of history, especially when the Middle Ages are concerned, we are often confronted with two extreme figures: noble ladies awaiting rescue in their towers, immortalized in poetry (the queens of courtly love literature), or saints cloaked in divine silence along the dim corridors of monasteries. But what about the rest? Where are the millions of “ordinary” women who toiled in the fields with the plow, wove cloth in town markets, traded silk, and struggled day and night to feed their homes and children?

It is precisely this gap that British historian Eileen Power’s landmark work, Medieval Women, seeks to fill—a monumental effort to pull history out of the thick walls of castles and the dogmatic narratives of the church and place it squarely in the streets, the fields, and at the workbenches.

Eileen Power, who lived between 1889 and 1940, was one of the most brilliant social and economic historians of her time. Her approach to history offered a radical alternative to the “great men” history that focused solely on kings’ wars and treaties. Power pursued the human stories lost behind grand theories. Medieval Women stands as one of her most mature achievements in this human-centered, meticulous, and literary style.

In this book, Power begins her examination of the social position of medieval women with a clear observation: the vast chasm between theory and practice.

Power brilliantly analyzes the two dominant theoretical forces that shaped perceptions of women in the Middle Ages: canon law and chivalric culture (courtly love).

1. Woman in the Eyes of the Church: In medieval theology, woman had a dual identity: on one hand, Eve, the temptress who led humanity into sin; on the other, Mary, the symbol of purity and holiness. Yet in practice, canon law consistently positioned women as subordinate to men, weak-willed, and in need of control.
2. Woman in the Eyes of Chivalry: In courtly literature, woman was an unreachable, flawless statue, honored with tournaments and songs, but never treated as a real person.

Power argues that both perspectives failed to reflect the reality of women. The church buried women beneath the earth, while chivalry elevated them to the heavens—but neither recognized women as human beings who walked the ground.

It is in the sections where Power sets aside theory and brings to life characters drawn from archival documents, court records, and contemporary literature that she truly captivates us. Throughout the book, we are invited into three distinct worlds of medieval women:

• Peasant Women: Making up the overwhelming majority of the medieval population, these women shared nearly the same heavy labor burden as men: working the fields, planting crops, tending animals, managing the household, and raising children. Power demonstrates that because peasant women directly contributed to economic production, they occupied a far stronger position of “partnership” within the family than theory suggested.
• Urban and Craftswomen: In medieval towns, women were far more than housewives. Guild records prove that women were highly active in trades such as textiles, silk production, brewing, and baking. Many widowed craftswomen took over their husbands’ workshops and businesses, managing large enterprises on their own. Power’s vivid portraits of Parisian silk weavers open a remarkable window into the struggle for economic independence in that era.
• Nuns and Noblewomen: Monasteries served as an escape for women who did not wish to marry or who sought an intellectual life. In describing the world of nuns, Power reveals that they were not merely passive figures devoted to prayer; they were administrators who managed vast estates, kept accounts, and wrote diplomatic correspondence.

Medieval Women dismantles the simplistic view that dismisses the Middle Ages as a dark age where women were mere slaves. Eileen Power does not conceal the oppression women faced, but she shows how, within that oppression, women carved out spaces of their own, resisted, produced, and kept the wheels of the economy turning.

If you believe history is more than just battles for thrones—if you want to hear the voices of real women who spun thread, wrote letters, sought justice, observed mourning, and built lives—then you must give Eileen Power’s timeless and compelling work a chance.