Robert Whitley on 15th Century Feminist

I’m not clear on what you intend to mean with the word “erased”? While obv in a patriarchal society, women are going to appear far less often in primary documents, such as charters, deeds, wills, contracts & administrative documents, they not only do appear as witnesses in the Middle Ages & they sometimes they even issue them, noblewomen, abbesses. They even have their own wax seals signifying their status and power. It seems women in legal documents this may have been more common in the Early Middle Ages, in pre-Norman Anglo Saxon England and Carolingian Europe than in the High MA. I don’t think documents were intentionally destroyed because they documented the history of women, which “erasure” might imply. That there was a conscious effort during the Middle Ages to obscure the trail of women which would be left in the futures historical record seems like a stretch. The primary documents, which historians use as sources, are in the archives. It’s no question. As far as secondary sources, like todays historians: if they show no interest in women’s history, then it’s more intentional ignorance than erasing. This is definitely a problem, which is being remedied, but it didn’t happen in the Middle Ages. The archival work is still left there undone for more open-minded historians to do later. There are some extremely relevant women in the Middle Ages, who I’m sure historians have included in their work. There is tons of stuff in the archives which never see the light of day. I myself have found things no one knew existed, or worked on projects going through crates of random fragments from the Middle Ages to identify them. Sometimes some unexpected things surface and it’s amazing. I promise you there are primary sources about women in archives which no one has identified or bothered to catalogue as such. People who are interested haven’t found it yet, it’s not erased, it’s just in total obscurity like most of history, which no one has known to search for. Work on my last post on an Anastasia of Pomerania made me realize this. Women pop up in the documents in unusual circumstances in the High Middle Ages, but they are there. All historians really know comes from these sources, and the rest they write is embellished, fantasized. Fact and fiction still overlap among historians. The Annales School of history, which looks at every day life, was likely elevated women in history too?