Periodic Reporting for period 1 - HeRstory (Holistic Research into the story of buildings, objects and people in the high medieval period of Ireland, Britain and France from a gendered perspective)
Reporting period: 2017-10-01 to 2019-09-30
Unfortunately, gendered bias is still prevalent in our world today, understanding gender, and specifically women, in the past may offer a mirror contemporary inequalities. This will provide an avenue through which people can begin to question further these imbalances: prompting people to ask are these owing to unequal societies or a result of scholarship that only concentrates on men? As Caroline Criado Perez (2019) has noted that male seems to be a default category in research. Women, and other gendered identities are now and were the medieval period part of the fabric of society, our research must endeavour to acknowledge and embrace this.
The overall objectives of this project were to share new gendered understanding of medieval castles. Through many talks, short videos, published academic papers as well as collaborations with heritage professionals I feel I have achieved my goals. I highlighted how things - used by people - can shed new light on gender.
In order to impact the perception of gender at medieval castles I organised a collaborative workshop: ‘Include/Challenge/Change: Gendered Interpretations of Medieval Castles’ for 25 heritage professionals (English Heritage, Cadw, and Historic Environment Scotland) who attended and presented. The outcomes and feedback from this day formed a multi-authored article (with me as lead). In addition to this I shared project findings and results at 18 conferences, symposiums or workshops (see technical report for full list). Highlights include a Keynote Paper for the Society of Medieval Archaeology conference ‘Archaeology, Feminist Practice and Medieval Castles’ in November 2018, University of Reading. Other international papers took me to Berlin and Sweden: 'Revealing our blindspots: thing-based archaeology at medieval castles', workshop on Rethinking visibility / invisibility of medieval objects at Humboldt University and ‘Gender Archaeology and Medieval Residences’ at Lund University. Altogether, these papers were all concerned with how we can foreground gender in research and tell stories of people in the past through the things that they used, made, loved and cared about.
At the beginning of my Fellowship I created a basic project webpage, available here: https://medievalcastlesandwomen.wordpress.com/(opens in new window) I also created a project specific Twitter account @womenandcastles (220 followers) and maintained my personal Twitter profiles (@karrycrow (1150 followers). I wrote a blog on my research which was shared by the University of Reading. Available at: Views 100+(opens in new window). As part of my concern to reach a wider, more diverse, audience I took part in an ‘Ask Historians’ thread on Reddit. My subject was medieval castles and women. This was very popular, 4,100 people voted and asked 261 questions. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cb25bw/iama_archaeologist_who_specialises_in_medieval/(opens in new window) It. Collaborating with Caroline Teng (graphic artist), I have created a graphic novella ‘Medieval Women: archaeological tales of the unexpected’ which tells the daily-life story of five socially diverse medieval women. This indicates my creative capabilities and commitment to reaching multiple audiences.