In archaeology, the story of the past is largely told through the experiences of men. Explorations either implicit or explicit of the wide spectrum of gendered identities and ideologies that must have existed in the past are too few. This is not surprising, many inequalities based on sex / sexual preference / sexual identity still persist in our world today. Modern discrimination based on sex, gender or sexual orientation and lack of research on gender in the past are intrinsically linked. Our ways of being in the present inform how we see and interpret the past. In turn, the stories we create to understand the past reveals much of how we see ourselves in our world today. It is no surprise that a patriarchal society in which white men are privileged identifies a past based on a supremacy of males in highly stratified cultures. My project, HERSTORY takes an holistic approach to the study of medieval castles in NW Europe. Through analysis of buildings, objects and the historical record of case-study sites, it reveals how this material culture constructed, reinforced and renegotiated gendered roles in medieval society. Essentially this means telling the story of medieval people, especially women, through the things that they used and cared about, within the spaces they inhabited, through the lens of what we know of the medieval past. This project challenges current male-orientated views of the medieval world, so typical of castle-studies, which have largely excluded the everyday experiences and lives of women. The outcomes of this research will deepen our knowledge of gender identities in medieval Europe.
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.
