Gender and Space in the Later Middle Ages: past, present, and future routes

This article traces approaches to social space back to the 1950s and the subsequent pursuit of the ‘rise of privacy’. It then delivers a historiography of late-medieval gender and space since the 1990s under three main themes: sacred spaces (churches, nunneries and monasteries); vernacular architecture, and high status residences including gardens and deer parks. It is noted that from the mid-1990s the impulse to make women ‘visible’ was largely replaced by an emphasis on differences—and similarities—among and between women, men, and other social categories and contexts, such as urban and rural, and that recent studies have moved on to explore the transgression of gendered boundaries. Methodologies such as access analysis are discussed and suggestions are made for future research, including the opportunities afforded by GI