Gender and Protest in Late Medieval England, c.1400–c.1532

Abstract

Abstract Women appear in our sources as active participants in outbreaks of revolt across the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This should not be surprising, yet historians’ general silence on the subject makes it so. Most scholarly accounts up to the 1980s, and often beyond, portray revolt as a wholly male enterprise. If and when the subject of female participation is broached, it is concluded that women were little involved in public acts of dissent in England. Where historians do find women at the centre of civil unrest, they explain their presence away or relegate their complaints to ‘women’s issues’. By contrast, when men are involved, modern commentators decide that they speak for a ‘common good’, and devote considerable interpretative energies to deciphering what has spurred them into action, seeing—for instance—a wealth of meaning in protests about poverty, inequality or evil counsel. The operative logic is that women can speak only for themselves, men for others. Here we consider the documentary evidence for women’s participation in protest, and show that women were not necessarily driven by gendered motives. Defining their part is as challenging as defining that of male rebels.