The Problem of Women’s Agency in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

In the last few decades, historians have regularly used the term “agency” to frame their studies of historical actors, probably none more so than historians of late medieval and early modern women. Witness, to cite just a few recent examples, all treating European women from roughly 1300 to 1800: Gender and Change; Agency, Chronology and Periodisation (2009); Women, Agency, and the Law, 1300–1700 (2013); Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (2013); Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender Agency, and Identity (2008); Women’s Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies, (2007). Even when not specifically included in the titles of books or articles, the word “agency” is laced throughout innumerable scholarly investigations published in the last several years.1 Although such studies describe women in different settings and with dissimilar capacities, the women in such studies are credited with agency because in some way they seem to have skirted or even reshaped the patriarchal structure of their day. In that respect, these studies imply, they are to be distinguished from the women who acted in full accord with patriarchal norms, even if they may have done so reluctantly. This research has measurably enriched and complicated the historical record. Most of the women’s historians publishing during the last half century or so necessarily concentrated on correcting an historical record that had all but ignored women, thus seeking to expose what were usually described as “women’s roles” in society.2 Although some of the studies inevitably featured