Fall 2015 Medieval and Early Modern Studies Lecture

Dr. Shannon McSheffrey  (Ph. D, Toronto), Professor, Department of History, Concordia University, Montreal, will speak on her research on women in late medieval London, including her work in digital humanities. She manages a database relating to the late medieval London Consistory court at http://digitalhistory.concordia.ca/consistory/index.php. In her lecture she will focus on a case study: in the spring of 1488, Margaret Heed, a young London woman about seventeen or eighteen years old, dithered about whether she would marry the man her father chose for her or another man whom she clearly preferred. Margaret’s dilemma highlighted a medieval paradox: young unmarried women were amongst the most powerless persons in medieval society, and yet at this one juncture in her life, as she was about to get married, a young woman held a particularly powerful card, as her consent was necessary for a marriage to be valid. Margaret’s story is a medieval one – but it’s also a 21^st-century digital humanities tale. We have more historical information than ever thanks to the digital revolution, but to interpret Margaret’s story, we also need the humanities, to teach us how to read the subtleties of the evidence, and indeed to remind us about how much we still do not know. 
Professor McSheffrey has published a number of scholarly articles and four books, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420-1530 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London (Medieval Institute Publications, 1995); Lollards of Coventry 1486-1522 (co-authored with Norman Tanner), Camden Fifth Series, vol. 23 (Cambridge University Press, 2003);Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). She has won several awards for her research and teaching and was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society of the U.K. in 2002.