Ladies in Waiting with Caroline Dunn

Ladies-in-Waiting in Medieval England with Caroline Dunn

Wednesday, December 11 9am PT/ 11am CT/ 12pm ET/ 5pm BST

Join NACBS to celebrate the publication of Ladies-in-Waiting in Medieval England by Caroline Dunn. Katherine French will join Caroline Dunn in conversation.

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“Ladies-in-Waiting in Medieval England examines female attendants who served queens and aristocratic women during the late medieval period. Using a unique set of primary source based statistics, Caroline Dunn reveals that the lady-in-waiting was far more than a pretty girl sewing in the queen's chamber while seeking to catch the eye of an eligible bachelor. Ladies-in-waiting witnessed major historical events of the era and were sophisticated players who earned significant rewards. They had both family and personal interests to advance – through employment they linked kin and court, and through marriage they built bridges between families. Whether royal or aristocratic, ladies-in-waiting worked within gendered spaces, building female-dominated social networks, while also operating within a masculine milieu that offered courtiers of both sexes access to power. Working from a range of sources wider than the subjective anecdote, Dunn presents the first scholarly treatment of medieval English ladies-in-waiting.”

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Caroline Dunn is Associate Professor of History at Clemson University. A scholar of medieval Europe with a particular focus on women’s roles and social networks in late medieval England, her books include Ladies-in-Waiting in Medieval England (Cambridge, 2024) and Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery c. 1100-1500 (Cambridge, 2012). She was the 2020 winner of the Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship, which annually awards one female medievalist the resources necessary to earn promotion to Full Professor.

Katherine French is the J. Frederick Hoffman Professor of medieval English history at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books and articles on local religion, women, and material culture, including most recently Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Domesticity and Consumption after the Plague (UPenn Press, 2021). She served as Caroline Dunn’s mentor for the Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship.