ABSTRACT
My musicological training took place back in an era, not so very long ago, that taught us there were no women in the middle ages. This was the implicit yet emphatic statement of the complete absence of any acknowledgement or consideration of them, of any interrogation about their role in the fabric of fourteenth and fifteenth century life. If there were women, what were they doing? In those days this question was not worth asking. It took the creation, by feminist scholarship, of new tools of inquiry in order to challenge the ingrained assumptions and to imagine that women of that era were capable of creativity and artistic power, just as women of other ages are and have been. Of course, codes of social conventions served to direct women's creative roles, but the scholarly assumption that women made no contribution was one based purely on ignorance.
