The Martial Maid: Women in the Age of Armour

Armour is a category of material and visual culture that was inextricably linked to constructions and representations of masculinity in late medieval and early modern Europe. Using stories, images and texts, this lecture will explore what it meant to depict or describe a female body encased in such symbolic armour of steel and ask the question: ‘How could putting on armour transform a woman in the eyes of her contemporaries and posterity?’