This thesis explores space and gender in twenty-three Latin saints’ vitae from the thirteenth-century Low Countries. In the midst of urbanisation and rejuvenating apostolic zeal, the vitae emerged from a milieu in which groups of women who were unable or unwilling to pursue a traditional religious vocation chose to live a vita mixta, a combination of the contemplative and active life, while remaining in the world. Recent scholarship has moved away from viewing the women through the lens of institutionalisation. However, continued focus on the women’s ecclesiastical status and the labels used to describe them has implicitly maintained a lay/monastic binary, in which the women are compared against the monastic paradigm. The twenty-three vitae under examination detail the lives of both women and men (whose vitae offer a comparison) from different backgrounds and vocations. This wide-ranging selection of texts allows for a broad comparative textual analysis in order to consider where and how the women and men enacted solitary piety and communal devotion. Taking geometric space as its organising principle the thesis considers the dominant cultural configurations of space and its fluidity, noting how space could be transformed to suit the spiritual needs of individuals and groups. Solitude could be achieved in a variety of different settings from the bedchamber to wilderness while spaces such as streets, windows and cells could facilitate communal devotion. This connected women and men from different religious backgrounds. There are some surprising finds: in the vitae entry points such as windows and doors were fundamental to womens’ communal piety and women sought solitude in the wilderness more frequently than their male counterparts. Uncovering women from the shadows of male-authored texts remains a pertinent issue in histories of medieval women. Ultimately, this thesis’ adoption of a spatial framework provides a different avenue to explore the vitae and primarily the women described within.

This comparison of two urban public spaces in the city of La Paz, Baja California Sur, examines the production of gendered space within an ethnohistorical context of material and discursive practices related to socio-spatial order, cultural and biological reproduction, and the construction of urban scale. The focus of the study of these two “commons” is on the liminal spatiality of the central plaza and the seaside promenade, the role of everyday life and consumption in the production of these spaces, and the role of women in these successive spatial transformations. In order to understand the relations and practices that produce these commons, the various spatial transformations that have affected the southern Baja California Peninsula are described and discussed. It is a place that has been constituted and reconstituted within successive globalizing forces since at least the beginning of the sixteenth century, up to and including contemporary international tourism. The city of La Paz, its people, and its sense of itself as expressed in its public spaces have emerged from these historical and cross-cultural processes. By examining and comparing the Parque Velasco and the Malecón as the products of both past and emerging patterns of spatial discourse in the negotiation, rehearsal and affirmation of gender identities, the following specific questions are addressed: What is the role women play in the cultural production and reproduction of these public spaces in a borderland? How do the spaces differ--materially, discursively, and in usage? What or whose purposes do they serve? How do they position peripheral agents within a hegemonic globalizing process? Finally, the study considers the question of what future can be envisioned for La Paz and its commons as border spaces.

This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to five residences that were commissioned and headed by noblewomen in England between the years 1444 and 1541. By focusing on the design, layout and use of domestic space, it explores how female authority was articulated through the material, spatial and social environment of the late medieval great household and its wider landscape. The five noblewomen and sites considered in this study are as follows: Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk (c.1404-75) and Ewelme Manor House (Oxfordshire); Margaret of Anjou, queen of England (1430-82) and Greenwich Palace (Kent); Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond and Derby (1443-1509) and Collyweston Palace (Northamptonshire); Katherine Courtenay, countess of Devon (1479-1527) and Tiverton Castle (Devon); and Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury (1473-1541) and Warblington Castle (Hampshire). By taking a comparative approach to the principal houses of these five women, this thesis makes a new and significant contribution to scholarly discussions of gender, power and space in pre-modern England, which have until now neglected to consider the great household as a site of female authority. Chapter one introduces the sites, and explores the geographical and social factors governing the women's choices of those locations. Chapters two and three focus on the arrangement of outdoor and indoor space respectively, to consider whether there was a discernible gender difference in the ways in which male and female heads of household ordered space for the projection of their authority. Chapter four focuses on the representations of male and female bodies through large-scale visual media such as tapestries and wall paintings, and considers how their representation and placement within the domestic complex articulated female authority. The fifth and final chapter explores the women's performances of their authority as household figureheads. Overall, the thesis argues that female displays of domestic authority relied on a complex interplay of masculine and feminine elements, thus challenging a prevailing notion that authoritative women in pre-modern England were merely honorary men or exceptional women, and revealing a far more nuanced reality.

The Social Spaces of Female Intellectual Careers in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Pest-Buda I examine three Hungarian female intellectual careers of the 19th century in the context of the urban and also the rural lifestyle. I focus on the role of Pest-Buda in the professions of female writers, editors and actresses. Therefore, the subjects of the three case studies are the representatives of these professions: Júlia Szendrey (1828 - 1868) as poet, writer and translator, Emília Kánya (1828 - 1905) as the first female editor of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Kornélia Prielle (1826 - 1906) as successful actress who experienced significant alterations in the assessment of her profession. My main research questions are the following: What was the role of the countryside and Pest-Buda in the female intellectual careers in the 19th century? How did the intellectual women use the urban space in Pest-Buda? What was the role of the first female intellectual professions (writer, editor, and actress) in the urban society? The main sources of the research are the so-called ego-documents (autobiographies, memoires, diaries, correspondences) as well as press products which were mediums of the contemporary debates about the female roles and professions. My primary goal is to reconsider the questions about the...

On account of their supposed link to nature, women in post-revolutionary France were pigeonholed into a very restrictive sphere that centred around domesticity and submission to their male counterparts. Yet this thesis shows how a number of women writers – Cottin, Genlis, Krüdener, Souza and Staël – re-appropriate nature in order to reclaim the voice denied to them and to their sex by the society in which they lived. The five chapters of this thesis are structured to follow a number of critical junctures in the life of an adult woman: marriage, authorship, motherhood, madness and mortality. The opening sections to each chapter show why these areas of life generated particular problems for women at this time. Then, through in-depth analysis of primary texts, the chapters function in two ways. They examine how female novelists craft natural landscapes to expose and comment on the problems male-dominant society causes women to experience in France at this time. In addition, they show how female novelists employ descriptions of nature to highlight women's responses to the pain and frustration that social issues provoke for them. Scholars have thus far overlooked the natural settings within the works of female novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, a re-evaluation of these natural settings, as suggested by this thesis, brings a new dimension to our appreciation of the works of these women writers and of their position as critics of contemporary society. Ultimately, an escape into nature on the part of female protagonists in these novels becomes the means by which their creators confront the everyday reality faced by women in the turbulent socio-historical era which followed the Revolution.