Why does medieval history matter in an age of renewed debates about diversity, inclusion, and social inequality? This lecture argues that studying medieval women is not just about recovering historical actors, but about developing new ways of analyzing power, agency, and social relations. Moving beyond the search for exceptional women, it proposes a relational approach that understands gender as an analytic category intersecting with status, kinship, education, religion, and other dimensions of social belonging.

By combining gender history with prosopography and historical network analysis, the lecture explores how concepts and data enable better stories. Network attributes, including kinship and marital relations, friendship, office, property, and neighborhood, reveal the resources through which individuals mobilized social capital. These resources connected people to wider networks of belonging. Power was relational because social capital was relational. Examples from medieval Central Europe demonstrate how courts, cities, and religious communities served as hubs of memory, patronage, and political cooperation, illuminating women’s agency within families, institutions, and wider social networks.

Christina Lutter is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Vienna and a Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2027, she will hold a Visiting Chair at Stanford University. Her research centers on gender, social networks, and community formation in medieval and early modern Central Europe, with ongoing projects on the gendered dimensions of court organization under Maximilian I (1493 to 1519) and on kinship and gender in medieval Vienna. Her most recent book, co-authored with Julia Burkhardt, is I, Helene Kottannerin: The Lady-in-Waiting Who Stole Hungary’s Crown (University of Toronto Press, 2026).

Der Vortrag ist Teil der Vortragsreihe Prague Histories Forum, die gemeinsam von den Prager Außernstellen des DHI Warschau, des Collegium Carolinum und des GWZO Leipzig organisiert wird. In diesem Wintersemester 2026/27 widmen wir uns dem Thema „Gender & Queer in East Central Europe".

Alle Vorträge der Reihe finden Dienstags von 15:50–17:20 Uhr in der Kunstfakultät der Prager Karlsuniversität statt.

Venue: Špork Palace, Hybernská 3, Prague 1 | Room 303, attic floor

All of the “Prague Histories Forum” lectures will be accessible online via Zoom. Please register here:
https://maxweberstiftung.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/yq0DKEQFRjS4TW3N2dNDeA

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