Based on the experiences I have shared with Elisabeth van Houts in compiling a recently published book of translated sources for secular women’s lives from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, this chapter examines the applicability of life-cycle as a structuring tool in the study of women’s lives in the past. Taking as its starting point what commentators such as Carolyn Dinshaw have identified as masculinist conceptions of linear time, as expressed in such schemata as ‘the ages of man’, it will argue that the apparent order and linearity of a lifetime, and its expectation of smooth progress from one life stage to the next, is an illusory ideal, interrupted and disrupted by actual life events. Moreover, certain life events, such as giving birth and mourning, might actually remove a woman from the linear flow of time within her community, as she withdrew from the everyday to observe ritual obligations or vigils. And, if she returned to her normal life afterwards, it might be with the aim of repeating a particular life stage, rather than ‘progressing’ forward through her life. Therefore, as I shall suggest, such a cyclical experience of time may well have produced – and stored for posterity – different types of memories from those available to the women’s menfolk. Collecting sources about secular women enabled an overview of how such processes might work in practice.

It is fair to say there has been a significant dropping-off of publication of sourcebooks about medieval women in the new millennium: is the market saturated, or does this reflect the massive increase in and uptake of material from internet resources? Has the project of documenting medieval women, the starting point in the wider drive to make medieval studies more inclusive, run its natural course? Or might the reluctance to create more source collections acknowledge the difficulty in representing women’s lives, given that previous volumes have rather arbitrarily organized their materials according to preconceived modern notions of medieval women’s communities (thus grouping by social rank) or activities (thus grouping ‘working women’ without really interrogating the term ‘work’)? As early as 1993 Judith Bennett commented along much the same lines, and pointed out that feminism had yet to be integrated into medieval curricula and research frameworks.