Resistance and Nonconformity in Unquiet Women

The Central Thematic Claim

In Unquiet Women, Max Adams constructs a sustained argument that women living between the dusk of the Roman Empire and the dawn of the Enlightenment were neither passive recipients of patriarchal dictates nor invisible historical actors. The theme of resistance and nonconformity operates as the book's connective tissue, demonstrating that women consistently devised strategies—intellectual, spatial, economic, and spiritual—to assert personal agency against systematic exclusion. Adams does not romanticise these acts of defiance; instead, he reveals a spectrum of nonconformity ranging from the quietly subversive to the openly confrontational. The very structure of the book, introduced in its opening overview, functions as a deliberate act of historical resistance, recovering silenced voices from a millennium and a half of neglect.

Intellectual Defiance as Foundational Resistance

The book's most explicit articulation of resistance appears in its epigraph, where the philosopher Mary Astell indicts male historians for treating exceptional women as anomalous "Men in Petticoats." This critique establishes the foundational premise: historical record-keeping itself constitutes a gendered act of exclusion. Adams positions his entire project as a countermeasure to this tradition, arguing that the absence of women from conventional narratives reflects archival prejudice rather than historical reality. Astell's own life embodies the theme—she out-thought John Locke and produced a body of philosophical work that challenged the intellectual hierarchies of her age. Her written will—both in the literal sense of testamentary documents and the metaphorical sense of philosophical legacy—symbolises the power of women to inscribe themselves onto a historical record that would prefer their erasure. This intellectual resistance was not merely symbolic; it created durable frameworks that later generations of women could inherit and extend.

Nonconformity Through Physical Mobility

Spatial autonomy emerges as a potent form of nonconformity throughout the book's kaleidoscopic narrative. The fourth-century pilgrim Egeria, a Gaulish nun who toured the Holy Land as the Roman Empire crumbled, defied the expectation that women should remain enclosed within domestic or monastic walls. Her pilgrimage journey represents more than devotional practice—it constitutes a deliberate expansion of female geography at a moment when political structures were collapsing and new possibilities for self-definition were emerging. The Plate Section's photograph of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre anchors Egeria's textual account in tangible space, transforming what might be dismissed as legend into documented historical presence. Similarly, Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the Icelandic explorer who gave birth to a European child on American soil, embodies a radical rejection of the sedentary roles prescribed for medieval women. Her transatlantic journey cannot be reduced to passive accompaniment of male explorers; it represents active participation in world-expanding ventures that challenged every assumption about female capacity and appropriate conduct.

Spiritual Autonomy and Communal Nonconformity

The beguine movement, examined in the book's thirty-sixth chapter, offers perhaps the most compelling case study in institutional resistance. These laywomen, concentrated across what are now Belgium, Artois, and the southern Netherlands, created semi-autonomous religious communities that operated outside formal ecclesiastical control. Adams notes that beguines "increasingly adopt regulations" after 1230, sensitive to charges of irregularity and heresy, yet they persisted in carving out spaces where women could pursue lives of simplicity, profitable labour, and charitable works without submitting to the enclosure of traditional nunneries or the domestic demands of marriage. The movement faced suppression from a nervous and defensive institutional church that perceived in these communities "the triumph of the laity—constituting a sort of democratising and socially inclusive movement quite at odds with institutional fundamentalism." Yet the beguinages survived, some lasting into the modern era, prefiguring women's colleges and demonstrating that nonconformity could be sustained across centuries when it was collectively organised. The echo of "the yearning for seclusion, separation and independence voiced so powerfully in the story of Christina of Markyate" reinforces the continuity of this impulse across different historical moments and geographical contexts.

The Complexity of Constrained Resistance

Adams does not present a simplistic narrative of heroic defiance. The book attends carefully to the boundaries within which resistance operated and the costs it often exacted. Anglo-Saxon poetry, examined in the twenty-seventh chapter, reveals women occupying roles that were simultaneously powerful and constrained. The figure of Wealhtheow in Beowulf functions as a "goad," inciting the hero to confront Grendel, yet her influence is exercised entirely within the framework of the mead hall, dependent on her position as queen and cup-bearer. The term "peace-weaver" applied to Freawaru captures this duality precisely: she is "explicitly sacrificed to a political marriage alliance, in order to end a blood feud," her body serving as a diplomatic instrument while her personal agency remains circumscribed. The wife of King Rædwald, whose name history does not record, dissuades her husband from betraying his guest—an act of moral counsel that the text explicitly frames as "placing a sword in a man's lap"—yet her intervention is preserved only because of its consequence for male political history. These examples illuminate a pattern in which women's resistance was most legible to record-keepers when it intersected with the affairs of powerful men, while the daily nonconformities of ordinary women remained beneath historical notice.

Everyday Resistance in Work and Survival

The Coroners' Rolls and other mundane records, explored in the book's thirty-third chapter, reveal a layer of female experience in which resistance takes the form of sheer persistence. Women appear as "bakeresses" accused of selling underweight bread, as brewers scalded in industrial accidents, as widows navigating property disputes, and as mothers managing households while their husbands laboured in fields. The records of commercial fraud—Sarrot Foting, Christina Terrice, and the other bakeresses of Stratford facing scrutiny from the Sheriff of London—show women participating actively in the medieval economy, subject to its regulations but also capable of manipulating its margins. Adams observes that "for the most part, women got on with their daily lives unnoticed by the historical record," a formulation that reframes ordinary survival as a form of quiet resistance to the conditions that rendered them invisible. The loom and textiles emerge as a recurring symbol in this context: women's traditional association with textile production was simultaneously a site of economic constraint and a domain in which they could exercise skilled autonomy, build communal networks, and occasionally achieve financial independence.

The Case of Béatrice de Planisoles

The fourteenth-century testimony of Béatrice de Planisoles, preserved through the obsessive records of the Inquisition, crystallises the book's treatment of nonconformity at its most personal and perilous. Béatrice, widowed twice and in her forties, conducted a love affair with a much younger priest, Barthélemy Amilhac, whom she believed had "cast some sort of spell on me, because I loved him so much." The objects discovered in her possession—a mirror, a wrapped knife, linen fragments, and a seed wrapped in muslin—might in another context mark her as a cunning-woman; in the eyes of Bishop Jacques Fournier's inquisitors, they were damning evidence of heresy. Béatrice's response to persecution embodies a pragmatic form of resistance: she "willingly abjured all heretical ideas, promised to be a good Catholic and submitted to whatever penance and punishment the court should impose." Adams presents this not as cowardice but as strategic survival. She "held her nerve and learned a key lesson for a defendant: deny the accusations simply, without repetition or caveat." Her eventual release from imprisonment, subject only to the display of a yellow cross, and her subsequent disappearance from the historical record suggest that nonconformity did not always require martyrdom to be effective. Sometimes it required endurance, tactical compliance, and the capacity to wait out persecutorial zeal.

Contradictions and Unresolved Tensions

The theme of resistance and nonconformity in Unquiet Women is not without internal contradictions. Adams acknowledges that women themselves participated in the enforcement of patriarchal norms—stepmothers could be grasping, mothers-in-law exacting, and female religious authorities gatekeepers of orthodoxy. The increasing professionalisation and rise of guilds that "would exclude women from some of these trades—especially the textile business" suggests that resistance was not a linear progression toward greater freedom but a contested terrain on which gains could be reversed. The chapter on matriarchs of Chaco Canyon, which describes a matrilineal dynasty expressed through "female inheritance and representing a continuous social elite," offers a comparative perspective that complicates any assumption that female power automatically translates into egalitarian social structures. Matrilocality gave Pueblo women "family solidarity" and "a powerful means of expressing identity and control over the running of the home," yet it also imposed its own constraints, requiring men to adapt to their wives' families in ways that may have generated new forms of tension and exclusion.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Mary Astell's epigraph frame the book's investigation of resistance and nonconformity?

Astell's epigraph argues that male historians systematically ignored women's achievements and dismissed exceptional women as aberrant. This critique establishes resistance as a problem of historical methodology as much as of lived experience: the absence of women from the record reflects deliberate exclusion rather than actual passivity. Adams positions his book as a countermeasure, recovering silenced voices and exposing the rhetorical strategies that denied women their place in history.

2. In what ways did the beguine movement represent a distinct form of institutional nonconformity?

The beguines created semi-autonomous religious communities for laywomen who sought lives of simplicity, profitable work, and charitable service without submitting to traditional nunneries or marriage. Operating between 1230 and the modern era across the Low Countries, they faced suppression from an institutional church that viewed their movement as a democratising threat to clerical authority. Their survival into modernity demonstrates that collective, organised nonconformity could outlast persecution.

3. How does the testimony of Béatrice de Planisoles illustrate the limits and strategies of individual resistance?

Béatrice's love affair with a younger priest and her possession of objects interpreted as heretical exposed her to the Inquisition's scrutiny. Rather than seeking martyrdom, she abjured all heretical ideas, denied accusations without elaboration, and submitted to penance. This strategic compliance—holding her nerve and avoiding self-incrimination—secured her release from imprisonment and eventual disappearance from the historical record, illustrating that effective resistance could take the form of tactical survival rather than open confrontation.

4. What does the figure of the "peace-weaver" in Anglo-Saxon poetry reveal about the complexity of female agency?

The peace-weaver, exemplified by Freawaru in Beowulf, was "explicitly sacrificed to a political marriage alliance, in order to end a blood feud." She served as a diplomatic instrument whose body and reproductive capacity were deployed to resolve male conflicts. Yet figures like Wealhtheow also functioned as "goads," inciting heroes to action and dispensing praise and treasure. This duality reveals agency operating within severe constraints: women influenced events but rarely controlled their own destinies.

5. How does Adams use ordinary women's presence in medieval legal records to expand the definition of resistance?

The Coroners' Rolls and weights-and-measures prosecutions document women as bakeresses, brewers, widows, and householders navigating an economy and legal system not designed for their benefit. Adams suggests that "for the most part, women got on with their daily lives unnoticed by the historical record," reframing ordinary persistence—working, trading, surviving accidents, raising children—as a form of quiet defiance against the structural forces that rendered most women invisible to history.