Alexandra Guerson, PhD

Assistant Professor
Teaching Stream, New College
University of Toronto

Dana Wessell Lightfoot, PhD

Associate Professor
Department of History
University of Northern British Columbia

“Our research focuses on exploring Jewish women’s agency in late medieval Girona as their community faced the systemic violence of 1391 and its aftermath. Using notarial records, municipal documents, and royal letters, we investigate the ways that Jewish women worked to protect their families over several generations. We are particularly interested in the experiences of mixed families, where some members of kin groups converted to Christianity, both in 1391 and in the early decades of the fifteenth century. Following these families through the notarial records from 1391 to the early 1420s, we’ve been able to consider the factors that led to conversion and the longer term impacts that it had on family and communal life. This research has highlighted tensions present between local municipal and ecclesiastical officials and the Crown as they fought for jurisdiction over these mixed family groups.

While much has been written about the Jewish community of Girona, very little has been done to shed light on the history of its women. Part of the challenge is methodological since the notarial collection available in Girona is so vast few scholars have been able to undertake such a project. What makes this project possible for us is our collaborative approach. Both of us received similar training as medievalists in the PhD program at the University of Toronto and thus do all our archival research together, inputting our findings in a shared relational database. We then use those findings to co-write our presentations, articles, and now a book, combining our expertise in Christian-Jewish relations (Alexandra) and the history of women and the family (Dana).

We have published articles on our collaborative research method in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Fall 2018) and forthcoming in Medieval People. Our article “A Tale of Two Tolranas: Jewish Women’s Agency and Conversion in late medieval Girona” in the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 12.3 (2020) co-won the Association of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Bishko Prize in 2021. Our work has also led us to think more broadly about the meaning of community, which led us to collaborate with Michelle Armstrong-Partida in editing a collection of essays entitled Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which was awarded the Best Collaborative Project of 2020 by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender.”

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