In Inventing Womanhood Tara Williamsinvestigates new ideas about womanhood that arose in fourteenthcentury Britain and evolved throughout the fifteenth century. In the aftermath of the plague and the substantial cultural shifts of the late 1300s female roles expanded temporarily. As a result the dominant models of maiden wife and widow could no longer adequately describe womens roles and lives. ampampnbsp Middle English writers responded by experimenting with new ways of representing women across a variety of genres from courtly poetry to devotional texts and from royal correspondence to cycle plays. In particular writers coined new terms including womanhood and femininity and refashioned others such as motherhood. These experiments allowed writers to develop and define a larger idea of womanhood underlying more specific identities like wife or mother and to reimagine womens relationships to different kinds of authoritygenerally masculine and frequently religious. ampampnbspampampnbspampampnbspampampnbspampampnbspampampnbspampampnbspampampnbspampampnbspampampnbspampampnbsp By exploring the medieval origins of some of our most important gender vocabulary Inventing Womanhood defamiliarizes our modern usage which often treats those terms as etymologically transparent and almost limitlessly capacious. It also restores a necessary historical and linguistic dimension to gender studies providing the groundwork for reconsidering how that language and the categories it creates have determined the ways in which gender has been imagined since the Middle Ages. ampampnbsp