RECOGNIZING FACULTY: REBECCA WINER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, HISTORY
In this edition of the VWPN Newsletter, we are highlighting the work of Rebecca Winer, Associate Professor, History. Rebecca teaches courses on medieval history, Women and Gender Studies, and Jewish history. Her medieval courses explore various topics of interest to students including “The Black Death and Global Pandemic,” “Robin Hood in Myth and History,” “Medieval Britain and Ireland,” “Religious Tolerance in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, Catalonia etc.) before 1492” and “Medieval Slavery.” Rebecca’s areas of research include Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations in southern France and Barcelona (Catalonia), Spain, Gender, slavery, women’s work, and mothers and children. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming collection Jewish Women in Historical Perspective: Approaches and Methodologies for the Twenty-First Century. A 20-chapter volume that makes the experiences of Jewish women from the Bible to the twenty-first century available to the general reader as well as the researcher. Rebecca is also a member of the team that created the website medievalslavery.org on teaching about global slavery and captivity after Ancient Rome and before Columbus. When not in the classroom at Villanova, Rebecca enjoys travelling to archives and seeing old friends in Europe, “geeking out” over history with her 17-year-old son, Noah, cooking with her 11-year-old daughter, Naomi, and walking with her husband Julian Yates who teaches English at the University of Delaware. Rebecca received her PhD and Master’s from UCLA, another Master’s from Oxford University, and her BA from Wellesley College.
Can you tell us about your research and its implications? I seek to reconstruct the lives of women from the distant past. I study their experiences in slavery, as members of minority groups, and around motherhood and childcare. During the Middle Ages, racism latched onto a person’s religious background as tightly as it did their ethnicity or skin color. I am interested in how and why that racism functioned along gender lines as well. I mainly focus on wet nursing. There were no safe and reliable breastmilk substitutes before the 1920s, and so the wealthy often hired or purchased a lactating woman to feed and look after their infants and toddlers. If the wet nurse was freeborn, she often had to wean and leave her own child to move into the home of her employer and earn valuable wages as a wet nurse to help her family. If the wet nurse were enslaved, she might see her own newborn ripped from her breast and sold, or abandoned to a foundling house, so that her precious breastmilk could feed the infant of her owner. These scenarios seem heartrending to me and illustrate the power the medieval nobles and merchants exerted over the families of the poor.
What motivated you to pursue this line of research? Can you tell us a little about your journey?
I started my current research project on medieval wet nursing and motherhood when I had young children who were in daycare. I felt incredibly grateful to the caregivers who made it possible for me do my work as a professor, and was conscious of the fact that their work was not as valued as it should be in terms of pay or social status.
In society today it is perhaps easier for those in advantaged positions to forget the cost to others of some of the things that they enjoy. The story of premodern childcare can help to remind us not to overlook the sacrifices others make to make our lives easier.
I also focus in my work on mothers. As a mother I have been in situations which unfairly put more pressure or heap criticism on mothers over fathers. In medieval Barcelona, wealthy mothers’ high position in society rested on their ability to give birth to infants who grew into healthy children and survived into adulthood. Moralists, and society at large, blamed infant and child mortality on these mothers. Wealthy mothers were criticized if they did not give birth to enough children, which pressured them not to breastfeed their own infants since if they did, they could not get pregnant as quickly. If the childcare providers these women chose were inept or unsuccessful in caring for their children, the wealthy mothers were condemned. They were defamed as vain women who refused to breastfeed so that they could preserve their figures and good looks, when they never really had a choice whether to breastfeed or hire a wet nurse in the first place.
What is the most challenging aspect of your research?
The sources I use are in Latin, Catalan, and Hebrew (sometimes with bits of Aramaic), and I am constantly honing my language skills. My documents are also mostly unedited so I must travel to France and Spain to find them, take digital photographs, and bring them home to transcribe and translate them. Many sources are about poor and marginalized women; and these are also often not even catalogued. The catalogues focus on the events around the royal court or the activities of nobles, knights, and international merchants, not their servants and slaves.
What are you hoping to pursue next in your research?
In an article that appeared recently in the journal Slavery and Abolition, I argued that enslaved wet nurses became common in wealthy homes in Barcelona several decades after their purchase was cost-efficient. After the Black Death, the urban and rural poor died in great numbers, greater numbers than the rich, and perhaps as much as half of the population was lost. Freeborn wet nurses were scarce and so they were able to ask for better working conditions (such as the ability to bring their toddlers into their employers’ homes with them) and more pay. Eventually employers began buying slaves instead, but economics were not the deciding factor. It was the convenience of having childcare providers who could not leave that lead to the move to enslaved wet nurses. I want to explore what other social and economic changes poor women experienced after the Black Death in my next project as well as continue my exploration of gender and slavery.
What are one or two “takeaways” from your research for our readers?
We cannot truly understand a society without studying its women. Although all medieval women were limited in their rights in certain ways because they were women, the high social class of some gave them influence in society and power over others, especially other women. The wife of a royal courtier in Barcelona in the 1300s influenced the lives of dozens, if not hundreds of people. She owned slaves, hired servants, and had an entire team of childcare providers for her many children. If she died, her will might mandate donations that could improve the lives of dozens of people; for example, poor adolescent girls hoping for charity to help them get married or slaves seeking to be manumitted [released].
What drew you to study History and pursue a PhD in that field?
I spent my junior year abroad at Oxford, which was an amazing experience. As a woman’s college, Wellesley had an agreement with the (former) women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge to allow students to apply to attend as second-year students. I enrolled in history at St. Anne’s College and was able to learn about the Middle Ages directly from medieval manuscripts and surrounded by medieval buildings. By the end of the year, I was hooked. Initially I wanted to study anything medieval that would allow me to use my French and Latin but increasingly I was frustrated at the degree to which women and Jews were left out of the grand narratives of that past. I came back to England after finishing at Wellesley and wrote my master’s thesis at Oxford on women saints; but still hoped to learn more about ordinary women. I therefore resolved to pursue a PhD on medieval history and recover the stories of those who had been left out of the books I had read.
What drew you to Villanova?
My thesis director at UCLA, the late Father Robert I. Burns, S.J. (of blessed memory) served as President of the Catholic Historical Association and wrote on his vision of the mission of Catholic universities. In short, Father Burns believed they should be top-notch institutions of learning where talk about God is welcomed. Although I am not a Catholic – I am a practicing Jew – I feel at home at Villanova where I served as the volunteer advisor for Villanova Hillel, the Jewish students’ association, from 2004-2020. I was also raised to value interfaith relations, my rabbi growing up in Chicago was the late Hayim Goren Perelmuter (z’l -of blessed memory). Rabbi Perelmuter was a beloved teacher at the Catholic Theological Union in whose honor a conference on Jewish-Christian Dialogue is held there every year.
What do you like to do when you are not teaching or researching?
I like to garden, travel, and spend time with my family and friends. I am a trained liturgical singer and can chant from the torah scroll, haftarah (prophetic books), and megillot (books of the Bible for holidays like Purim) in synagogue. Over the years I have sung the Ten Commandments several times for the community at Bet Shalom, one of the liberal synagogues in Barcelona, on the holiday of Shavuot (in May/June).
