(no subject)

My reaction to the prompts for our Big Damn Paper for Medieval England makes me feel like a bad feminist. Or a bad feminist historian, anyway. Because I completely breezed past all the fascinating prompts about women in medieval England (and they are pretty fascinating -- the concept of gender equality, the power of queens in regards to their husbands' success, Eleanor of Aquitaine, female spirituality, the element of family) and went straight to the military history ones. Military factors in the Norman conquest! The Hundred Years War! Warfare in medieval society! The Wars of the Roses! (And some other stuff concentrating on specific kings that I'm not particularly interested in, and also the Crusades, also not extremely interested.)

I was looking at the prompt "How central was warfare to medieval society?", but the book list isn't impressing me -- there's a lot of concentration on, I think, the nobility, rather than the peasantry. (Our professor doesn't trust us to find suitably scholarly books, so she gives us lists of books we can use.) And that's a fairly broad prompt -- the others that I'm looking at seriously are "How destructive were the Wars of the Roses to the stability and prosperity of England?", "What were the repercussions on England of the Hundred Years War?", and "How large a part did military factors play in the Norman conquest and settlement of England?"

There are thirty-two prompts. I am really curious why I am not as curious about "How crucial were Queens to the success or otherwise of their husband's rule in medieval England?" as I should be. (Obviously I am highly intrigued by this one, but not intrigued enough to write 3000 words on it. I am much more coherent in regards to military history.)

For some reason I am feeling very defensive. I like military history, but I get the feeling it's kind of downtrodden in the academic world? Especially for women.