Jenny Townes
Assignment 6
I found a mislabeled illustration in a history book and I would like to prove its inaccuracy. It is the
frontispiece for Christine de Pisan’s “Livre de la Cite des Dames (Book of the City of Ladies),” yet the
author cropped the image and cites it as “Female masons contructing a city wall.” Thus, I need to know if there were female
masons in 15th century France.
Search descriptions
Google
- I tried the search four times. Each time I tweaked the search terms each time. The first time I used
"female masons" and "France", but I found only sites on Freemasons. Next I used "female bricklayers" and
"France", but found only contemporary sites. The third time I got too specific and used "female bricklayers"
and "fifteenth century France", which turned up no results. The last times I used female bricklayers AND
medieval and came up with a useable result.
Yahoo
- On Yahoo I only had to do one search, for female bricklayers AND medieval. One site,
http://www.auesd.k12.ca.us/ev-cain/prero/Glossary.html, looked promising because the domain appears to be
a school and the description included this sentence: “Also called a 'mason,' bricklayers were always in
demand for…” However it turned out merely to be a glossary of medieval terms.
Ask Jeeves
- Since this searches text, I formed the query into a question: were there female bricklayers in the
middle ages? From the first search a few sites look promising.
- www.ashbourne-town.com/history/labour.htm: The site is called “Ashbourne - Victorian Labour,” and from the URL it is perhaps the history of a certain town in England. It seems to be about jobs held by women since the Middle Ages. However, nowhere in the document does it indicate that women were bricklayers.
- www.macha.f9.co.uk/7day-extracts/beguine.html: This site looks very promising as the title of it is “The Beguine: Women in Charge of their Spirit.” The URL is not found, though.
- www.embassy.org.nz/aws/awsh1.htm: This site contained data that could indicate that women were masons in the 17th century, but as this doesn’t deal with the fifteenth century or France, it really didn’t answer my question.
Infomine
- This search engine had search options I was unfamiliar with. I tried |female bricklayers| and medieval,
"female bricklayers" and medieval, female bricklayers, medieval female occupations. All returned either no
results or hits that were off-topic. One hit sent me to the Librarians Index to the Internet. This could
be useful but my time for this search engine has elapsed.
Search.com
- For this search I used a combination of the search terms I used in previous searches: female
occupations medieval, medieval jobs, and "female bricklayers" and "medieval". The results were all
scholarly but not useful. I finally searched “Beguines,” which turned up two sites. A text search didn’t
turn up the words “bricklayer” or “mason.”
Analysis
Normally I find AskJeeves quite helpful, but this time it was very difficult. Of all the searches,
AskJeeves came up with the most promising hits, but a text search of each document showed that they
weren’t useful to my purposes. This took up a lot of time and effort.
Infomine and Search.com seemed like they would provide more academic information, especially since
Search.com searched databases like Bartleby’s and Britannica. However, I had to do four different searches
on each. Most came up with no results or results that were off-topic or sites that didn’t answer my question.
Google, my first search, proved the best. The quick results showed how I could easily refine the terms to
get more accurate information (ie, “mason” vs. “bricklayer”). On the fourth search, I found
http://www2.kenyon.edu/Projects/Margin/porete2.htm. This URL indicates the site is associated with Kenyon
College and is perhaps a student paper. Looking at the site itself I see it is a scholarly paper about
the Beguines, who were a loose religious organization of free women in the Middle Ages, so this
information could provide the answer I need. Using a text search I found this sentence at the bottom of
the page:
A beguinage provided both social and spiritual support for the free female worker. And, particularly in urban environments, females were trained in a broad spectrum of skills, working as blacksmiths, brewers, bricklayers and stone masons, weavers, soldiers, scribes, musicians, artists, surgeons, etc.
The author includes footnotes, so I can see that this information came from two scholarly works, one
written in 1954 and one written in 1980.
Because my topic was so specific, using a simple Boolean search on Google and looking at the site
descriptions proved to be the best. However, my topic was also academic: finding a simple fact. It seems
that I should have been able to verify it using Infomine and Search.com. Those sites searched for broader
topics, though, and were thus not very useful. It is interesting to note, however, that the site I found
on Google never showed up on another search engine.
The way Google searches, though, it would be hard to pick a hit if there were no brief descriptions
provided. Many times the words “female” and “bricklayers” were both in the site but had nothing to do with
each other. Thus I chose hits based on the bolded words in the description as well as the substance of
the URL. The only troubling thing about this site I found on Google is that it isn’t clear who wrote it.
Did the person listed at the bottom – “Bonnie Duncan” of Millersville University – write it or did the
person listed at the top in bold text – “Marguerite Porčte” – write it? Who are these women? Why is
someone affiliated with another university using Kenyon College’s server? The site itself was authored
in 1995, making it relatively aged. If I wanted to clear up the situation above, Ms. Duncan’s contact
information could be out of date.
Conclusion
The conclusion is yes, there is evidence that women were masons in the Middle Ages. However, the author still
misrepresented the picture she used.
