About

Sharon A. Farmer is a Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, affiliated with the Department of French and Italian. Her academic interests include medieval women and gender, relations between Northern France and the globe, medieval environmental history, and forms of vulnerability in pre-modern societies. She has also developed an interest in permaculture agriculture as a means of mitigating climate change. Her research explores medieval towns, the poor, and the intersections of luxury and violence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with specific projects such as the life of Jehanne la Fouaciere, a Parisian linen merchant. Farmer has authored significant monographs, including 'Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor' and 'Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours.' She has also contributed to edited volumes and numerous articles that examine various aspects of medieval history, including gender, social organization, and cultural interactions. Her scholarly work has been recognized through prestigious fellowships and honors, such as election to the Society of Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Institut d’études avancées-Paris. Farmer has mentored a number of PhD students who have gone on to academic careers, and her research continues to deepen understanding of medieval social and cultural history.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History
• Philosophy
• Art
• Medicine
• Linguistics
• Audiology
• Art history
• Classics
• Communication
• Economic history
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe, by Miri Rubin

  The English Historical Review · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Classics

  Journal Article Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe, by Miri Rubin Get access Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe, by Miri Rubin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020; pp. 204. £57.99). Sharon Farmer Sharon Farmer University of California, Santa Barbara, USA farmer@history.ucsb.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 137, Issue 585, April 2022, Pages 576–578, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceac058 Published: 24 February 2022

  PublisherDOI

• Poverty and Gender

  2022-05-30

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  The history of medieval poverty and charity can be divided into three main time periods: the early (c. 500–1000), high (c. 1000–1300) and late (c. 1300–1500) Middle Ages. In each of those time periods women and men experienced poverty differently; and in each, women were especially associated with charity and palliative care. At the onset of the Middle Ages women were innovators in the introduction of hospitals into Western Europe, and, as society rapidly pauperised, women's mortality rates were much higher than men's. During the high Middle Ages, women were perceived as more worthy recipients of charity than men, but they also suffered from much lower wages and poor laboring women in towns were frequently the victims of rape. During the late Middle Ages, a variety of developments contributed to a further feminising of poverty: guilds began to exclude single women, labour statutes negatively affected women, and Mediterranean towns passed inheritance laws that disfavoured widows.

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• Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours

  Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) · 2021-07-07 · 5 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Sharon Farmer here investigates the ways in which three medieval communities?the town of Tours, the basilica of Saint-Martin there, and the abbey of Marmoutier nearby?all defined themselves through the cult of Saint Martin. She demonstrates how in the early Middle Ages the bishops of Tours used the cult of Martin, their fourthcentury predecessor, to shape an idealized image of Tours as Martin's town. As the heirs to Martin's see, the bishops projected themselves as the rightful leaders of the community. However, in the late eleventh century, she shows, the canons of Saint-Martin (where the saint's relics resided) and the monks of Marmoutier (which Martin had founded) took control of the cult and produced new legends and rituals to strengthen their corporate interests. Since the basilica and the abbey differed in their spiritualities, structures, and external ties, the canons and monks elaborated and manipulated Martin's cult in quite different ways. Farmer shows how one saint's cult lent itself to these varying uses, and analyzes the strikingly dissimilar Martins that emerged. Her skillful inquiry into the relationship between group identity and cultural expression illuminates the degree to which culture is contested territory. Farmer's rich blend of social history and hagiography will appeal to a wide range of medievalists, cultural anthropologists, religious historians, and urban historians.

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• A Deaf-Mute’s Story

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Linguistics
  • Audiology
  PublisherDOI

• Communities of Saint Martin

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-03-15 · 27 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Those assistants included Miriam Davis, Michael Burger, and Richard Bar ton, whose careful help in preparing the manuscript saved me an enormous amount of time and energy.The Interlibrary Lo an department at SUNY Binghamton was es pecially resourceful in fe

  PublisherDOI

• 9. Martin's New Town: Dominance and Resistance in Chateauneuf

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-03-15

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Between 1122 and I305 the burghers of Chateauneuf attempted on numerous occasions to extract themselves fr om the seigneurial lord ship of the canons of Saint-Martin. They resorted to various tactics both legal and violent-and they persisted in their attempts fo r over I 50 years, even though they gained a number of rights and conces sions fr om the king of France. t

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• Global and Gendered Perspectives on the Production of a Parisian Alms Purse, c. 13401

  Journal of Medieval Worlds · 2019-09-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Drawing on recent technical analyses of an exquisite embroidered French alms purse that now resides at the Musée des Tissus et Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Lyon, this article argues that the purse, which was probably embroidered in Paris in the early 1340s, represents the culmination of the efforts of dozens of men and women on three different continents. Some of the women who worked in the fields where the flax was grown were simple day laborers, but many of the other men and women—both rural peasants and urban artisans—possessed specific technical knowledge and manual skills that could take years to perfect. Indeed, it took a global village of many talented individuals to create a fourteenth-century luxury alms purse from Paris. The article also explores the ecological impact of the extraction and processing of some of the raw materials that were employed in the purse.

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• K<scp>athryn</scp> L. R<scp>eyerson</scp>. <i>Mother and Sons, Inc.: Martha de Cabanis in Medieval Montpellier</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2019-02-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Drawing on notarial records concerning the financial and commercial activities of a prominent widow and her two sons, who were members of the merchant elite of early fourteenth-century Montpellier, Kathryn L. Reyerson, in Mother and Sons, Inc.: Martha de Cabanis in Medieval Montpellier, contributes to our understanding of the economic opportunities that were open to talented and well-connected women in parts of the Mediterranean world that lay under the influence of Roman law and the ius commune. Like other widows in this region, Martha de Cabanis would have risked losing her children and access to her husband’s patrimony if she had chosen to remarry. By remaining a widow, however, and by repeatedly renouncing the “protections” of Roman law (which aimed at preventing women from entering into contractual obligations in behalf of others), Martha, like other widows in Montpellier and various parts of the Crown of Aragon, was able to act as guardian and curatrix for her minor and young adult sons. Martha’s continued collaboration with her sons even after her role as guardian and curatrix had ended underscores, Reyerson argues convincingly, the degree to which her sons recognized Martha’s talents. Indeed, Reyerson argues further, it was largely because of Martha’s abilities to preserve and capitalize upon the resources that her husband had left behind that two of their three sons became prominent retailers of Lucchese silks, spices from the Levant, French linens and woolens, and saffron from Catalonia; their clients included residents of Paris, Toulouse, Cyprus, and the Byzantine Empire.

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• 2. Excluding the Center: Monastic Exemption and Liturgical Realignment in Tours

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-03-15

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 7. The Beggar's Body: Intersections of Gender and Social Status in High Medieval Paris

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2019-03-14 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Barbara H. Rosenwein

  3 shared

• Debra Srebnik

  University of Washington

  2 shared

• Richard K. Ries

  University of Washington

  2 shared

• Pamela J. Benson

  Providence College

  1 shared

• Ryan C. Bell

  1 shared

• Jacques Le Goff

  1 shared

• Carl F. Lagenaur

  University of Pittsburgh

  1 shared

• Thomas F. X. Noble

  1 shared

Labs

• Sharon A. Farmer LabPI

Awards & honors

• Election to Society of Fellows, Medieval Academy of America,…
• EURIAS Fellow, Institut d’études avancées-Paris, 2013-4
• John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2007-8
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2005-6