Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris - Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor, 2001, 224 p., cartes et ill. -

This book about poor men and women in 13th and early 14th-century Paris reveals the other side of the "age of cathedrals". The author extends the understanding of urban poverty in the High Middle Ages. She explores the ways in which cultural elites thought about the poor, and shows that their conceptions of poor men and women derived from the roles assigned to men and women in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis - men are associated with productive labor, women with reproductive labor. Of particular interest are Farmer's discussions of society's responses to men and women who are disabled to the point of being incapable of any work at all.