I am not up to providing an overview of women's history as a field with regards to your second question, but I have got some book recommendations for you!

Where are the Women?: A Guide to an Imagined Scotland by Sara Sheridan. This one is not a scholarly book, but it REALLY challenges traditional conceptions of history as being one where only men's deeds are worth commemorating, so I think you'd find it very interesting. It's an imaginary tour guide of Scotland, designed as if all of Scotland's monuments, street names, and buildings were dedicated to women instead of men. Most of the women are from the 19th century, but even someone like me who is very gung-ho about women's history in Scotland was surprised by how much it challenged my basic assumptions about what is and isn't worth commemorating in public spaces.

Clare of Assisi and the Thirteenth-Century Church: Religious Women, Rules, and Resistance by Catherine Mooney. Catherine Mooney is a leading scholar on Clare of Assisi, the less famous of the two major saints who emerged in Assisi in the 13th century. While Francis is better known, and Clare was inspired by Francis to take up the religious life, she ended up pursuing an even more extreme form of asceticism than he did. Of particular interest to you will be Clare's clashes with the Papacy over her approach to women's religious life. The Pope believed that nuns should be totally enclosed from the world, meaning that they would need to own some property to support themselves. Clare on the other hand believed that the nuns should own no property and should instead maintain a close relationship with Franciscan friars to provide for them through their begging. Especially exciting is that Clare wrote letters to another prominent womanr religious, Agnes of Prague, urging her to remain steadfast in her devotion to poverty in spite of what the Pope wanted. That's where the "resistance" in the title comes in!

Walking in the Sacred Manner by Mark St. Pierre and Tilda Long Soldier. When you broaden your studies of women's history to the world outside Europe, it quickly becomes apparent that white feminist narratives of hopeless oppression until feminism emerges as a movement in the mid-late 20th century just doesn't hold up. This book looks at the roles of healing women in Lakota and other Plains societies. While most of the stories in the book focus on the 19th and early 20th centuries, there is also a lot of material about how their lives connected to women in pre-colonial times. The stories are drawn from interviews with holy women and their relatives and document the ways that they resisted patriarchal Western religious impositions on their spiritual practices and how they adapted their religious heritage to colonial times.

The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown. While the subject of this book, the 11th century Gudridr Thorbjarnardottir, was not exactly a rebel, she was a woman who travelled incredible distances during her life, challenging our ideas of the medieval woman who never leaves the home. This is a really accessible book where the author tries to retrace Gudrid's steps. Gudridr travelled from Iceland to Greenland, Canada, and Rome during her lifetime and was the first European woman to give birth in North America.

The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination by Gary Macy. This is an excellent if provocative book about the history of women's formal roles in the medieval Catholic Church. Macy painstakingly sifts through the theological writings about ordination from medieval Europe to demonstrate how this definition changed in the High Middle Ages. It went from one that included many women's roles, such as widow, nun, abbess, and deaconess, to one that excluded anyone who wasn't destined for the (male) priesthood. He starts with all the evidence for women playing active and ordained roles within their churches in the early medieval period, then follows through to how theologians started arguing that women were not physically or spiritually capable of being ordained. He also keeps track of examples of women continuing to serve in churches regardless of the rulings of church councils that they shouldn't.

The Christian Watt Papers by Christian Watt. This one deals with the 19th century, but it's AWESOME. It's a blistering first-person account of what life was like for a poor fisherwoman in Victorian Scotland. Watt does NOT hold back in writing about how the upper classes exploit the working class, which is pretty awesome to read from a woman who was born in the 1830s. You can sense a real fiery spirit of rebellion in her when you read her memoir. Women in Scottish fishing communities in general had quite a different gender dynamic than women in other parts of 19th century Britain. They often say that the men did the fishing, and the women did everything else. In fact, a Scottish fisherman once told me that the only things a fisherman in the old days had to fear were hell and his wife!

Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists by Sally Roesch Wagner. This is a really accessible read about looks at a really under-appreciated aspect of the suffragist movement in the United States. It takes a deep dive into how much white American feminists were inspired to fight for their own rights after seeing how many more rights their Haudenosaunee neighbours had in their societies. Haudenosaunee societies are matrilocal, matrilineal, and in many ways matriarchal. This book really puts the Seneca back in Seneca Falls! ;)

Women of the Conquest Dynasties: Gender and Identity in Liao and Jin China by Linda Cooke. Central Asia in the Middle Ages had its fair share of warrior women and conquest queens. This book will introduce you to several such characters!

Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe by Avraham Grossman. If it's got "rebellious" in the title, it's got to be good, right? This is a fascinating book about how Jewish women asserted their rights in fledgling Ashkenazi communities. Grossman looks at topics like how women fought for the right to divorce when their husbands abandoned their families on long-distance trading trips, as well as how women asserted their place in their religion, taking up ritual roles that had previously been denied them.

Selling Songs and Smiles: The Sex Trade in Heian and Kamakura Japan by Janet R. Goodwin. That's right, this one is about medieval Japanese prostitutes. The asobi were a class of singing prostitute who set up Japan's first pleasure districts in the 11th century. Unlike later communities of prostitutes, which were run by male pimps, the asobi practiced a matrilineal "family" system ruled by the head prostitute or chōja. The women procured their own clients and divided the payment amongst themselves. Goodwin traces the development of the asobi and looks at how attitudes towards them changed as Japan developed stricter ideas of what made a "good" wife.

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You might be interested in a fantastic resource created by Meg Hyland, called Women of 1000 AD. It's a collection of illustrations of fascinating historical women who lived in different parts of the world around the year 1000, accompanied by historical overviews of their lives, as well as external sources you can check out.