Women in Medieval Society

Susan Mosher Stuard

  Introduction

     Social history aids in understanding women's condition in any age; it is particularly essential for comprehending women in the Middle Ages, an era remote enough from our own so that common social presumptions do not pertain. As a discipline it demands that information gleaned from research be understood in the social context of the day, integrating knowledge at the expense, perhaps, of glamorous misconceptions of an earlier and exotic age. Such an approach dwells upon the ordinary with barely a mention of some of the more spectacular figures of the day, St. Joan, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and that host of saints, abbesses, princesses, and queens who come to mind at the mention of the Middle Ages. Instead it deals with the position of women, the roles assumed by women, and their importance within their social context, which often meant their importance within the family. Frequently these articles bring forward new information about women's lives; just as often they establish a more adequate context for comprehending previously available data.

Inheritance provides a good example. For generations scholars have noted women's inheritance rights in the medieval period, but the problem lay in interpreting what such rights meant in a woman's life. Certainly there existed no such simple equation deriving high social status from inheritance rights. The complexities of the problem, however, can be investigated by social history. Inheritance of land or of non-servile status meant enhancing a woman's desirability as a marriage partner in ninth-century French peasant society but at a price—her relative scarcity, as Emily Coleman's study of infanticide indicates. Heath Dillard shows that, in Spain, women's traditional right to inherit lay at the heart of the social restrictions which came to surround women's lives. In late medieval Venice, women's right to inherit and bequeath property established patterns distinct from male gifts, bequests, and dowry grants. As Stanley Chojnacki relates, it played an important role in determining the patterns of social cohesiveness of the patriciate.

It is this sort of problem which the authors of the anthology address. They are such manifestly important issues that one justly questions why so little has been done in the guise of scholarly investigative social history of women to date. The answer lies in' the historiographical dilemma of women's history. Eleanor Shipley Duckett, a Cambridge-trained medievalist with considerable skills, exemplifies the difficulty. As she noted about her first study of medieval history, completed in the early decades of the century, There it was, dull as ditchwater but my own. A godparent, I decided, might help catch a publisher and since I was not wise enough to know better I carried it to an eminent scholar. Would he of his charity read it? With courteous voice and complete British sincerity he replied, ‘Do you want me to judge it on its own merits or as the work of a woman?’¹

Her lack of wisdom, she had learned, lay in not realizing that an unbridgeable gulf lay between work by and about women and the serious concerns of the scholarly community. Few women bridged that gulf. They learned their lesson far too well and simply refused to reach for that deeper level of comprehension which integrates women's position into the texture of social history. If their audience wished biography, anything from factual to romanticized or, on occasion, downright fictionalized accounts of women's lives, they supplied them. In fact the most remarkable women from the medieval period are the victims of this tendency. A great number of the pages written about them obfuscate rather than clarify their roles. Usually the notable woman is viewed as an anomaly, extraordinary in vigor and ambition, an exception to her age. More pertinent issues such as why these remarkable figures were produced and tolerated in their age, and the nature of the social context which fostered their talents, were seldom raised.

A number of sound works which related their findings to the history of women failed to reach, or impress, the scholarly world sufficiently, a reflection of the low esteem in which their subject was held. Bertha Phillpotts' brilliant study of Kindred and Clan had to wait well over a generation to find an appreciative audience.² Other historians who could have offered sound studies on women shied away from the field because it involved too many serious interpretive difficulties and would not win approbation from their scholarly colleagues. Eileen Power, whose work in social and economic history qualified her for such a task, was genuinely reluctant to undertake it. She finally assented to write a brief essay on women, and its slim pages, completed in 1926, stood as the only general synthesis on medieval women for nearly a half century.³

A corollary difficulty lies in finding adequate resource material for the history of medieval women. Along with biography, the other major scholarly field to concern itself with women was literary history. These studies contributed thorough analyses of role expectations for women within the epics, chansons, fabliaux, and other vernacular works of early Europe. But an interpretive difficulty arose whenever literary historians attempted to reconstruct those significant changes in role expectation which occurred in the medieval period, given manuscript material dating, for the most part, from the twelfth century or later. Some of the most significant questions concerning women were relegated to that largely speculative area concerning what might have constituted women's role before literary redaction. Bits and shards of recorded behavior had been retained, quite at odds with a heroine's late medieval characterization, but how does the critic go about interpreting such inconsistencies of characterization? Literary historians raised the appropriate questions concerning changing social expectations, but, given their sources, the questions often remained unanswered.

Ecclesiastical women of the early medieval period probably received the most sympathetic historical treatment. Lina Eckenstein produced her fine study, Women Under Monasticism, in 1896.⁴ Women under the Rule were a source of wonder and fascination to modern women scholars. Reviewing the history of abbesses who served as administrators of double (that is, male and female) monasteries, who wrote scholarly treatises, philosophy, and literature, and were respected for it, intrigued and baffled modern women whose own administrative and scholarly talents were underutilized by the society in which they lived. Emily Putnam in her foreword to The Lady stated a prevalent theory to explain the disparity. She isolated the twin causes of chastity and distance from male-dominated society as the reasons for the Lady Abbess's success, and, with many of her early twentieth-century colleagues, founded, administered, and taught in women's colleges with such a model in mind. But the cloister was not the sole influence operating to produce those outstanding early ecclesiastical women. A more realistic model might have been available had Emily Putnam and her contemporaries understood the social environment outside the monastery walls. Their unconfirmed belief that early medieval society was a cruel, even vicious, male-dominated environment from which a sensible woman escaped, underestimated the spiritual commitment of those who entered the Orders and maligned the social conditions under which they lived.⁵

The following essays in social history state their findings so adequately that there is no need to introduce them here. Therefore this introductory essay is addressed to the sorts of problems which specifically relate to women's lives—in particular to women's life cycle, a public vs. a privatized or domestic existence, conditions of the material life as they relate to women, women's control of their reproductivity, the social history of religious opinion as it pertains to women, and the accomodation of legal principles to social needs as it affects women. All these factors are fundamental to creating understandings which affect the broader social issues of family, class, occupation (and medieval women frequently had occupations), and a rural or urban environment.

Birth, death, and the rites of passage between are points in life when women are most likely to leave a written record. Furthermore the events which punctuate a life, birth, infancy, possibly education, very likely betrothal and marriage or entry into a religious order, begetting children, divorce, widowhood, last testaments and death, reveal much about social priorities. Dowries, the preliminary step to marriage, are a particularly sensitive instrument for detecting social values. From early medieval society and the traditional Germanic male-awarded dowry to the development of the female dowry and its inflation into an extraordinary economic device in the late medieval city-state, dowries mark changes in women's social status. There are a host of related issues: who provides the dowry, who receives it? Even if a woman's marriage is the occasion of giving a dowry, will she control it in any fashion or upon any occasion in her life? There is an astonishing variety of answers to these questions, even in the limited examples of time and place covered in this volume. The variety signifies a fluidity in social usage that still existed in the Middle Ages. Tradition had yet to solidify into the unyielding patterns which characterize later centuries.

But women do not appear in the surviving manuscripts only at significant moments in their lives. Historians often remark about how frequently women appear in the medieval record, and in such a wide variety of functions. Early medieval women, to borrow a term from contemporary radical feminism, do not appear to have been privatized, that is, relegated to a domestic existence where their functions are determined by, or subordinated to, their sexual capacities. My attention was drawn to women in the charters of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) for this reason. It was evident that women participated in public life in disregard of Statute Law, which, in being enforced, would have strictly limited their lives to the private or domestic sphere. David Herlihy makes an even stronger case for the early Middle Ages, 700–1200, noting in particular women's role in the economy. Although it is a sparsely documented era, a significant number of the surviving sources refer to women, and to their public acts. Now this had implications for society at large: with greater opportunity to use their capacities women became a more positive force in society. These essays should be read with the issue of women's public or private role in mind. An English woman of the feudal classes maintained a significant number of public capacities into the late Middle Ages. In Spain the greater privatization of women stood in conflict with the need to colonize newly reconquered territories. The degree of privatization of women varies by locale in Europe, with implications for the later development of national character.

A Syrian gentleman, Usāmah ibn Murshid, observing the behavior of Christian women on Crusade, was aghast at the freedom with which they appeared in public places and participated in the life of the community at large. He had aptly observed a striking peculiarity of western European society.⁶ But in the late Middle Ages conditions conducive to women's public participation began to disappear in the Italian city-states, those pace setters for change in the medieval world. Richard Goldthwaite notes the disappearance of the tower and loggia in Florentine domestic architecture in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the growing emphasis upon the bourgeois palace with its elegance of interior space. Complementary to this is a trend in painting toward depiction of the domestic scene, the madonna and child shown with infinite tenderness.⁷ Despite the fascination with family, and women, and children within the isolated domestic setting, a woman's opportunities were significantly confined by shutting her away from the loggia, that window upon urban life. This is a significant loss of rights from the earlier medieval period, no matter how tenderly compensated by celebration of the domestic joys.

Participation in public life relates directly to women's occupations. Women's membership in artisan guilds, which were on occasion exclusively filled with women, depended upon the social right to participate in public life. The loss of this right came to be closely tied to class standing, as this anthology illustrates. But more research needs to be done on its relationship to economic cycles: periods of economic expansion when women were encouraged to participate in public occupations and periods of falling prices when unemployment relegated women to the domestic sphere. Sociologists note that a woman's standing in her family is heavily dependent upon her capacity to derive income from work outside the family unit. Therefore lack of employment would tend to reduce a woman's social standing, conditions which came to operate more and more in the depressed conditions of the Renaissance economy.

If social status is dependent upon freedom to participate in public life, what of women's capability to do the hard physical work required ‘by medieval agriculture and artisan production? Most ages make clear sex distinctions, viewing women as different in kind, largely due to their lesser size and physical strength. Despite Tacitus’ famous description of the terrible and powerful early German women and occasional place names like Ladysmith, are there any reasons to believe that in the early history of the West women were capable of performing tasks which most other ages in history thought appropriate to men only? In this respect, conditions of women's material life may influence their social and economic position. While comparative statistics on physical size and strength are not available for the medieval period, a shred of significant data on women's general wellbeing does exist; these are observations on the age of menarche. A recent review of the medieval literature on the topic indicates that while St. Thomas Aquinas had Aristotle's authoritative age of fifteen for menarche before him, he opted for the much earlier age of twelve.⁸ Since age of menarche is an indication of general health determined largely by the protein content of the diet, it appears that Fernand Braudel's wholly carnivorous European man is matched by a protein-eating woman.⁹ Of course, there are social priorities involved; apparently women were not discriminated against in the allocation of available protein, although distinctly different proportions of protein in the diets of men and women characterize other places and other times. Apportioning women a substantial amount of protein could increase women's capacity to reproduce, while, and this is the startling fact, leaving them further energies to perform other tasks not specifically related to child-bearing and child-rearing. This stands among the most salient facts about the growth of Europe in its early centuries.

Generally favorable conditions of the material life can operate on the female half of the population in many ways. It may be conducive to the control of fertility, for example. Studies of post-industrial societies indicate that the chief incentive for decreased birth rates are the relatively favorable or improved conditions of infant survival.¹⁰ If medieval women could with some confidence expect their offspring to survive, largely because of their own good health maintáined by an adequate diet, they might be expected to make some effort to control their fertility. This tendency would be strengthened if they knew they might participate in gainful employment in the public sphere. Himes, in his study of contraception, noted references to medieval contraceptive practice a generation ago.¹¹ John Noonan's excellent study of the church's position on contraception gives indication of the frequency with which the church legislated against contraception and abortion throughout the medieval period. He listed the numerous formulae for contraceptives and abortifacients.¹² It would be foolhardy to attempt an evaluation of their success, but as B. D. H. Miller has stated, The evidence on contraception is often indirect: we have to infer that what was frequently prohibited was also frequently practised.¹³ Contraception, then, reveals attitudes, and medieval women often showed positive attitudes toward the possibility of control over their fertility.

Our discussion of factors affecting women's lives in the medieval period can go no further without some discussion of the role played by religious, or ecclesiastical, opinion upon women's position in society. How was an ecclesiastical organization whose principles of morality were based upon the highly privatized conditions of women in the ancient Mediterranean world to adapt to the significantly different social and economic conditions under which medieval women lived? There is no better issue in which to weigh this problem than contraception: specifically, its meaning in the medieval world in contrast to its meaning within the context of late classical Mediterranean society. As classical women were almost entirely confined to a private domestic sphere, their use of contraceptives would indicate either a refusal to undertake the responsibilities of their reproductive, that is, their only socially productive, life or, possibly, their extra-marital activity. Both were anathema in the eyes of church authorities, and the declining birth rates of the late ancient world were seen as a particularly heinous social evil.

Applying ecclesiastical prohibitions on contraception, which were the product of such a social climate, to the lives of women of the Middle Ages was singularly inappropriate. Medieval women were not as completely privatized or as exclusively defined by their sexual nature. Contraception would be employed by them to limit the demands of family in relation to their other responsibilities. Population, despite the unsettled conditions of the early medieval period, reflected a tendency toward increase; despite contraception, famine, war, and disease, medieval women supported an overall increase. The church did accomodate somewhat in recognition of women's economic role. Burchard's Decretum, which is dependent upon opinions offered in the Venerable Bede and earlier sources, exacted a lighter penance for a woman prohibiting conception if her economic condition was poor.¹⁴ This implies some recognition of the economic and social conditions affecting medieval women's lives, but it was not strong enough a tendency to block the ancient church's equation of contraception with homicide, and the harsher doctrine ultimately prevailed.

There are very few historical interpretations of the church's position on women's role in medieval society, and a thorough examination of the writings of the Church Fathers is needed. Such an investigation should keep in mind that women lived their lives in tension between the conditions of their social and material existence and the often conflicting dictates of the church. The church could sustain women in their roles or reduce their capacity to function in the public sphere and maintain control over their own lives. It reached women at the most significant moments in their lives; through its control of the sacrament of marriage the church had, perhaps, the most profound effect upon them. The article in this volume on early medieval marriage and divorce by Jo-Ann McNamara and Suzanne Wemple investigates the complex steps which led to the formulation of an orthodox position on canon marriage in the writings of the Carolingian authority, Hincmar of Rheims. In the process many traditional practices of proven social value were lost, not the least of which was the right to repudiate a marriage. Social institutions suited to the needs of the day were not likely to survive when pitted against the canons of sacred law or the validity of the sacraments.

Social history offers one cautionary lesson when dealing with church law or ecclesiastical opinion as it pertains to medieval women. Because the church prohibited, or chastised, or declared a penance does not mean that society conformed. Again, the church's directives were most likely to be influential among the upper classes and among the urban who were served by an effective ecclesiastical structure. The principle holds for civil law also. Legal statutes can be obeyed to the letter, stretched beyond recognition, abused, misused, or ignored by society. Any study of the social history of religious opinion would then have to evaluate whether ecclesiastical judgments were actively and successfully enforced.

At least in regard to the church's opinion of women, the Middle Ages can be appropriately bisected by the Gregorian reform movement of the late eleventh century. This reform demolished the double monasteries of the earlier era and quite effectively walled women's houses off from the institutional hierarchy of the church. The great medieval churchwomen, Hild at Whitby, Leoba, Hildegard of Bingen, Roswitha of Gandersheim, all belong to the earlier period. As the influence of churchwomen waned, church writings on women showed a greater tendency to regard women as the other, the basis for a growing misogyny and a violation of the orthodox Christian belief that all souls, without distinction of age, class, or sex, are equal in the eyes of God. Religious opinion in the medieval period travels a long distance from the generally sympathetic statements in the writings of Pope Gregory I, 590–604, to the late medieval bifurcation of women into spiritual or profane beings, the divine Mary or the seductive Eve. Even some of the least misogynous late medieval church philosophers, such as Vincent of Beauvais, whose supposedly enlightened theories on the education of women are thought to prefigure the Renaissance, did not escape the generally pessimistic attitudes toward women of his day. As Rosemary Tobin notes in her appraisal of his ideas on the education of women, With all due deference to Vincent for qualifying some of the more extremely restrictive positions of his authorities, it is still quite evident that he is more concerned about the effects of a girl's behavior on others, whether family or society, than he is on her own soul.¹⁵ His attempt to control women's impact upon society reveals the church's growing fear of women's drives and purposes. It serves to illustrate that as the ecclesiastical hierarchy grew more remote from women it encountered greater difficulty in comprehending women who participated in society. It was only truly at ease with that totally spiritualized image of the private and domestic woman, Mary, the Mother of God.

Brenda Bolton in her study, Mulieres Sanctae, indicates the severity of the social problem which existed. Thirteenth-century women found the church ill-disposed to create insitutions for the expression of their deeply-felt devotion. The Frauenfrage, or Women Question, came to be an important religious issue, and one which was not answered very satisfactorily. The recognized danger for the church, of course, lay in devout women seeking the representatives of heretical movements for spiritual guidance. Heresy plays a significant role in women's history, and the heretical movements of the thirteenth century are no exception.

Canon law and civil statute became increasingly important in women's lives in the later Middle Ages. As social tradition was replaced by highly specific statute law in the feudal kingdoms of the north and in the Mediterranean city-states, women confronted in civic guise those Roman legal principles which had influenced the church's opinion on their position. If the statute law of the Adriatic city-states can be taken as illustrative, and it suits the purpose because it contains some of the most ancient codified urban law, women lived strictly curtailed existences. They might be citizens, but they were private citizens, unable to exercise the public rights enjoyed by their fathers, husbands, and sons. Do such laws indicate that freedoms of earlier centuries have disappeared? Social history, through examining the application of law, can investigate this problem. In Ragusa (Dubrovnik), for example, I noted the law was disregarded so women might participate in the public sector, and I concluded that women were too essential in a period of economic growth to be excluded from a role in the family's economic pursuits. This illustrates one of the most baffling difficulties for women's studies: the attempt to determine whether legal principle and social custom coincide. Historians dealing with women have grown increasingly wary of accepting restrictive laws and misogynous interpretations of women's position at face value. Women do not necessarily behave as if they accepted either. In the context of Venetian patrician society, women appear to have had considerable impact on inheritance and, through it, the economy. Barbara Hanawalt, by investigating the behavior of female felons, reveals a whole range of female behavior outside the law, behavior only apparent to the historian's eye because the felons were apprehended and left a record in the Court Rolls. Whether openly criminal, as in this case, or merely passively resistant, women can be notorious scofflaws; the more privatized, the more likely they are to be so. This makes their history elusive, but it should sharpen our awareness of social undercurrents. Even under conditions which severely limit their activity, women may enjoy considerable informal freedoms and have a decisive impact upon the society in which they live.

The tendency, as the Middle Ages progressed, was toward a lessening of the public activity of women, a lower place in ecclesiastical opinion, fewer roles in guild organizations, and less agricultural administration if not less agricultural labor. But such generalizations must be carefully qualified by specific reference to locale, as this volume amply illustrates. But why did women's generally favorable position during Europe's early and anarchic centuries tend to worsen as medieval society developed? Various answers have been offered. Some credit the early Germans with customs particularly favorable to women. They offer as evidence the male dowry of the Germans and the higher wergild, or bloodprice, of women in the Barbaric Law codes of many of the German tribes.¹⁶ Some note also that Christianity had yet to make significant inroads into the still largely pagan customs of Europe north of the Alps. This latter interpretation may do the early missionary church a great disservice. The church's most notable accomplishment with regard to women lay in incorporating them into its early monastic houses. Another interpretation has been offered stressing the fact that early medieval women had not yet undergone those evolutionary steps into a patriarchal, male-dominated, capitalist, accumulating society, and they were, for the time being, relatively free. Frederick Engels, in his study of the Origin of the Family, struck this markedly romantic theme in his interpretation of Europe's barbaric age.¹⁷ None of these arguments takes sufficient note of the failure of early medieval society to define rigidly a public and a private sphere, and relegate women to the latter. Nor do they note the relatively beneficent conditions of the material life which prevailed. Early medieval women had opportunity to make recognized public contributions to society; they were valued for that reason. We know from historical sources that women did receive recognition. Betty Bandel, in a note on English chroniclers' attitudes toward women before the Norman Conquest, pointed out that vigor, ambition, daring, and intelligence were recognized and commended. After the Conquest such behavior was regarded as inappropriate and unwomanly.¹⁸

The late eleventh and twelfth centuries stand in many ways as a watershed between the greater opportunity for women in early medieval times and the more confining circumstances of life in the later Middle Ages. But before we identify civil law codes or ecclesiastical opinions as the arch-villains in this change, some effort should be made to count the cost of relative freedom for women in the early Middle Ages. When inventories and similar sources yield comparative statistical data, we learn that early medieval women had notably higher (that is, earlier) mortality rates than men. Women in the early Middle Ages paid the price of early death for the valuable contributions of maintaining population growth and contributing to society in the public sphere. Historians must therefore take into account an individual's reasonable desire for a longer and less demanding existence. A privatized life might mean some reduction in the harsh demands of life, even if purchased at the price of lower social status. Here lies a difficult issue involving, possibly, changing mentalities. Does a peasant woman or a town-bred spinster feel bitter resentment if relieved of field work or excluded from a guild by an adequate supply of male labor? Does the Florentine bourgeois wife find ample satisfaction in her high-ceilinged palace and lovingly executed portrait to compensate for loss of participation in the family's civic and business concerns? Does a Provencal duchess shut out from the administration of her own lands by her husband's growing corps of bureaucrats enjoy the courtly songs and poems composed in her honor by lesser noblemen who have been as effectively dislodged from their bases of power as she has been from hers? These are the issues of changing mentalities and only in the latter instance, the courtly romance, are there adequate resources to begin the investigation of new and changing sensibilities.

By the later Middle Ages, in the most favorable (that is, urban) settings, women had increased their life spans, sometimes even outdoing the male segment of the population in longevity. Less difficult work seems to have exerted an influence here, but another factor is involved: certain women did not marry in the cities of the later Middle Ages, their comparatively long lives adding up to a statistical increase for all womankind. After centuries of population growth in which all but those few women who chose the monastic life married and propagated, single women began to appear in considerable numbers. Lack of dowries was trumpeted as the cause of this worrisome social situation, but it is also a symptom that population level increases were no longer particularly desirable. This complicated the celebrated Frauenfrage.¹⁹ Women who did not marry were considered appropriately situated only when they were cloistered, an enormous burden upon the spiritual nature of the conventual orders and houses which existed. ²⁰

Although this volume does not purport to examine women's condition throughout all of medieval Europe, there is ample variety in the essays included to make useful comparisons by time and place. The medieval period will always attract notice because of curiosity about the origins of ideas and social traditions. But there are many more significant reasons to investigate women's position in the early centuries of the West. Possibly the greatest claim for early-European women's significance was