women, gender, and medieval historians - Usc

chapter 1
women, gender, and
medieval historians
Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras
Medieval people considered “man” the human standard and “woman” peculiarly capable
of both extraordinary good, as with the Virgin Mary, and evil, as exemplified by Eve.
For many centuries after the close of the Middle Ages, historians echoed these assumptions,
treating medieval women as the marked gender—as opposed to men whose gender
went unnoticed—and characterizing women as both revered (ladies on pedestals)
and maligned (witches at the stake). But no longer. Since the 1970s, historians of medieval
women have written more often about variety and opportunity than pedestals or
stakes, and since the 1990s, gender historians have unpacked the many genders and gendered
languages of medieval Europe.
Th is volume grows from these new understandings of medieval women, men, and
gender. On the one hand, the essays collected here continue the ongoing task of creating
fully peopled histories of the Middle Ages, and to that end, the volume focuses more on
women than men. Some authors highlight women’s agency and creativity (see chapters
by Fiona Griffiths and Anneke Mulder-Bakker). Others focus on how women’s lives varied
across social, regional, religious, and temporal contexts (see chapters by Elisheva
Baumgarten, Sarah Rees Jones, and Martha Howell). Still others argue that women were
central actors in the unfolding of medieval history (see chapters by Albrecht Diem and
Constance Berman). On the other hand, this volume also explores the many meanings
of gender in the Middle Ages. The chapters by Kathryn Ringrose, E. Jane Burns, and
Helmut Puff evoke a rich history of medieval gender benders and diverse masculinities
and femininities. Some women seemed manly in their devotion; some men seemed
feminine in their subjection to God; and gendered ideas flowed so freely that scholars
can now argue that medieval people sometimes made room for three or more genders. 1
Gender shaped the life options of medieval women and men; it also shaped how medieval
people thought about their world. Gendered language described institutions—
Christians saw their church, for example, as a bride of Christ—shaped views of
nature, often imagined as a sort of goddess, and even worked to malign minorities;
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2 judith m. bennett and ruth mazo karras
Christians saw Muslim men as sodomitical and Jewish men as effeminate. Gendered
metaphors—God as a father; Mercy as a female; Jesus (or in Jewish mysticism, God) as
a mother—were everywhere in medieval Europe. Even biblical stories opened up multiple
possibilities, as discussions of the figures of Mary and Martha by Kate Cooper (for
the early Middle Ages) and Jennifer Deane (for later) show.
As the editors of this collection, we are acutely aware of the boundaries we set, especially
our focus on the medieval west, and the gaps that remain, especially our slight
coverage of medieval masculinities. We also hope that our new histories will not drown
out the old. The stereotypes of pedestal and stake seem hopelessly dichotomous today,
but they contain some truth. Medieval thinkers both respected and denigrated women;
women themselves were both restricted and resourceful, as has been true, it seems, in
virtually all human societies. Despite all the flexibilities of medieval genders, the pervasive
notion of a God-given hierarchical gender binary—“man” as more perfectly
human than “woman”—constrained medieval ideas about both sexual difference and
the agency of women. Thus, although Christians, Jews, and Muslims disagreed on many
issues, they agreed that “woman” was less than “man,” a necessary but weaker divergence
from the male (human) standard (see chapters by Dyan Elliott, Jonathan Berkey, Judith
Baskin, and Katharine Park). Yes, some extraordinary medieval women achieved a great
deal—more than even most men—and some were even deemed man-like, for better
or worse. But these viragoes had first to transcend their lesser femaleness by virtue of
wealth, privileged birth, personality, or spiritual power. At any given level of medieval
society and in any medieval century, a girl—and the woman she became—had fewer
choices and opportunities than did her brother.
Back Stories
Stories about women and gender helped to create the very idea of the “Middle Ages.”
Some of the earliest stories were remarkably silly yet long-enduring. In the “Renaissance”
(from the fourteenth century in Italy, the sixteenth century farther north), when
Europeans were beginning to construct a medieval dark age between the glories of
ancient Rome and their own self-perceived glory, they concocted barbaric gender customs
for that medieval past: aristocratic lords who by right took the maidenheads of
peasant brides; crusaders who clasped hideous chastity belts on their wives; and a crossdressed
woman who became pope and died in public procession, after going into labor
and giving birth. The burden of these myths echoes even today, in brides threatened
with legal violation as in the film Braveheart , in pornographic “reconstructions” of chastity
belts, and in a Pope Joan reimagined as a feminist heroine. 2
In early modern Europe, these stories did what cross-cultural comparisons of women
and gender have often done: they elevated one civilization and denigrated another. It
is no accident that the earliest stories about the “right of the first night” were set not
just in a medieval past but also in the wilds of Scotland and Ireland, or that the story of
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women, gender, and medieval historians 3
Pope Joan was gleefully repeated by Protestant critics of Catholicism. These early stories
tell more about the interpretive creation of a maligned “Middle Ages” than about actual
medieval women and genders.
When nineteenth-century European intellectuals settled on a three-part past of
ancient, medieval, and modern, stories about women and gender remained powerfully
determinative of “medieval.” In France, a heated public debate raged for decades
about whether lords had, indeed, once claimed the virginity of serf brides (and if so,
the church’s complicity in the practice). In England, a gothic revival reimagined the
Middle Ages as a glorious age of unquestioned faith, chivalrous knights, and honored
ladies. The Lady of Shalott—celebrated in poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1833) and
in painting by John William Waterhouse (1888)—epitomized the feminine in Victorian
medievalism: loosely lifted from Arthurian legend, she was young, beautiful, pure, and
tragic. In the United States, Henry Adams’s Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904),
addressed to his nieces and based largely on a reimagination of the Virgin Mary, introduced
Americans to this romantic, touching, and forever-lost Middle Ages.
This is not to say that much serious study was given to medieval women and gender
during the nineteenth century. The first professional medievalists—all men—told stories
about kings and state-building, popes and religious institutions. They systematically
doubted the authenticity of female authors: they dubbed Dhuoda’s handbook the product
of a household priest, Hrosvit of Gandersheim’s plays a clever hoax, Hildegard of
Bingen’s writings the work of male secretaries, and Heloise’s letters the creation of Peter
Abelard. Medievalists are still undoing this mischief today. 3
By the early twentieth century, however, a few female medievalists had found secure
footing, mostly at women’s colleges and mostly in technical fields (especially legal and
economic history) that signaled their non-amateur status. A few, emboldened by the
emerging politics of feminism, began to study medieval women as a subject in their
own right. Like male historians interested in state-building kings and reforming popes,
these female medievalists focused on elites and told stories that spoke to the aspirations
of their day; they found in the Middle Ages a rough-and-ready equality of women and
men. Their foundational studies were full of insight, archival discoveries, and admirable
women—confident nuns, hard-working wives, and intrepid queens.
When feminism waned in the middle decades of the twentieth century, so too did
interest in medieval women and gender, and the few studies then produced usually
offered more downbeat evaluations. In 1955, Betty Bandel traced a negative trajectory
for women, arguing that a powerful ruler like Æthelflæd of Mercia (r. 911–918) was discussed
matter-of-factly in the tenth century, considered disturbingly man-like by the
twelfth century, and trivialized as a troublesome wife soon thereafter. When medieval
women’s history revived in the 1970s, the mid-century gap was so profound that Eileen
Power’s half-century-old essays were repackaged as a new and authoritative survey. 4
The 1970s and 1980s created the study of medieval women as a vibrant field. Susan
Mosher Stuard edited an early collection of essays (1976); Shulamith Shahar produced
the first textbook (1981); feminist medievalists started a journal (1986), now the Medieval
Feminist Forum ; and the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship was established
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4 judith m. bennett and ruth mazo karras
(1992).
5
These were heady decades of fact-finding, when feminist historians scoured
archives, accumulated data, and crunched numbers, all with an eye to recovering the
lost history of women. David Herlihy, often working with Christiane Klapisch-Zuber,
told about women’s restricted land-holding, their improved life expectancy after 1000,
their ages at marriage and family sizes. 6 His use of quantitative data provided a new evidentiary
base, but the data and their meanings, once seemingly so secure and transparent,
are now much debated, as Maryanne Kowaleski shows in her chapter. Caroline
Bynum traced how female mystics reshaped Christian spirituality and how they and
others played with gender by, for example, imagining Jesus as a maternal figure.
7
S ome
now question the extent of a specifically female spirituality, but Bynum’s pioneering
work encouraged extensive feminist interrogation of the texts and artifacts of medieval
piety, reflected here especially in the chapters by Deane, Miri Rubin, Kathleen Ashley,
and Mulder-Bakker. Herlihy and Bynum, just two among the scores of feminist historians
who published in these decades, also lent their substantial credibility—as presidents
of both the Medieval Academy of America and the American Historical Association—
to this emerging field.
Some historians of medieval women also began at this time to expand on a narrative
of decline. Among social historians, Georges Duby argued that early medieval aristocratic
families had been relatively egalitarian, but that this changed from the eleventh
century, when women’s options narrowed, thanks to the growing importance of patrimonial
property, primogeniture, and public office. Among feminist historians, Marion
Facinger (who argued in 1968 that early Capetian queens enjoyed powers later queens
lacked) and Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Wemple (who traced in 1973 the “power of
women through the family” in early medieval Europe) also saw ever-lessening options
for medieval women. These narratives accorded well with Joan Kelly’s electrifying thesis
(in 1977) that women tended to lose opportunity precisely when male opportunity was
expanding. 8 Timing the decline earlier than Kelly (who located it in the Renaissance),
medievalists suggested that there might have been no “High” Middle Ages for women,
that this triumphal era of religious reform, state-building, universities, and cathedrals
was, for women, an era of waning opportunity.
This neat chronology is no longer quite so compelling. Duby’s thesis has been substantively
undermined by archival studies, as Joanna Drell’s chapter indicates. The circumstances
of women in early medieval Europe are now understood as more limited
than McNamara and Wemple allowed (chapters by Lisa Bitel, Janet Nelson and Alice
Rio, and Rachel Stone capture the wide range of these circumstances). Continuities in
women’s lives can seem more striking than changes (see, for example, Jane Whittle’s
chapter on rural economies). And historians now understand medieval women as much
fuller participants in the developments that enhanced European life from the eleventh
century (see, for example, the chapters by Griffiths, Berman, and Kathryn Reyerson).
But the notion of ever fewer opportunities for women remains a quiet backbeat in many
feminist histories; readers will discern it, for example, in Stuard’s discussion of marital
assigns and Howell’s treatment of the gendered meanings of mercantile capitalism.
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women, gender, and medieval historians 5
By 1993, when the Medieval Academy of America devoted an issue of Speculum to
“Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism,” the field was securely established. 9
It was also changing rapidly, influenced especially by postmodernism and third-wave
feminism. “Women” no longer constituted a secure, transparent category; differences
among women took on new importance; grand chronologies seemed newly suspicious;
historians more openly acknowledged the interpretative processes that give meaning to
seemingly transparent facts; and “gender” took center stage. From the 1970s, feminists
had understood biological “sex” as distinct from the social construction of “gender.” By
the 1990s, this sex/gender distinction was less secure, particularly under the force of the
argument that even biological sex differences were, in fact, socially created—thus, all
“sex” was “gender.” 10 Joan Scott’s path-breaking article on “Gender: A Useful Category of
Historical Analysis” (1986) inspired a plethora of studies that delved more deeply than
before into discursive constructions of genders and sexualities. 11
This collection shows how much feminist medievalists today draw on—and move
beyond—these varied traditions. We strive to juggle both women’s history and gender
history. We tussle about the possibility of women’s changing status over time—whether
within the Middle Ages or at the junctures of ancient/medieval and medieval/modern.
The essays collected here are most certainly not the fruit of a single methodology, a single
chronological vision, or a single judgment as to women’s status, and we do not aim
in this introduction to wrestle these many voices into a univocal synthesis. Using the
seven categories into which we have grouped our chapters, we review the ways in which
feminist medievalists are now—armed with new sources, new methods, and new questions—rewriting
yet again the many histories of medieval women and gender.
Gendered Thinking
Every era has its own beliefs about what constitutes “women,” “men,” and their proper
interrelationship; in the Middle Ages these assumptions accorded rather more authority
to religion and less, for example, to science. Thinking on gender was rooted in the
three religions of the time, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; in scientific teachings; and
in political traditions. Each constituted an authoritative literate discourse, and together
they spoke about women and gender in a remarkably coherent chorus. Women were
understood as less than men, female attributes as less good than male ones, and gender
relations as properly characterized by womanly submission and manly governance.
Theology had pride of place in these discussions not only because so much medieval
learning was produced in religious contexts but also because religious inquiry then
included almost all knowledge. For example, natural philosophy, which we today call
science, explained God’s creation, and political theory taught how humans should operate
within God’s rules. Gender rules were similarly God-given, and the submission of
women to men paralleled the submission of all humanity to God.
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6 judith m. bennett and ruth mazo karras
There was much variation and change, of course. Elliott shows how Christian teachings
on marriage and virginity developed over time, albeit from a core of patristic
texts; Berkey traces the many elements—Arab, Roman, and Sassanid contexts, as well
as Qur’anic teachings—that comprised Islamic traditions; and Baskin stresses that
restrictions on Jewish women were more acute in religious ritual than economic practice.
Scholars once favored hierarchical histories of these three intertwined traditions,
usually telling how Jewish women were best off, Muslim women least so, and Christian
women somewhere in between. Now, historians more often depict women in all three
traditions as swimming against patriarchal tides that varied by time, place, and faith.
Many also now see women as moving more readily than men across confessional
divides—in market places, childbearing, domestic service, and, indeed, even slavery
(see chapters by Baumgarten and Sally McKee).
We are only beginning to appreciate how much Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic cultures
learned from each other. Thus, for example, whether finding piety in celibacy
(Christians) or marriage (Jews and Muslims), theologians in all three traditions constructed
female sexuality as a disruptive and polluting worry. Medical theories, as
Katharine Park shows, traveled across these cultures, as each adapted classical texts
(especially Aristotelian ones) in distinctive but similar ways. Medieval misogyny was
not, then, solely a nefarious construct of sexually repressed Christians, nor a mere
offshoot of Christian misogamy (anti-marriage polemic). Denigration of women
was vicious, powerful, and cross-cultural; it was also sometimes little more than a
learned game in which, as Alcuin Blamires has put it, authors could “show off their
literary paces.” 12
Medieval Europe was by no means unusual in assuming male dominance; nor was
it unique in articulating this assumption inconsistently and applying it ambivalently.
Medieval thinkers were quite capable of holding, at one and the same time, contradictory
ideas about women and gender. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in political
theory as enacted in coronation rituals, where, as Amalie Foessel shows, rule by women
was at once intolerable and tolerated.
In the fifteenth century, anti-woman discourses were both magnified and challenged.
Beliefs about women as sorcerers became more prominent, growing alongside a continuing
tradition of learned magic as a male preserve; from this development, among
others, would emerge the witch crazes of early modern Europe (see chapter by Laura
Stokes). As some strands of anti-woman discourse deepened, explicit refutations also
developed. Christine de Pizan initiated in 1405 a debate about the misogynous ideas so
deeply embedded in literature and theology, and her determined writings mark one origin
of feminist thought in Europe (see chapter by Roberta Krueger).
Learned traditions—articulated mostly by men working in major intellectual institutions—speak
to only some parts of the gendered thinking of medieval people.
Imaginative literatures move away from universities, yeshivas, and madrasas into the
more lay, albeit still elite, worlds of medieval courts and townhouses. There, medievalists
now discern considerable pleasure in stories that dwell on gender trouble—in
women who act like men, men who act like women, and a wide array of sexual desires.
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women, gender, and medieval historians 7
Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics prescribed how women and men should be; the
poems and romances produced by Chrétien de Troyes and others imagined how women
and men might be. Yes, husbands should govern their wives, just as theologians taught;
yes, it was fun to laugh at tales of disobedient wives, such as Alison in Chaucer’s Miller’s
Tale ; in practice, most people expected wives to behave as competent but lesser partners
to their husbands. As Berkey notes in relation to Islamic practices, the rich were particularly
able to adhere to learned gender ideals. Most medieval people were poor, very poor.
Ordinary folk certainly imbibed some learned ideas from clergy and elites, but they had
their own traditions too, visible rarely, only partially, and mostly for the last medieval
centuries.
Looking Through the Law
Law provides some of the best source material for medieval gender rules as applied to
ordinary people. Prescriptive law reveals how lawyers, judges, and legislators understood
gender differences; it broadly echoes the story told in other learned traditions.
Documents of legal practice, such as court records, notarial registers, and charters, tell
something else; they provide valuable evidence for the actual lives of humble women
and men. These records of legal process did not mirror social reality, for only certain
matters merited legal attention and court procedures determined how those matters
were reported. But for historians today, medieval law, as both prescribed and practiced,
constitutes an exceedingly important source of information about women and
non-elites.
In its own time, medieval law also provided durable frameworks, especially with
regard to women and gender. Legal categories regularly differentiated women and
men, thereby solidifying gender as a critical determinant of status and thus, of identity.
Specific laws about women’s legal status and participation in court proceedings varied
by jurisdiction, but the terms of the debate proved remarkably consistent across legal
systems and across time. Questions of women’s rights with regard to the ownership, control,
and transmission of property—both landed and liquid—long endured. So, too, did
moral regulation, which in the Middle Ages especially focused around the sexual behaviors
of women and their implications for family formation and inheritance.
Medieval societies had such a bewildering variety of jurisdictions, each with its own
procedures, that it is difficult to compare gendered legal statuses. Roman law remained
crucially important throughout the Middle Ages, not so much as a body of specific
enactments but as a set of procedures and a way of thinking about the world. Civic law
drew on it extensively, as did the canon law of the church, and as Marie Kelleher’s chapter
suggests, local customs interacted with Roman law to create new ways of thinking
about women and gender. Germanic law (already codified within a Romanized context
by the time the first sources survive) and local customary law (at first unwritten, but then
codified) also entered the medieval mix, although as Nelson and Rio show, the surviving
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8 judith m. bennett and ruth mazo karras
sources for the “barbarian” law codes can be very difficult to interpret. Individual concepts
from these various legal systems, such as the Roman dos (roughly, dowry), were
recast to suit changing socio-economic conditions; as Stone and Stuard discuss, these
reinterpretations not only shaped medieval family structures but also stimulated economic
development.
Law strictly prescribed women’s disability, but practice was often more forgiving.
In late medieval Mediterranean towns (which are exceptionally rich in legal records),
women negotiated, with or without men’s help, their own legal and business affairs (see
chapters by Reyerson and Carol Lansing). Even in canon law, a jurisprudence studied
and applied across Christian Europe, litigants still had considerable room to maneuver
(as shown in chapters by Kelleher and Sara McDougall). Feminist historians today look
both at the law—its bewildering uniformity and diversity, in both theory and practice—
and through it to discern what its records might tell about otherwise undocumented
women and men.
Domestic Lives
Modern English obfuscates the realities of domestic labor in the Middle Ages. “Lady”
suggests a refined femininity far from the authoritative ladies of the medieval aristocracy;
“housewife” has lost much of its original, medieval emphasis on work; and “servant”
evokes the parlor more than the field or workshop. Our understandings are further
clouded by all-too-ready biological assumptions—that, for example, it was the fate of
medieval women to produce streams of children in quick succession, or that it was
somehow natural for women take on more domestic tasks than men (see critiques in
chapters by Kowaleski, Whittle, and Rees Jones).
Historians of the early Middle Ages, working mostly with sparse evidence for the aristocracy,
have built narratives of change—marriage (once multiple and weak) becoming
a single, permanent bond, and lineage narrowing from bilateral to patrilineal.
McNamara and Wemple once characterized this half-millennium as a time of extraordinary
opportunity for elite women. Nelson and Rio now read law codes as more contingent,
but at the same time less positive for women. Stone sees Carolingian women as
ideologically more “moral” and more “private” than their Merovingian counterparts.
And Drell doubts that the first five hundred years of the Middle Ages did, in fact, produce
a halcyon age for aristocratic women.
From 1000, several different general patterns of European domesticity emerge. As
Kowaleski notes, one cuts Europe south and north, with women in Mediterranean
Europe marrying younger, more often, and to older husbands than did women in the
north—and thus, more likely to be dependent on their husbands at first and widowed
later. Another trend cuts Europe by class, with aristocratic women throughout Europe
marrying in high numbers and at young ages, as Drell shows. Yet another distinction
cuts by religion, for, as Baumgarten argues, Jews throughout Europe tended to marry
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women, gender, and medieval historians 9
early and universally. To these must be added at least three more domestic situations:
those of never-married singlewomen, accounting for as much as one third of adult
women in the north; those of nuns; and of course, those of widows. Some experiences
transcended these variations; throughout Europe, for example, clerks identified men by
such public characteristics as occupation or rank and women by family ties. 13
By the later Middle Ages, three themes—middle-class domesticity, gendered space,
and domestic piety—loom large. 14 The development of the European middle class, long
a preoccupation of modern historians, now seems critical to understanding late medieval
domesticity. Wealthy burghers possessed many more things than ever before: better
houses, more furnishings, and more fashionable clothes. The management of these
goods, as Katharine French shows in her chapter, quickly became a female responsibility
and a source of female agency, and as Howell argues, a new bourgeois ideology of gender
emerged whereby women were to be good housewives, busy at home, and men were to
be good citizens, busy in public work. 15 Slowly but steadily, in Rees Jones’s view, these
changes spread to other social groups. Once burghers’ wives adopted a new definition
of female honesty rooted in their own domestic roles, the age-old public work of more
humble women became newly suspect.
As Rees Jones also stresses, medieval spaces did not always divide neatly into public
(masculine) and private (feminine). Markets, streets, and guildhalls provided common
spaces and public spheres; designs of late medieval castles, townhouses, and cottages
promoted the privatization and engendering of domestic spaces; and housewifery, challenged
by the abounding possessions of late medieval households, was redefined to better
accommodate to an emerging consumer economy.
Medieval households were also deeply embedded in faith. This was always obvious for
Jewish households (see Baumgarten), but in the 1970s and 1980s, the study of medieval
Christian life focused on the public and institutional, and the study of female piety was
accordingly a study of nuns. Now, however, nunneries look more domestic, 16 and lay
households, as Deane argues, seem holy, equipped with chapels and chaplains (if rich),
psalters (if middling), and rosaries (if poor). Mulder-Bakker shows how sanctity also
changed, with more wives and widows recognized for exceptional holiness in the later
Middle Ages, and with more holy women, like Catherine of Siena, pursuing their devotions
at home.
Land, Labor, Economy
When medieval women’s history took firm shape in the 1970s and 1980s, economic history
was a natural ally, providing a developed feminist historiography buttressed by
Marxist scholarship. From these foundations grew robust investigations of women’s
work that revolved around two primary issues. The first focused on clothmaking, urbanization,
and a chronology that stretched across the medieval millennium. As set out in
David Herlihy’s Opera Muliebria (1990), the cloth industry exemplified how women’s
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10 judith m. bennett and ruth mazo karras
work outside the home slowly became less important: cloth was usually made by women
before 1000, men became more active in clothmaking during the central Middle Ages,
and by 1500, men executed all but the craft’s most menial tasks. Herlihy’s core insight—
that women and clothmaking were critical to the medieval economy—remains strong.
Thus, Berman has linked economic growth c .1000 to the spread of wind and water
mills, which freed women from laborious hand-milling and sent them into the cloth
industry. 17
The second issue focused on the medieval/modern divide, particularly in England.
Was there a 150-year “golden age” for working women during the labor shortage that followed
the plague of 1347–1349 that was eventually snuffed out by population growth and
a surge towards capitalism c .1500? This question produced a plethora of new facts and a
variety of answers—yes, no, and maybe just a little bit. 18 Today, feminist research focuses
less on work and more on wealth: women’s bodies as wealth; women and the production
of wealth; and women’s control of wealth.
Women were, themselves, a sort of wealth, for their reproductive work—both biological
and social—was highly valued in medieval family economies. Men needed
women to produce their heirs and run their households (as Whittle and Drell explore).
Women were also valued for the wealth they could bring in marriage, whether to plowmen,
knights, merchants, or artisans. 19 Women’s bodies were even assessed and sold
more directly: prices for enslaved women depended, as McKee shows, on their suitability
for sexual service, and prostitution also represented a direct purchase of women’s
bodies. 20
Women labored, as did men, in the production of food, goods, and services. As
Reyerson and Whittle argue, the sexual division of productive labor was clear but highly
flexible. Women worked in fields and forests, in markets and shops, for themselves and
for employers. They tended, more than men, to juggle many occupations. They were
especially prominent in poorly remunerated trades—minor food trades, spinning,
small-scale marketing. They worked for wages much lower than those paid to men.
Medieval women, in short, worked hard, but they were rarely empowered by their work.
The same could be said for many working men in medieval villages and towns, but hard,
unrewarding work was especially women’s lot.
Medieval women were more often carriers of wealth to husbands or children—
wealth in the form of goods, land, or coin—than creators or managers of it. Women
possessed relatively little wealth: women’s wages and work produced less income, and
women received less from parents, in either gifts or inheritance. Rich or poor, women
held, at best, about one fifth of all feudal and peasant tenures; both proportions fell by
the later Middle Ages (see Drell and Whittle, respectively). Women also had less control
over what little they held. Guardians oversaw the assets of unmarried heiresses;
husbands managed dowries, dowers, and other properties; and many widows enjoyed
only usufruct of conjugal lands. These patterns were not hard rules. Sometimes law or
custom allowed women full control of wealth; sometimes rules were circumvented or
ignored; and sometimes (especially when husbands were absent) wives directly managed
family assets.
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women, gender, and medieval historians 11
Bodies, Pleasures, Desires
Bodies and sexualities have always been inextricably linked to women and gender.
Studies of medieval sexual behavior exploded after the 1976 publication of the first
volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality . 21 Foucault discussed sexuality as a
field of discourse rather than a set of behaviors, and he argued that “sexuality” did not
really exist before the advent of bourgeois capitalism. Although Foucault tended to
equate male sexuality with human sexuality, his ideas complemented those of feminist
historians who argued that it was language and culture, rather than nature, that
dictated the reproductive destiny of women, the permeability of the female body, and
beliefs about gender. Foucault’s interest in male homosexuality, which he argued did
not exist as an identity before the nineteenth century, also stimulated new research.
John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980) argued that
gay identity was as old as the Middle Ages and so, too, was tolerance of gay lifestyles.
In the extensive debates that followed, male same-sex relations—whether socially
“constructed” or biologically “essentialist”—briefly became the central category in the
history of medieval sexuality. 22
Scholars now question whether “homosexuality” is even a relevant concept in the
Middle Ages. As Puff shows in this volume, medieval texts reveal a variety of affectionate
and erotic relationships among same-sex couples that do not readily map onto modern
categories. Medieval people seem not to have thought, for example, that sex-of-partner
determined gender identity. Dominance was gendered male and passivity female.
Thus, in the few extant court cases that treat female same-sex relations before 1500, the
dominant (penetrating) partner is figured as man-like and abominable, the other (passive)
partner as woman-like and forgivable. 23 Sex without penetration was unimaginable
in medieval law, and as a result, some sexual practices were ignored, reinterpreted, or
reconfigured as gender transgressions.
Sorting out the affectionate from the erotic—or put another way, determining what
kinds of desires medieval people felt—has proven difficult. Insofar as medieval people
wrote about desire, they mostly wrote about God. Imaginative literature was a bit
more down to earth. Courtly ideals, expressed particularly in love lyrics and Arthurian
romances, shaped aristocratic culture and practice, and they were remarkably playful
about gender and sex. As Burns shows, men were not always manly, women were
not always passive, and desire did not always move along a male–female axis. Indeed,
medieval bodies seem to have been malleable and negotiable. Differences between
male and female bodies were certainly an important way of organizing medical knowledge;
as discussed by Park, the male body was taken as standard, and the female body
assessed against it. But the interplay of body and gender in the Middle Ages was not just
an either/or proposition. The thirteenth-century Roman de Silence explicitly explored
some of the possibilities. Its heroine is born female but raised as a boy and later counseled
by both Nature (who urges a return to female identity) and Nurture (who argues for
retaining a male identity). Medical writers and practitioners often pondered, as Green
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12 judith m. bennett and ruth mazo karras
discusses, the gender of “hermaphrodites” and their meaning within God’s plan. 24 And
in the Byzantine east, as Ringrose shows, eunuchs adopted a gender distinctiveness that
was built on much more than castration alone.
Nevertheless, throughout the Middle Ages, reproduction was understood as the key
purpose of sexual activity. Thus, physicians and other medical practitioners tended
to focus their care of women, as Green shows in her chapter, on reproductive health.
Across centuries and across religious cultures, the care of women’s bodies, whether by
female or male practitioners, focused on preserving fertility and facilitating childbirth.
Engendering Christian Holiness
In the last thirty years, feminist scholars have transformed the study of medieval
Christianity. Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast redirected discussions away from theological
and ecclesiastical hostility to women (and even nuns) to emphasize how women
were able to shape their own Christian faith. The association of women with the flesh,
Bynum argued, allowed women to identify with the body of Christ, and both female and
male writers produced a dazzling array of positive associations linking the divine and the
feminine. Bynum also demonstrated that although only priests could celebrate the Mass,
holy women bypassed this male monopoly through their own experiences of Eucharistic
miracles. In the wake of Bynum’s work on the intersection between theology and practice,
feminist scholars of medieval Christianity began to tell new and startling stories.
As a result, medievalists now see the medieval church as willing to play with gender
binaries. God the Father, although a distinctly masculine figure, was not without
tenderness. God the Son was also masculine, but sometimes given nurturing feminine
attributes, as in Bynum’s examination of “Jesus as mother.” The Holy Spirit, often figured
as a dove, was even less tied to one gender or the other. The medieval church itself—an
institution in which only men were ordained and all women (even nuns) were laity—
was often cast as a bride, with Christ as bridegroom. The cult of the saints, particularly
veneration of the Virgin Mary, allowed ample room for feminine aspects to enter religious
devotion (as Rubin shows). Mystics, among them many women, regularly played
with a wide range of gendered and sexual metaphors in their discussions of the divine;
so, too, did bishops and other church leaders. 25
Feminist medievalists have also drawn attention to how medieval Christians
deployed women, gender, and sexuality to guard the boundaries of their faith. 26 Wome n
and gender were everywhere in the Christianization of Europe—as proselytizers, as
converts, and as sites of anxiety as old faiths overlapped with new (see Bitel’s chapter).
And when the church came to deal with Christians whose faith diverged from orthodox
teachings, especially from the twelfth century on, gender was again important. As John
Arnold points out in his chapter, some heretics diverged from the Roman church in
their gender rules (allowing, for example, preaching by women), and sometimes Rome’s
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women, gender, and medieval historians 13
classification of acceptable divergence—whether a belief was merely idiosyncratic or
heretical—hinged on gender conformity or nonconformity.
Whereas nuns were once the story of women in medieval Christianity, the ordinary
pieties of Christian households now command more attention, as also do laywomen
who pursued holiness outside formal communities. Nuns remain, however, an important
part of our understandings of medieval society. Some scholars have proposed that
nuns (and monks as well) became de-gendered by their vows, released from ordinary
standards; others have argued that while monastics used gendered metaphors flexibly,
they still clung to an overarching binary of gender. Regardless, most agree that the lives
of nuns and monks were more similar than different (and thereby different from most
laity). Diem argues that the forms of monasticism that dominated by the central Middle
Ages may have been originally designed for women, and in the great monastic reforms
of the twelfth century, as Griffiths shows, women worked as hard as men to create new
types of religious practice, even if the eventual results were not entirely positive for them.
Finally and most dramatically, female piety today takes center stage in histories of medieval
spirituality: the theology of Hildegard of Bingen, the heterodoxy of Marguerite Porete,
the mysticism of Catherine of Siena, the eremiticism of Julian of Norwich, the striving
holiness of Margery Kempe, and the quotidian devotion of countless ordinary women. By
their own hand or through scribes, pious women wrote extensively about their devotions,
visions, and theological insights. Men produced more texts, to be sure, but women’s texts
were often distinctively innovative (Kempe’s book is, for example, the first autobiography in
English), and female authors likely lie hidden behind a plethora of “anonymous” writings. 27
Forceful pious women, Mulder-Bakker demonstrates, also took leadership roles in many
quasi-organized forms of lay piety. Some created or commissioned artworks of extraordinary
power. 28 And everyday women—ordinary women, not writers, leaders, or artists—
worshipped in homes and parishes where, like men, they drew on a range of Christian
practices and artifacts that spoke not only to their humanity but also to their gender (see
Deane and Ashley). There was, in short, far more flexibility and space for women within
medieval Christianity than historians once imagined. In this research area, perhaps more
than any other, feminist histories today speak more of opportunity and less of constraint.
Turning Points and Places
Joan Kelly long ago called on historians to gender our master narratives, but medievalists
still usually identify epochal change with major events that have little to do with
women or gender: the deposition of the last Western Roman emperor in 476; the plagues
of 1347–1349; the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453; the voyage of Columbus
in 1492. Even in the 1990s, gender remained a glaringly overlooked category in a wellfunded,
international research project on the transformation of the Roman world into a
medieval one.
29
More recently, feminist historians have suggested downplaying epochal
change altogether—that is, focusing more on continuities. Working, as did Kelly, on the
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14 judith m. bennett and ruth mazo karras
transition from medieval to modern, Judith Bennett has argued that while women’s work
changed, the status of that work did not: whenever a particular type of work became
more prestigious, as with weaving or brewing, men took it over, and tasks identified as
female remained just as low status, low-skilled, and poorly compensated as before. 30
Today, feminist chronologies of the Middle Ages work within and around these
debates. Historians are finally beginning to look at “late antiquity” with a focus less
on geopolitical events and more on the way Christians, particularly Christian women,
preserved and reconfigured aspects of Roman culture (see Cooper). We are also reassessing
the all-important transitions that cluster around the year 1000. Some, like
McNamara, find a wholesale reorientation of the gender system after 1000, as a newly
celibate clergy excluded women from ecclesiastical and dynastic roles. 31 Others, like
Berman in this volume, see this as a time of expanding opportunity for women and,
indeed, even expanding female influence over the course of historical change. In both
cases, stories of women and gender in the central Middle Ages play against a less glorious
background than was once the case. The same western Europeans who built states,
cathedrals, and universities between 1000 and 1300 also mounted crusades against
Muslims, persecuted Jews, and grew increasingly anxious about sexual minorities.
The transitions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are similarly now seen in
ambivalent light. Some changes seem clearly negative: the retrenchment of some women’s
economic role as a result of the rise of mercantile capitalism (discussed by Howell) and the
beginnings of witch-hunts (discussed by Stokes). Other changes—such as the first glimmerings
of female advocacy in Europe (see Krueger)—are considerably more positive.
As reflected in the essays in this volume, feminist scholarship on the Middle Ages is at
once scholarly and political. Feminist medievalists approach the artifacts of the past—
the documents, texts, bones, and goods the dead have left for us—with academic rigor
and honesty, striving to “get it right.” But we also talk back to sources—asking questions
and seeking answers that reflect current issues, both scholarly debates (did women’s work
status decline during the Middle Ages?) and broadly social concerns (should women be
paid equally with men?). The extremes of Mary and Eve, of achievement and abasement,
can no longer encompass this complex field. Yet the dichotomy speaks to a sort of truth.
Medieval women worked hard, created much, and accomplished a great deal, but their
achievements are all the more remarkable because they took place within a confined context—a
medieval world in which men were human and women were different.
Further Reading
The contributors to the volume introduced by this essay have produced remarkable
summations of specific areas of research. In addition, see these general resources:
Amt , Emilie , ed. Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook . New York : Routledge , 1993 .
Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index. The University of Iowa Libraries, < http://
inpress.lib.uiowa.edu/feminae/Default.aspx >.
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women, gender, and medieval historians 15
Larrington , Carolyne , ed. Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook .
London : New York: Routledge , 1995.
McCarthy , Conor , ed. Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook .
London : Routledge , 2004 .
Murray , Jacqueline , ed. Love, Marriage, and Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader . Peterborough,
Ont. : Broadview Press , 2001 .
Schaus , Margaret , ed. Women and Gender in Medieval Europe : An Encyclopedia .
New York : Routledge , 2006 .
Skinner , Patricia and Elisabeth Van Houts , Medieval Writings on Secular Women .
London : Penguin , 2011 .
Wilson , Katharina M. , ed. Medieval Women Writers . Athens, Ga. : University of Georgia
Press , 1984 .
Wilson , Katharina M. and Nadia Margolis , eds. Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia .
Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press , 2004 .
N o t e s
1 . R. N. Swanson , “ Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform
to Reformation ,” in D. M. Hadley , ed., Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London;
New York : Longman , 1999 ), 160–77 ; Jacqueline Murray , “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three
Genders ?” in Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz , eds, Gender and Christianity in Medieval
Europe ( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2008 ), 34–51 .
2 . A l ai n B ou re au , Th e Lord’s First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage , trans. Lydia
G. Cochrane ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1998 ) ; idem, Th e Myth of Pope
Joan , trans. Lydia G. Cochrane ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2001 ) . Albrecht
Classen , Th e Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process ( New York : Palgrave
Macmillan , 2007 ) .
3 . Barbara Newman , “ Authority, Authenticity, and the Repression of Heloise ,” in
From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature
( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 1995), 46–75 .
4 . B ett y B and el , “ The English Chroniclers’ Attitude Toward Women ,” Journal of the History of
Ideas , 16 ( 1 ) ( 1955 ): 113–18 . Eileen Power , Medieval Women , ed. M. M. Postan ( Cambridge;
New York : Cambridge University Press , 1975 ) .
5 . Susan Mosher Stuard , ed., Women in Medieval Society ( Philadelphia : University of
Pennsylvania Press , 1976 ) ; Shulamith Shahar , The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the
Middle Ages (London : Methuen , 1983 ) .
6 . D av i d He rl i hy and C h r ist i ane K l apis ch-Zub er , Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the
Florentine Catasto of 1427 ( New Haven : Yale University Press , 1985 ) ; Herlihy , Medieval
Households (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press , 1985 ) ; idem, “Land, Family and
Women in Continental Europe, 701–1200 ,” Traditio , 18 ( 1962 ): 89–120 .
7 . Caroline Walker Bynum , Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle
Ages (Berkeley : University of California Press , 1982 ) ; idem, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The
Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley : University of California
Press , 1987 ) .
8 . G e orge s D uby , The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in
Medieval France , trans. Barbara Bray ( New York : Pantheon Books , 1983 ) ; Marion F.
Facinger , “ A Study of Medieval Queenship: Capetian France, 987–1237 ,” Studies in
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16 judith m. bennett and ruth mazo karras
Medieval and Renaissance History , 5 (1968 ): 3–48 ; Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Wemple ,
“ The Power of Women Through the Family in Medieval Europe: 500–1100 ,” Feminist
Studies , 1 (3/4) (1973 ): 126–41 ; Joan Kelly-Gadol , “Did Women Have a Renaissance ?” in
Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koontz , eds, Becoming Visible: Women in European History
(Boston : Houghton Mifflin , 1977 ) , reprinted in Joan Kelly , Women, History, and Theory: The
Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1984 ) .
9 . Speculum , 68 (2 ) (1993 ) ; Nancy F. Partner , ed., Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender,
Feminism (Cambridge, Mass. : Medieval Academy of America , 1993 ) .
1 0 . Judit h But l e r , Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
( New York : Routledge , 1990 ) .
11 . Joan W. Scott , “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis ,” American
Historical Review , 91 (5 ) (1986 ): 1053–75 ; reprinted in Gender and the Politics of History
(New York : Columbia University Press , 1988 ) . Dyan Elliott , “The Three Ages of Joan Scott ,”
American Historical Review , 113 (5) (December 2008 ): 1390–403 .
12 . Alcuin Blamires , ed., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval
Texts ( Oxford : Clarendon Press , 1992 ), 12 .
13 . For exceptions, see Shennan Hutton , Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval
Ghent ( New York : Palgrave Macmillan , 2011 ) and Ellen E. Kittell , “ The Construction of
Women’s Social Identity in Medieval Douai: Evidence from Identifying Epithets ,” Journal
of Medieval History , 25 ( 3 ) ( 1999 ): 215–27 .
1 4 . Mar y an ne Kow a l e sk i and P. J. P. G oldb erg , e ds, Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing
and Household in Medieval England ( Cambridge; New York : Cambridge University
Press , 2008 ) .
15 . Felicity Riddy , “ Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text ,” Speculum ,
71 (1 ) (1996 ): 66–86 .
16 . Marilyn Oliva , “Nuns at Home: The Domesticity of Sacred Space ,” in Kowaleski and
Goldberg , eds, Medieval Domesticity .
1 7 . D av i d He r l i hy , Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe ( Philadelphia :
Temple University Press , 1990 ) ; Constance H. Berman , “ Women’s Work in Family,
Village, and Town after 1000 CE: Contributions to Economic Growth ?” Journal of
Women’s History , 19 ( 2007 ): 10–32 .
1 8 . P. J. P. G ol db e rg , Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and
Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520 (Oxford : Clarendon Press , 1992 ) ; Caroline M. Barron , “The ‘Golden
Age’ of Women in Medieval London ,” Reading Medieval Studies , 15 ( 1989 ): 35–58 ; Marjorie
Keniston McIntosh , Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620 ( Cambridge : Cambridge
University Press , 2005 ) ; Judith M. Bennett , chapter 5 in History Matters: Patriarchy and the
Challenge of Feminism ( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2006 ), 82–107 .
19 . B ar b ar a Hanaw a lt , The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval
London (New York : Oxford University Press , 2007 ) .
20 . Ruth Mazo Karras , Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England
(New York : Oxford University Press , 1996 ) .
2 1 . Ver n L . Bu l l ou g h , Sex, Society, and History (New York : Science History Publications , 1976 ) ;
Mi chel Fou c au lt , Histoire de la sexualité ( Paris : Gallimard , 1976 ) , translated as The History
of Sexuality: An Introduction , vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York : Vintage Books , 1990 ) .
22 . John Boswell , Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western
Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago;
London : University of Chicago Press , 1980 ) ; debate summarized in Ruth Mazo Karras ,
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women, gender, and medieval historians 17
Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others , 2nd edn ( Abingdon : Routledge ,
2012 ), 5–10 .
23 . James A. Schultz , Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality
(Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2006 ) ; Karma Lochrie , Heterosyncrasies: Female
Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 2005 ) ;
Kar ras , Sexuality in Medieval Europe ; Helmut Puff , “ Female Sodomy: The Trial of
Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477) ,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies , 30 (1 )
(2000 ): 41–61 ; Jacqueline Murray , “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the
Middle Ages ,” in Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage , eds, Handbook of Medieval
Sexuality (New York : Garland , 1996 ), 191–223 .
24 . Joan Cadden , Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and
Culture (Cambridge; New York : Cambridge University Press , 1993 ) ; Lorraine Daston and
Katharine Park , “The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early
Modern France ,” in Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero , eds, Premodern Sexualities
( New York : Routledge , 1996 ) ; Leah DeVun , “ The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex
Difference in Premodern Europe ,” Journal of the History of Ideas , 69 ( 2 ) ( 2008 ): 193–218 .
2 5 . B ar b ar a Ne w man , God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages
( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2003 ) .
26 . David Nirenberg , “ Conversion, Sex, and Segregation: Jews and Christians in Medieval
Spain ,” American Historical Review , 107 (4 ) (2002 ): 1065–93 .
27 . Janet L. Nelson , “Gender and Genre in Women Historians of the Early Middle Ages ,” in
The Frankish World, 750–900 ( London : Hambledon , 1996 ) .
2 8 . Jeff rey F. Hamburger , Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent
(Berkeley : University of California Press , 1997 ) .
29 . Julia M. H. Smith , “Did Women Have a Transformation of the Roman World ?” Gender &
History , 12 ( 3 ) ( 2000 ): 552–71 .
30 . B e n ne tt , History Matters .
31 . Jo Ann McNamara , “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–
1150 ,” in Clare A. Lees , ed., Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages
(Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 1994 ), 3–29 .
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