Week 7 : Relics and Devotional Life - Medieval Men and Women

The medieval vision of women and understanding of gender relations are heavily shaped by religious teachings. Christian theologists saw women as inferior to men and dangerous creatures. The mainstream justification comes from Eve and her bad behaviour. 

Adam and Eve, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1533.

 

 

 

Eve is presented as created from Adam’s rib, therefore she comes second and is inferior to men. Furthermore, she is the sinner who listened to the devil and pushed Adam to sin as well. Consequently, she is seen as subjected to evil influence, a temptress and a danger for men. So are all women, “daughters of Eve”. Therefore, men must have authority over women. During the medieval period, for women one of the most important facts of their lives was virginity. Virginity was an expectation in young women and something which was only to be broken after their marriage to a suitable candidate. St Jerome stated that ‘the gift of virginity has been bestowed most richly upon women’ and a women who gave this away out of wedlock was committing a major sin. Thus marriage became a very important institution to the church. Again, Jerome believed that ‘wedded women may congratulate themselves that they come next to virgins’, and played an important role in repopulating a society. However, it was also believed by some (for example Augustine of Hippo) that marriage was only for the purpose of procreating children, and for that to be done in a decent manner which discouraged sin.

Marriage of Bohemond I and Constance of France, 1337

 

Within marriage, women had no authority over their body, but were seen to be owned by their husband. Marriage was an oath of peace, and was often used to create alliances between feuding families; it was a form of truce. The marriages of upper class women were always made to the advantage of the family. They had very little control in their own lives; they didn’t have any standing of their own, it was their father’s standing and then their husbands which control their own.  A dowry was also of key importance in marriages and without a large dowry a woman could not expect to find a desirable marriage. There were many expectations and pressures placed upon females throughout the Middle Ages. From all levels of society, reproduction and the caring of family was clearly emphasised as not only an essential aspect of their lives but additionally it was considered the dual purpose of a woman. Women were blamed for any infertility, regardless of whether it was their body which was capable of bearing a child or not. Engendering valid heirs was a challenge faced by women as mortality rates were increasingly high. Therefore, despite the average woman giving birth to approximately ten children, death was frequent and sadly unsurprising.

Medieval women and children

 Failing to full fill the role of motherhood reflected negatively not only on the essence of the female but in turn both families with which she was significantly tied. Women were also expected to govern her servants (if she had any), maintain the household and above all, always remain obedient to the will of her husband, putting aside her own aspirations and desires. An upper Class woman was very much the pawn of her family. Upper class women rarely had any access to what was considered “their” land or money; it normally went straight to her husband so she had no economic role what so ever. 

Women defending a Castle, Walter de Milemete, 1326-27 

 The main role of an upper class woman was to have several children with a strong male lineage. Much like a working class woman, upper class women had to control her husband’s household; it was her job to control the servants and oversee the everyday order in the household. Working class women were the backbone of a medieval society. They provided clothes and cooked food for their families and village. Working class women usually worked from dawn to dusk, doing jobs similar to famers; feeding the animals, harvesting the crops, as well as maintaining the house. On top of their housewife duties, they sometimes help their husbands in the fields that enabled him to make money and be the “bread winner”. 

Women in the fields - Haymaking in June

 

Another type of working class woman was the urban woman. She helped her merchant husband sell goods to different towns and travel with him as well. Though as the bible gives as a very inferior and weak model of woman, it is obviously from the readings, that women in the Middle Ages were not as weak and inferior as the bible and its preachers had us believe.

In Medieval Europe the church was the sole provider of education for its people. As such the church’s views on women led their educational status. What little education they did receive was usually in accordance with views of their future roles as wives and mothers. Matteo Veggio in his treatise De educatione liberorum written in 1440, claimed that women should lead "regular, chaste, and religious lives and to devote all [their] time to female labors." Noble daughters were educated by private tutors along with their brothers in many houses holds.

Alternatively women could enter the church as nuns in an Abbey or Nunnery. Education was a part of a Nuns training and the nunnery endeavoured to form an independent and self supporting community. Much like the male monasteries the Nuns life was devoted to worship and prayer, living under the same codes of chastity, humility and loyalty as their male counterparts. However the Nunnery was the only place where medieval women were offered some freedom. They were able to elect their own abbess of prioress and this was one of the few positions of authority that Medieval women held. 

Life in the Nunnery was for self-contained and isolated from the outside world as it was its own farm, shelter, hospital and school. The nuns were involved heavily in charity such as healing the sick and feeding the poor who came to their doors. The convents and nunneries were the only source of education for women, although the knowledge the nuns were given with was carefully screened by the Church.

Matthew Bull, Louise Giorgini, Tekla Kirby, Georgia Maling, Amandine Martel, and Amber Waring-Thomson.

Question for Blog Discussion:

Interestingly enough, in spite of the Church’s bad vision of women, it fostered improvements in the status/condition of women in the middle ages, what are they ?