WOMEN

WOMEN

1. The 'OTHER'

   • Stuard - C12th, church writings seeing women as an other
     • Increasing misogyny and violation of Christian belief that all souls are equal before God
   • Vincent of Beauvais' attempt to control women's impact upon society
     • Church's growing fears of women's drives and impulses
   • Stuard -ecclesiastical hierarchy grew more remote from women
     • Encountered greater difficulty in comprehending women who participated in society
     • Only at ease with women in private, domestic environ or Mary
   • Canon law and civil statute increasingly encroached on women's life
     • Lessening of the public activity of women
     • Lower place in ecclesiastical opinion
     • Fewer roles in guild organisations
   • Stuard - C12th watershed
     • Between the greater opportunity for women in early medieval times and the more confining circumstances of life in the later Middle Ages
   • CHURCH
     • Existence of religious and semi-religious communities of women posed problems
       • BEGUINES
         • Urban movement
         • Perceived as heretical
           • Made no polemical demands on clerics and did not stress to the same extent the merit of the priesthood
           • Supposed Albigensian affiliations - namesake
         • Objectives of chastity and renunciation of worldly goods
         • AGAINST natural order of society
           • Chose to abandon noble/ rich backgrounds and turned to a 'lesser' way of life
           • Poverty and chastity represented a moral and social renovation
             • A spiritual renewal through the adoption of a new lifestyle – the vita apostolica.
         • E. Power - prominent part women played in heretic movements
           • Manifestation of their discontent with their lot in the world.
     • Women in clerical eyes contributed to indiscipline - Bolton
     • Celibate priests increasingly portrayed Eve as sinful temptress
       • Men who aspired to the spiritual life should avoid women altogether
       • An active, negative force within society, enticing men into the material realm of sin
         • Farmer
     • 1210 Innocent III
       • Forbade abbesses from 'clerical' roles of preaching, blessing nuns and hearing confession
     • Aquinas - assumptions of procreation
       • Procreation understood in terms of active and passive powers
         • Man the active, woman the passive
       • Some functions in life were nobler than others
         • Specifically male functions of spirituality and the warrior caste
       • Active power more nobler than the passive.
   • SECULAR
     • C11th rise of primogeniture
       • Serving to protect the power and wealth of the nobility by consolidating landed property
       • Dowries fell increasingly under the husband's control
     • ORDERIC VITALIS
       • General moral decline among the Norman knights caused by a feminisation of culture
         • In men becoming more female, subverting the gender hierarchy, and therefore undertones of disorder - POWER
     • Chansons de geste and accounts from knightly circles emphasised the edification of daughters by beating
     • Most works of male authorship
       • Assumed prerogative of author to examine and judge womankind
       • Trained in reasoned argument
         • Aquinas' scholasticism
     • Rise of the Universities
       • Women denied entrance
       • Provided increased educational opportunities for MEN
         • MOORE
           • Education a badge of office from which to assert power
             • Knowledge of the weaker sex
     • Cosmetics; 'the devil's soap
       • Echoed Tertullian
         • "those women sin against God who annoint their faces with creams, stain cheeks with rouge or lengthen eyelashes with antimony"
         • Polluting their face; God's creation and hence provoked clerical disgust
   • Wei - men and women created in binary opposition
     • Women naturally inferior to men and thus should be subject to men - POWER relationship
     • Aquinas - such subjection is domestic and in which the ruler manages his wife for her advantage and benefit

2. Medieval Bifurcation

   • Spiritual or profane beings
   • Divine Mary or sinful Eve
   • Women = matter
     • Chaotic and formless
     • Women imperfect and incomplete version of man - opposite sex as the receiver and inferior instrument
   • Men = form
     • Life-giving principle

3. MARRIAGE

   • Peter Damian C11th
     • Hated all sexuality and barely allowed marriage to be a cover to sin
   • C12th onwards - union of marriage sacramental
     • Sexual union the essence of marriage
   • Church's view
     • Monogamy for Life
     • Women the physically orient aspect of men and rational
       • Reason should subdue the passions - husbands should rule over their wives
       • SAID
     • Served as a concession to the weakness of the Flesh
     • Conjugal debt - equality
       • Yet often used by theologians to depict the weakness of the female flesh - her passive role means she was perceived to instigate sex
   • Thomas Chobham 1215
     • Eccentric view - Farmer
     • Wives should employ persuasion, feminine enticements to influence and correct the moral and economic behaviour of their husbands
       • Women to be preachers to their husbands, because no priest is able to soften the heart of a man the way his wife can
       • Wife's duty to prevent her husband from sinning
     • Husband should exhibit the respect owed as to part of his own body
       • Taken from Genesis - Eve made from Adam's rib - an equal
       • He should employ greater diligence in guarding his wife than in guarding any earthly possession
     • Remarkable responsibilities for wives
       • Moral persuasion
       • Role as an independent almsgiver
   • Disobedient wives subject to correction by force
     • Canon Law specifically allowed wife-beating
   • Important as wife and mother
     • Wielding practical authority in her sphere in the home and as her husband’s representative during his absence
   • Dowering of poor girls one of the recognised forms of medieval charity
   • Parisian theologians - gender difference due to women created to help man in procreation - Wei
   • Wei - creation from the man’s side indicated a measure of equality in the relationship
     • That she was created from him at all brought hierarchy back into play

4. Historians agreed secular role and theological image of women declined C11th - C13th

   • Farmer
   • Ideas about women were formed by the clerkly order, usually celibate, and on the other by a narrow caste
     • Nobles saw their women as ornamental assets, and subordinating them to the interests of the land - E. Power

5. Positive Image

   • C11th and C12th monks wrote that noblemen's generosity stemmed from the "inspiration, admonition or request of the wife"
   • Orderic - existence of pious wives and feminisation of culture saw women exercise economic influence through their husbands
   • Chivalry
     • Cult of the Lady romantic counterpart to the cult of the Virgin
     • Romantic worship of the lady is for the knight as important as worship to God - E. Power
       • Even in the class in which it was promulgated it was often little more than a veneer - E. Power
     • BUT limited to aristocracy - chivalry didn't filter down
     • Courtly love and troubadours
       • New politeness principles in higher society - Great ladies the main beneficiaries and the main clientele of the literature and art inspired by courtly love.
   • Clearest reaction against prevailing misogynism can be found in the literature - tales praising women
     • Christine de Pisan - the first female 'man of letters'
       • Poems she composed complaining of the fashionable habit of dispraising women and attacks particularly 'Le Roman de la Rose'