Defamed and defended, attacked and praised, caricatured as Eve and venerated as the Virgin, women in late medieval England (and Europe more generally) were both fully human and profoundly other. Not surprisingly, the gender ideologies that sought to account for them abounded with contradictions and ambiguities. Yet, in one respect there was no contradiction or ambiguity in Europe’s long-standing traditions of misogyny and misogamy: women were assumed to be inherently inferior to men and properly guided by men. As Bracton baldly put it, ‘Women differ from men in many respects, for their position is inferior to men’.23 It was within this never-questioned framework that the gender rules of late medieval England took hold.
As Alcuin Blamires has shown, the literary expression of medieval misogyny drew on a remarkably small number of biblical, ancient and patristic authorities. It was so predictable in content and form that it constituted, in Blamires’s view, an intellectual game in which authors could ‘show off their literary paces’.24 Yet misogyny was more than just a literary pastime, for, as has been shown for medieval brewsters and prostitutes, Englishwomen directly suffered from misogynous ideas. Because women were perceived as naturally greedy, oversexed and untrustworthy, male brewers came to be preferred to brewsters, and in part because of this preference, commercial brewing changed from a trade of women to a trade of men. Similarly, because all women were thought to use sex for personal gain, the prostitute was understood, in the words of Ruth Karras, as ‘simply the market-oriented version of a more general phenomenon’.25
Late medieval English culture was not devoid of defences and even praise of women: the perfect (albeit dead) maiden of the Pearl poet; Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women; and the many ways in which the Virgin was venerated in both religious and popular venues. Yet the full meanings of these representations are difficult to assess. The Virgin embodied human fallibility as well as saintly perfection, challenge as well as conformity, active power as well as passive receptivity. Courtly love was so ambivalent in its treatment of women that some scholars today understand it as praising women but others consider it a particularly virulent form of misogyny. Even the intentions of individual authors remain much debated. Some scholars see Chaucer’s creation of such characters as the Wife of Bath as indicating his enormous sympathy for women, but others argue that he harboured a deep anti-feminism.
For women, misogyny and misogamy combined with uncertain praise to create slippery ideals of femininity. Even virginity was not wholly positive, since a virgin’s ‘masculine’ self-control distanced her from the female gender. She was admired as a virago but still viewed as a woman. As a result, monks and priests approached their holy sisters with ‘a sense of unease’, seeing them more as threats to their chastity than inspiration for their souls. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, many new orders refused or failed to accommodate women religious, and by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many female monasteries were more marked by what Eileen Power has called the ‘three D’s (dances, dresses, dogs)’ than by devotional attentiveness. But as Marilyn Oliva has shown, even then some English nuns managed to construct lives of religious and personal vitality within their convent walls.26
In any case, by the later middle ages virginity had lost its unquestioned preeminence as the ideal for women, and married women grew more able to stake claims to holiness. Margery Kempe, proud daughter of a mayor of Lynn and author of the first autobiography written in English, often strikes modern readers as more egotistic than mystical, but her style of piety - extensive learning acquired through sermons and conversations, chaste marriage, frequent confession, multiple pilgrimages, ascetic discipline and unending meditation - was not hers alone. In pursuing piety while neither virgin nor nun, she was joined, among others, by vowesses, by beguines and other quasi-nuns, and by other women who sought holiness through mingling contemplation and action.27 Virginity remained an important ideal in late medieval England (Kempe herself worried that she was not a virgin), but it was supplemented by other viable and vital paths to holiness.
Not all women devoted themselves to piety, whether through virginity or the mixed life, and ordinary laywomen also confronted ambivalent ideas about how they should behave. Uncertainty began early. As Kim Phillips has shown, clerical writers thought that a man most nearly achieved perfection in his middle age, but that the period between puberty and marriage - that is, maidenhood - was a woman’s perfect age. If so, this perfection was fraught with mixed messages. Although singlewomen’s chastity was valued, their marriage was actively encouraged (in, for example, the charitable provision of dowries for the poor). Although singlewomen were expected to admire men, they were also to beware of them - so that they were to desire heterosexual pleasure, but to delay it until marriage. Although singlewomen were often encouraged and sometimes forced to leave their parents’ homes, they were expected to maintain childlike dependence by living under the authority of a master or mistress. Finally, although singleness was associated with youth, a significant minority of people never married - probably about 10 per cent in the fifteenth century. Discouraged from active sexuality, oriented towards marriage as a final destination, and aware that some would never reach that goal, young women negotiated a very difficult ideological terrain.28
Marriage did not clear the field, since wives - expected to be highly competent but properly dependent - were also given a difficult brief. On the one hand, passivity was not an option: all wives worked, whether they were gentlewomen managing estates or countrywomen weeding fields. This productive work was always coordinated with reproductive labour (raising children, maintaining the home and preparing meals), but the latter did not necessarily dictate the former. Griselda, whose characterizations by Boccaccio and Chaucer emphasized a cultural ideal of wifely passivity and obedience, was simply a not very practical option in a world where husbands needed competent and active partners. On the other hand, however, wifely assertion was to be tempered with deference; the ideal wife stood behind her husband, helping him with her labour but never intimidating him with her competence and seldom working independently of him. (The customs of some towns allowed wives, acting as femmes soles, to run businesses separate from those of their husbands, but such provisions did more to protect the assets of husbands than to encourage wifely independence.) Ready to step into her husband’s shoes if necessary but never threatening to do so, an ideal wife had to follow a narrow and difficult path. The failure of real women to measure up to this ideal was a strong theme in late medieval culture, as seen in such media as marginalia of wives beating husbands, poems about complaining wives and songs of marital disharmony.
In a similar way, wives had to balance carefully their influence over their husbands - moving men towards wise decisions, while not making decisions themselves. Wifely influence was legitimized by stories of how the Virgin interceded for sinners and how queens softened their husbands’ anger (of the last, particularly notable were Philippa of Hainault’s intervention on behalf of the burghers of Calais and Anne of Bohemia’s pleas for the citizenry of London). The influence of wives offered women avenues of power, however indirect, and it could also serve the interests of their husbands (for whom wifely influence usefully complemented manly authority). But it was a highly contested arena of female power. Was a wife’s influence helpful or overbearing? Was a husband’s attentiveness to his wife’s opinions a sign of wisdom or weakness? In a world that both celebrated and feared the ‘persuasive voices’ of wives, only one thing was clear: an ideal wife spoke publicly through her husband or spoke not at all.29
The cultural patronage of wives - and widows too - was a somewhat less fraught role, at least for those few women wealthy enough to offer encouragement to authors, artists, clerics and educators. Anne of Bohemia transported books, Bohemian illustrators and vernacular translations of the gospels to England when she married Richard II in 1382. She also brought her own ideas, inspiring Chaucer to write The Legend of Good Women, which he dedicated to her. Through such patronage, elite laywomen advanced political agendas, satisfied personal interests, expressed religious piety, educated their children and entertained their courts. Female patrons were sometimes judged by contemporaries to be more prodigal than generous, but patronage was a generally acceptable form of public influence for women.30
Patronage was particularly accessible to elite widows, who were more likely than other women to have disposable assets which they directly controlled. Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, was a great benefactor of Cambridge University, but it was only after the death of her third husband that she was able to fund her greatest gift, the foundation of Christ’s College. Yet for most women their proper role in widowhood was as uncertain as their proper roles before and during marriage. Widows were more substitutes for their dead husbands than independent businesswomen or landowners. They could be valued by their children or disliked for the delayed inheritances their dower rights could cause. They were encouraged by church and custom to remain chaste, but they were often pressured by lords or friends to remarry. Like singlewomen and wives, widows had to pick their way through an ideological maze of contradictory pressures and expectations.
Medieval gender ideologies, then, offered women a confusing prospect. The same was true for men who also themselves faced a multitude of ideas about how a man should behave. Although a relatively new field of study, research on ideals of masculinity has already begun to delineate the many different masculinities of medieval Europe, with variations by age, marital status, region, occupation and religion. It has also shown that there were many men - real as well as fictional - who fell short of masculine ideals. Prominent among these were late medieval clerics who, in the opinion of R. N. Swanson, might have constituted a third gender of ‘emas-culine’ men. Yet despite these diverse masculinities, the primary attribute of masculinity - control over self and others - might have been, compared to gender rules for women, relatively clear and unconflicted. If so, the challenge of achieving masculinity was more striking than the uncertainties of its objective. Or, to put it another way, medieval gender ideologies might have offered men a more fearsome task and women a more confusing one.31
World History
