The Fourth Estate

A History of Women in the Middle Ages

Shulamith Shahar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134394203
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Did women really constitute a `fourth estate' in medieval society and, if so, in what sense? In this wide-ranging study Shulamith Shahar considers this and the whole question of the varying attitudes to women and their status in western Europe between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries.

1

Introduction

There has never been a book about the ‘History of men in the Middle Ages’, nor is it likely that there ever will be one. But apart from the fact that far too many books about the Middle Ages make no mention of the part played by the women, leaving a lacuna in the description of medieval society, is there any justification for a special study to be made of the history of women in the High and Late Middle Ages? In the extremely hierarchical medieval society the social classes differed greatly from each other in their legal rights, economic circumstances and modes of living. Was there any condition that was shared by all women in medieval society? Nowadays, despite the remaining diversity in the status and way of life of women in the different social classes, some sociologists have defined them collectively as a ‘minority group’, although not necessarily a numerical one; others, rather more reasonably, use the term ‘marginal social group’.¹ But let us discard the terminology of modern sociologists and examine the contemporary definitions that were applied in the Middle Ages.

From the beginning of the eleventh century onward, contemporary writers repeatedly describe society as made up of three classes (ordines) – Worshippers, Warriors and Workers (oratores, bellatores, laboratores). This triune society is depicted as horizontal, purposeful and harmonious. Each class fulfils a certain function which the other two need, as it needs theirs. Together they comprise the single, harmonious, Christian society which expresses the divine will. This description does not include a specific reference to women. But from the twelfth century on, with the great social and economic transformations that marked the age, the triple society, though not entirely discarded, was partially replaced by a new popular description. It continued to express mainly an ideal and finally also a political conception that was realized in the representative assemblies, while the new description was based on a division into ‘socio-professional’ classes, to use the phrase coined by J. Le Goff.² To designate these classes contemporary writers used the terms conditio and status, in place of ordo as in the triple society.

The ‘literature of estates’, as historians sometimes call the writings about the ‘socio-professional’ classes, does not present a uniform description of society, but there are two features that occur throughout. The old, horizontally-balanced division has been replaced by a vertical one, reflecting a human rather than a divine order. Secondly, the old ordines were subdivided on a ‘socio-professional’ basis. The Worshippers are divided into the Regular and the Secular clergy, the latter being graded hierarchically from the pope down through the cardinals and all the lower ranks, to the parochial priests at the bottom of the ladder. Warriors are divided into dukes, counts, knights and sergeants. The class of Workers is made up of free peasants, serfs, merchants, notaries, physicians, various artisans, beggars and thieves. (As Max Weber put it, in the city every activity becomes a profession, including beggary, crime and prostitution.) Each of the above-listed trades or titles have particular faults and sins peculiar to them.

In these descriptions of society, and in other writings from the twelfth century onwards, women are almost always categorized separately. They are described as a distinct class, subdivided according to their social-economic, rather than ‘socio-professional’ position. Otherwise, they are subdivided according to their personal, i.e. marital, status, a division never applied to men. This may be illustrated in several ways. The thirteenth-century manual for preachers, De Eruditione Praedicatorum, by the Dominican Humbert de Romans, has a separate section on preaching to women. The first chapters of this section are devoted to nuns, having different sermons for each order. These are followed by a chapter for lay women (ad omnes mulieres), followed by separate chapters for noble ladies, wealthy bourgeoises, poor country women, maidservants and whores.³ An example of women being described as a distinct category, subdivided according to their marital status, is to be found in Etienne Fougères’ Livre de Manières, written in the second half of the twelfth century. The author deals separately with maidens, married women and widows and the proper way for them to conduct themselves.⁴

Sometimes the division is based on both the ‘socio-professional or social-economic and the marital status. This was done in the fifteenth-century Dance of Death, which is documented in wall-paintings and in poetry. Here women, as a distinct category, were added to the Dance, which had previously comprised only male figures. Among the female figures dragged along by the corpse are a queen, an abbess, a nun, a pedlar and a sister of mercy, showing a subdivision based on occupation or title. In addition, there are also women in various familial, biological and psychological phases – the virgin, the beloved, the bride, the newly-married and the pregnant woman.⁵

Being thus ranged together as a class, women, like the other classes, have special faults and sins attributed to them. These are sometimes subdivided to match the internal division of the class, and sometimes given as applying to the feminine class as a whole. Among the faults and sins attributed to women as such are: vanity, pride, greed, promiscuity, gluttony, drunkenness, bad temper, fickleness, and more. The authors also declare that women must be kept out of public office, must not serve as judges nor wield any kind of authority, may not take part in councils or public assemblies, and must devote themselves to their domestic functions. A good woman is one who loves and serves her husband and brings up her children.⁶ In the manuals for confessors, too, a special section was usually devoted to the characteristic sins to be expected in women.

In contrast to the inequality between the condition of men and women in the temporal Church, as well as in society and the state, Christianity viewed the sexes as equal with regard to grace and salvation: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus (Epistle to the Galatians 3:28). Nevertheless, a twelfth-century ecclesiastical author, Abbot Hugh of the Flavigny monastery, in describing the metaphysical hierarchy, placed women separately at the bottom of his list. His celestial hierarchy went as follows: Peter and Paul, the other Apostles, the saintly hermits, the perfect monks living in communities, good bishops, good laymen, women.⁷

Like the homiletics and the works dealing with the hierarchy of grace, the ‘estate literature’ was written by men. In his Canterbury Tales Chaucer has the Wife of Bath speak the following words:

By god, if wommen hadde writen stories,

As clerkes han with-inne hir oratories,

They wolde han writen of men more wikkednesse

Than all the mark of Adam may redresse.⁸

A reasonable asumption. But in reality, when a woman in the Middle Ages did write on social and moral questions, she too defined women as a class unto themselves. Christine de Pisan, who, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century wrote many books of poetry, history and morality, and who was aware of the fact that the image of women had been created by men, was also the author of ‘The Body Politic’ (Corps de Policie). In this treatise on political morality she discusses the classes that comprise the political body and their respective duties, making no mention of women. To them, she devoted a special volume entitled ‘The Book of the Three Virtues’ (Le Livre des Trois Vertus), or ‘The Treasure of the Ladies’ City’ (Le Trèsor de la Citè des Dames), as it is called in certain manuscripts. It is a parallel work to ‘The Body Politic’, dealing with the duties of women in the different classes, and also includes precepts for maidens, married women and widows.⁹

It would seem, therefore, that most medieval writers treated women as a distinct class, thereby providing the justification for the actual separate study of the history of women in the Middle Ages. This, however, is only the theoretical background. The social scheme wherein women are a distinct class is part of the theory about woman in the Middle Ages and of her described image. It remains to be seen to what extent theory matched reality, and whether the generality of women did in fact bear the distinguishing marks of a medieval order with its own law (jus). We have seen that contemporary writers were aware of the special situation of women in the different classes, and expressed it in the subcategories into which they divided them. Needless to say, if we wish to discover the functions performed by women, the rights they enjoyed and the discrimination to which they were subjected, we shall have to study each class separately. If we wish to visualize their lives, we shall have to deal with the way of life of women in each and every social class. We shall have to study the mode of living, privileges and deprivations of a noblewoman, and compare them with those of a nobleman, and then do the same with the townswoman and the peasant.

Moreover, women were denied access to one of the routes by which men of the lower classes could rise, namely, education at a church school, admission into the service of the Church and an ecclesiastical career. In the words of Philippe de Novare: ‘The Church often made it possible for poor men to become great churchmen and rise to wealth and honour.’¹⁰ To say that it happened often is an exaggeration, but it did happen. Women, on the other hand, had no such option: the secular Church was closed to them, and only the upper class took the veil.

While some writers stressed the economic differences between women in their respective classes, others laid emphasis on their marital status. It was also for this reason that in registers and censuses the marital status of women was invariably noted: if a woman was single nothing was appended; if married, her husband's name; or it was noted that she was a widow. This was never done where men were concerned. (Had the registers shown the widowed state in men, too, it would have helped modern demographers to determine the relative life-expectancy of men and women in the Middle Ages!) Modern European languages have retained special titles for women of different marital status – Miss, Mrs; Mlle, Mme; etc., while no such distinction exists for men, suggesting that to this day the public view of women is more affected by their marital status than the view of men.¹¹ During the Middle Ages this was not merely a matter of opinion: the legal status and real rights of the married woman differed from those of the unmarried and widowed. This held for all classes of society, as we shall see. One illustration may suffice here: according to the ordinances of the lepers’ house at Amiens, a patient who called a married serving woman a prostitute was sentenced to twenty days’ penance, while one calling an unmarried serving woman by the same name was sentenced to only ten …¹²

There is no doubt that all the subdivisions, social and marital, existed in reality to a great extent. But no general model or image fits reality perfectly, nor do they in this case. Moreover, in the Middle Ages the law did not fully reflect the real status of some women. The question whether women were in fact a distinct class will be dealt with throughout this volume. Here we shall propose only one example to illustrate the disparity between the situation as described in the ‘estate literature’ and in reality. It will serve to point out the difference between reality, on the one hand, and literary images, theoretical models and even the law, on the other. We have seen that in his categorization of all lay women Humbert de Romans lists noble ladies, wealthy bourgeoises, maid-servants in the towns, poor women in the villages and prostitutes. In the fifteenth-century Dance of Death the feminine category is represented by a queen, an abbess, a nun, a pedlar and a sister of mercy – as against some forty trades and noble ranks among the men. Setting aside the wealthy bourgeoises, who did not engage in any trade, townswomen would thus seem to have worked only as servants, pedlars, sisters of mercy or prostitutes. But the thirteenth-century ‘Book of Trades’ (Livre des Métiers) by Etienne Boileau, which contains the rules of all the guilds of Paris at the time, shows that out of a hundred occupations women engaged in eighty-six! A similar picture of a broad spectrum of occupations engaged in by women emerges also from the rules and registers of guilds in other Western European cities at that time, and the part played by women in medieval industry may be the most fascinating aspect of the history of women in medieval cities.

Similar if not greater discrepancies are found between the image of women in literary works and their position in actuality. As F. L. Lucas, in his book on the Greek tragedy, points out:

It remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in Athena's city, where women were kept in almost Oriential suppression as odalisques or drudges, the stage should have produced figures like Clytemnestra and Cassandra, Atossa and Antigone, Phaedra and Medea, and all the other heroines who dominate play after play of the ‘misogynist’ Euripides … the paradox of this world, where in real life a respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street, and yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man, has never yet been satisfactorily explained.’¹³

Greek drama deals with the human soul and its eternal verities by means of psychological and social archetypes; it does not reflect contemporary realities, political, social or domestic, with regard to women. The medieval courtly romance does not plumb the depths of the human soul as does classical Greek drama, but it does not hold up a mirror to contemporary life either. The only aspect it reflects realistically is the lifestyle of the nobility. Above all, it expresses an ideal, as A. Auerbach puts it in his Mimesis:

The courtly romance is not reality shaped and set forth by art, but an escape into fable and fairy tale. From the very beginning, at the height of its cultural florescence, this ruling class adopted an ethos and an ideal which concealed its real function. And it proceeded to describe its own life in extra-historical terms, as an absolute aesthetic configuration without practical purpose.¹⁴

Courtly lyrical poetry, which exalted the woman, had even less to do with the realities of life. We must therefore beware of deriving unequivocal assumptions about the position of women in the aristocracy from their image in the courtly romance; we shall return to this subject further on.

Urban literature, which was primarily moralistic and satirical, showed greater realism and faithfulness in its depiction of the relative positions of men and women in urban society. Neither tragic nor sublime, it actually portrayed townsmen's conscious attitude towards women. Whether a tale with a moral, a broad jest, a conventional piece depicting the ‘class type’, or a more original work portraying an individual character, whose author's views and tastes do not necessarily match those of his public, it does serve to fill gaps in our picture of woman's place in that society. As we shall see, this literature abounds in expressions of hatred for women. However, it must be kept in mind that such manifestations, either in comic or serious-realistic writings, do not necessarily indicate an inferior status. In the second half of the twentieth century, when women in the western world have won, if not full equality, at least a more nearly equal legal status than in any known historical society, misogynistic literature has been written as vituperative as anything in the urban literature of the Middle Ages.¹⁵

We have not referred to all the literary works of the age that dealt with women from one viewpoint or another. In the mid-twelfth century, for example, Bernard Silvestris wrote a cosmogonical poem entitled ‘About the Universe’ (De Universitate Mundi), described by E. R. Curtius as a combination of speculative cosmogony and a hymn to sexuality. In this poem, which is dominated by the cult of fertility, the Noys, a female emanation of divinity, plays an essential role. She is entreated by Natura, i.e., the mother of all creation and the inexhaustible womb (mater generationis, uterus indefessus). Natura governs reproduction and the cycle of life. She gives form to matter, places the stars in their or...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• The Fourth Estate
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Public and Legal Rights
• 3 Nuns
• 4 Married Women
• 5 Women in the Nobility
• 6 Townswomen
• 7 Women in the Peasantry
• 8 Witches and the Heretical Movements
• Notes
• Index