A Medieval Woman's Companion

Women's Lives in the European Middle Ages

Susan Signe Morrison

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781785700804
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

What have a deaf nun, the mother of the first baby born to Europeans in North America, and a condemned heretic to do with one another? They are among the virtuous virgins, marvelous maidens, and fierce feminists of the Middle Ages who trail-blazed paths for women today. Without those first courageous souls who worked in fields dominated by men, women might not have the presence they currently do in professions such as education, the law, and literature. Focusing on women from Western Europe between c. 300 and 1500 CE in the medieval period and richly carpeted with detail, A Medieval Woman's Companion offers a wealth of information about real medieval women who are now considered vital for understanding the Middle Ages in a full and nuanced way. Short biographies of 20 medieval women illustrate how they have anticipated and shaped current concerns, including access to education; creative emotional outlets such as art, theater, romantic fiction, and music; marriage and marital rights; fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, contraception and gynecology; sex trafficking and sexual violence; the balance of work and family; faith; and disability. Their legacy abides until today in attitudes to contemporary women that have their roots in the medieval period. The final chapter suggests how 20th and 21st century feminist and gender theories can be applied to and complicated by medieval women's lives and writings. Doubly marginalized due to gender and the remoteness of the time period, medieval women's accomplishments are acknowledged and presented in a way that readers can appreciate and find inspiring. Ideal for high school and college classroom use in courses ranging from history and literature to women's and gender studies, an accompanying website with educational links, images, downloadable curriculum guide, and interactive blog will be made available at the time of publication.

PART I

PIONEERS

Frederick Stuart Church’s ‘The Viking’s Daughter’ (1887). The nineteenth century saw a revival of interest in all things medieval (gift of John Gellatly 1929.6.19. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY)

CHAPTER 1

Gudrun Osvifsdottir (c. 970–1050)

VIKING VIXEN

Can a bad girl become a good girl? This Icelandic woman, of Viking stock, took men’s hearts by storm. Jealous, murderous, demanding, she ultimately became the first Icelandic nun.

Who were the Vikings? They were Scandinavians who wandered by ship to attack, plunder, colonize, settle, capture humans for the slave trade, and assimilate in areas as far-reaching as Russia, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, Canada, and even Constantinople (now called Istanbul). They settled in Ireland, England, Orkney in northern Scotland, the Faroe Islands between Ireland and Iceland, and the Isle of Man. The Vikings were popularly thought of as men, but women travelled with them too, as wives, slaves, and adventurers. The Viking Age lasted roughly 800–1100 CE; thereafter, Iceland was settled and Christianized. During this period Iceland transformed from being the Wild West of the North Atlantic to conforming to many habits and beliefs of medieval Christian Europe.

Written in prose with occasional poetic interludes and telling of the stories of the settlers of Iceland, the sagas depicted adventures with tough, forthright, and sometimes violent women. These lively narratives took place between the late ninth century with the arrival of the first pagan colonists and 1262 when Icelanders were forced to accept the ruler of Norway as their master. How much we can trust the sagas about historical truth has been long debated. The sagas played out in an imaginative space conjured up by Icelanders several hundred years after the action is set. While some things were unlikely (ghosts and trolls), other aspects, such as genealogy, legal disputes, and familial strife, were based on fact. Thus most historians turn to the sagas for understanding medieval Iceland. While sagas had their roots in oral stories passed down over the centuries, the details of political rule and mayhem make them useful for understanding who was in power and how men and women interacted with one another.

Richly textured with bold women who seem familiar to us in the twenty-first century, the sagas argued how females were crucial to the founding of Iceland, a newly settled country. Several sources, including the Laxdaela Saga, tells of the 13 female land claimants numbered among the 400 original settlers. Ninety other women accompanied their husbands. Unn the Deep-Minded founded a farm with her vast wealth. Close to death, she cleverly hosted a party where all the attendants had to bear witness to her intention to leave her property to her grandson. These observers were bound to uphold the desires of this “exceptional woman”.¹ Worthy of the most dignified of funerals, she “was placed in a ship in the mound, along with a great deal of riches, and the mound closed.”² Archeologists have located such ship burials, like that of Oseberg in Norway in which the skeletons of two women were discovered. People were typically buried with grave goods, items important to the deceased in life and beyond. Physical evidence from a Viking settlement on Orkney includes a pit with a young woman and her newborn child, buried with wool combs and other domestic items needed in the world to come. Jewels and brooches festoon the grave, decorated with glass, beads, silver, gold, and amber. Some elaborate burial sites suggest that women could be major leaders in their communities. While women typically were buried with women’s items, having to do with spinning for example, there are cases where they were buried with male-identified items like weapons.

Gudrun Osvifsdottir, the dominant figure of the Laxdaela Saga, enacted vengeance with a bloody outcome. Gudrun “was the most beautiful woman ever to have grown up in Iceland, and no less clever than she was good-looking”.³ She married four times starting at the age of 15. Her first husband, not to her liking, slapped her, to which Gudrun responded, “Fine rosy colour in her cheeks is just what every woman needs, if she is to look her best”.⁴ This understated response carried a sharpness fulfilled when later she plotted for a divorce. A key year was 1000 when the Althing (Parliament) decided that pagan Iceland should convert to Christianity. This new religion highlighted two forms of marriage: the Germanic model, by which the marriage was a bridge to secure property and alliance, and the Christian model of man and woman consenting to unite. Married partners were encouraged to stay in their same social class. Often unions were intended to help patch up troubles between warring families by joining the son and daughter of feuding parties. A father could not force a girl to marry who wanted to be a nun – though with only two nunneries in Iceland, she might not have had many options. Though they were still disadvantaged politically as women, older widows had the most power among women in Icelandic society. Thorgerd, widowed but still young enough to have more children, “was free to decide for herself”⁶ concerning a second marriage. Christianity attempted to control looser pagan ways concerning relationships. Sometimes secret marriages were valid if consent were proven.

Another Gudrun

The Poetic Edda tells the foundational mythology of Scandinavian and Germanic cultures. Beloved by the hero Sigurd, the mythological Gudrun remarried after her husband’s murder. After her new husband, Atli the Hun, slaughtered Gudrun’s brothers, she secretly killed her sons in retaliation. Once Atli had feasted, she told him, “You are digesting, proud one, slaughtered human meat …[Y]ou will not see again … the bounteous princes … cantering their horses.”⁵

Divorce was relatively easy to get – if you were too poor to care for your children, if a husband planned to take his wife’s property out of the country, or if one spouse committed violence towards the other. Women kept economic independence in marriage, yet their power and influence varied. A woman named Vigdis was furious at her husband who had doublecrossed her fugitive kinsman. Angry, she took the money pouch filled with his treacherous payoff and “swung the purse up into his face, striking him on the nose which bled so that drops of blood fell to the ground”.⁷ Her husband managed to swindle her out of her rightful claim to half the property. She took with her “nothing but her own belongings”.⁸

Gudrun met her soul mate, the dreamy Kjartan, at the hot-springs. Taken with her “as she was both clever and good with words”,⁹ he nonetheless had to go off for the coming-of-age trip all young Icelandic men made: to Norway to meet the king. Occupied by Norwegians who fled the dominance of King Harald Fairhair (ruled late ninth–tenth centuries), Icelanders wanted to have their own land and freedom, though at a cost. The typical male Icelander would return to Norway in his youth to curry favor with royalty, make connections, and – if he were lucky – make money in trade and goods. When Kjartan told Gudrun he had to make this trip, she gave this shocking response: “I want to go with you this summer, and by taking me you can make up for deciding this so hastily, for it’s not Iceland that I love”.¹⁰ He pointed out that she could not. No woman had ever done that – certainly no woman who was unmarried (though once divorced and once widowed). Kjartan asked her to wait three years for him. She refused. Kjartan and his best friend, Bolli, went to Norway. When Christianity comes to pagan Iceland, Kjartan does not. His delay in returning allowed his rival to vie for Gudrun. Men competed over the scarce women who, in turn, could demand more rights than they had had in Norway. While in Norway early law permitted the infanticide of deformed babies or females, Icelandic daughters were more valued. Children were typically named according to their father. Boys had ‘son’ after their father’s name as in Bardi Gudmundarson (son of Gudmundar). Girls had ‘dottir’ (daughter) after their father’s name, as in Jorunn Thorbergsdottir (daughter of Thorberg). If the father died while the child was still an infant, she or he could take the mother’s name.

Bolli, who secretly loved Gudrun, suggested that Kjartan and the Norwegian princess were romantically involved, whereupon Gudrun lost her sparkle and married Bolli. Yet “Gudrun showed little affection for Bolli”.¹¹ When Kjartan returned still a bachelor, he opted for the lovely Hrefna who tried on a gold studded head-dress originally intended for Gudrun. Kjartan said, “To my mind the head-dress suits you very well, Hrefna. I expect the best thing for me would be to own both the head-dress and the comely head it rests upon”.¹² While the sagas did not present love in a fanciful glow, they suggested deep emotional ties between men and women. Sometimes romance provoked poetic verse. In another saga, the lovely Helga floated to Greenland on a fragment of frozen ice and fell in love with Skeggi. The affair ended at her father’s insistence and she mourned. “Strife eats my soul … I gape open with grief. / I speak sorrow to myself”.¹³

In Laxdaela Saga, Gudrun and Hrefna compete for who could possess the seat of highest honor at the dining table. The golden head-dress disappeared, with suspicion falling on Gudrun. Tensions rose until Gudrun gave her husband Bolli a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Website and blog
• Introduction
• Part I: Pioneers
• Part II: Fearless Females
• Part III: Women of Wisdom
• Part IV: Non-Conformists
• Part V: “My Most Honored Ladies”
• Part VI: “Experience is Right Enough for Me”
• Glossary
• Bibliography