Gender Roles in Medieval Society

1
Gender Roles in Medieval Society

• Marriage practices varied between Italy and
  England (even within England) from the 11th to
  14th centuries.
• Marriages practices varied based on social and
  economic (birth) status gentry (about 1 of the
  population) had different practices than the
  common class

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• In general, most women had no public social role.
• Marsilius of Padua in estate lists defines the
  people of the estate as everybody except the
  children, slaves, aliens, and women.
• Since the role was overwhelmingly private, it was
  asocial, internal, and emotional. The only way
  these women had to define themselves was in
  relation to their husbands. 92 of women married
  at this time.
• The only exception was women with religious
  callings. They could use service to Christ as a
  means of self-fulfillment.

3

• In England the nuclear family becomes the social
  unit, unlike in Italy or southern Europe where it
  was still more of a clan system.
• The Church taught by the beginning of the 12th
  century that marriage was not validated by a
  service but by the consent of two parties.
• Words of the present
• Words of the future
• The Church wanted to be assured that these
  agreements were not coerced, especially as the
  legal age for girls was twelve and for boys
  fourteen.
• The two could not be too closely related
• The two could not already be married

4

• Parents did not give up authority easily, so
  preferable marriages were public ones
• The banns were read for three weeks prior to the
  ceremony.
• The service was performed at the church door.
• The property arrangements were made at the church
  door, as priests were among the few educated
  enough to actually write the contract.

5

• Exceptions to this were the nobility where the
  primary concern tended to be transmission of
  patrimony
• Children could be betrothed at birth
• Children could be married by proxy
• These practices were motivated out of the fear of
  the fathers death, which would leave the child
  as ward of and the property at the discretion of
  the lord, who could, in turn, sell the marriage
  rights.

6

• There was tension in the conflicting views that
  one should choose a spouse carefully for the
  economic and companionship concerns and the idea
  that one should choose a spouse based on love or
  true love.
• This led to two conflicting views of marriage
• That marriage traps men into an unholy alliance
  with a sexual being, so that the husband should
  be constantly vigilant to retain his authority
• That husbands and wives were equal and
  partners, sharing a social love of mutual
  friends. Each has a duty to satisfy and fulfill
  the other.

7

• Was marriage satisfying to medieval women?
• Only about 50 of widowed women remarried
• Women were in a sense brainwashed by the culture
  into believing that marriage could ideally
  provide happiness

8

• Religious women saw their union with God as the
  ideal marriage (only barely asexual).
• The visionary union between male deity and female
  holy woman was imagined with remarkable
  physicality. Christ joined with women mouth to
  mouth and heart to heart, sometimes fusing with
  them.
• Catherine of Siena says she married Christ not
  with a ring of gold or silver but with the ring
  of his foreskin, the circumcision being a symbol
  of accepted suffering.
• Margery Kempe found her marriage intolerable as
  it interfered with her relationship with Christ,
  finally, after twelve children, getting her
  husband to commit to a life of abstinence

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The Medieval Sex Life

• The Church governed sexual practices throughout
  most of Europe during the Middle Ages
• Sex between married couples was illegal on
  Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays
• Sex was illegal for the 40 days before Easter and
  Christmas
• Sex was illegal within the three days prior to
  ones acceptance of communion
• Only one sexual position was allowed
  (missionary), and penalties would be prescribed
  for any variations
• Sex was not to be enjoyed it was for procreation
  only

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Womans Place in Medieval Society

• Many women worked domestically growing and
  harvesting grain, spinning wool, making ale, etc.
• Their husbands controlled their earnings because
  they were, largely, femme couverte de baron. If
  they were married they had no legal status of
  their own.
• Husbands were responsible for legal suits brought
  against their wives
• Men were allowed to inflict moderate
  chastisement upon their wives to keep them in
  their place. A civil law allowed that a husband
  could beat his wife violently with whips and
  chains.

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• A few women could be legally declared femme
  soles, whether married or not, which allowed them
  financial control of their businesses.

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Courtly Love

• The Idea of Love
• in the Middle Ages

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• From the 5th to 11th centuries, the frontier age
  of western Europe, women played a vital and
  expanding role in laying the foundations of our
  modern society.
• In the era following the end of the Roman Empire
  in the West, invading Germanic tribes
  intermarried freely with the conquered Romans,
  forming families that united different cultures.
  
• Recognized marriage alliances eased the process
  of social integration, and womens roles in the
  family helped speed assimilation.
• Women held positions as administrators,
  educators, and religious leaders.

14
Early Christians did not want to offend
contemporaries by maintaining an equal social
position for Women. There is the attitude that
the Weaker Sex requires restriction and support
in the Early Christian writings.

• In the 6th century, Roman Empresses still had a
  great deal of power and could come from humble
  origins (like Theodora).
• In the 9th century, status and wealth begin to
  lose ground to prejudice against the sex, and
  women are given important legal rights in their
  familial capacities--but they begin to be limited
  socially. While these patterns were always in
  flux, the social distinctions were becoming more
  rigid, and upward mobility (for both sexes) began
  to become more difficult, if not impossible.

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• Courtly Love developed during the 1100s in
  France, and it became an ideal, both literary and
  real, throughout Europe for the rest of the
  Middle Ages.
• It celebrated an intensely idealized form of
  sexual passion in a highly elaborate,
  sophisticated, and aristocratic code of behavior.

16
Map of France
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• The relative peace and prosperity and the
  continued contact with Moorish Spain nurtured a
  civilized culture, based around the courts of
  Aquitaine, Auvergne, and Poitou.
• At these courts, from the twelfth century
  onwards, troubadours and trobairitz performed,
  combining the skills of poets, musicians, and
  singers.

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• What they wrote about rather than how they wrote
  about it was new.
• They wrote about love, and about the women they
  loved.
• They celebrated their love in a quasi-religious
  way.
• They venerated the women they loved, showing them
  as objects of worship.
• They emphasized the torments suffered by the
  lover.

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• They invented a religious cult of love, with
  Venus and Cupid as deities.

20

• Courtly Love was revolutionary because it placed
  women, who had no real legal power in medieval
  society, in a position of power over their
  lovers.
• The goal could be spiritual (platonic) or earthly
  (physical consummation).

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• The goal could be spiritual (platonic)

• Or earthly (physical consummation).

22

• Both the noblewomen and their lovers benefited by
  this situation.
• The women found status and fame in the songs and
  stories and received affection from their lovers,
  which may have been lacking in their arranged
  marriages.
• The male lovers got status, money, and patronage.

23

• While cheating on ones lord with that lords
  wife would be treasonous in feudal society,
  because legitimacy of the heir was important,
  during this time in Southern France it was
  tolerated, after the birth of the heir, because
  these liaisons produced more sons to be knights
  and daughters with which to make alliances were
  beneficial.

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• In fact, a way to ensure a neighbors loyalty was
  to make them aware that you harbored their
  illegitimate child.

The troubadours were soon imitated in Northern
France and Germany
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• They wrote in many forms, such as
• The Breton Lay, a short story often based on
  Celtic tales and energized by magical happenings
• The knight-hero tales, longer stories in which
  the knight would perform his deeds to show his
  worthiness of his lady, to improve himself , and
  to achieve his potential as a man and as a knight.

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• There was great appeal in the idea that relations
  between aristocratic men and women could be
  determined by an irresistible mutual passion
  rather than by the dynastic, territorial, and
  financial imperatives that led to arranged
  marriages.

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• During the entire period of the Middle Ages this
  new idea of romantic love was seen as a
  humanizing and refining influence.

• The knight-heros quest for love and
  self-actualization was contrasted to the
  traditional knights function as a warrior
  fighting for lord, comrades, or society.

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• For the first time in post-classical Europe a
  mans status as a civilized being, a member of
  courtly society, was judged by his behavior
  toward women.

• By the later decades of the twelfth century, the
  ethos of courtly love was codified and written
  down.

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History of the Rules of Love

• In the first century B.C.E., Ovid composed The
  Art of Loving.
• This was a how-to book on seduction of women
  written to a male audience.
• Ovid admits that people fall in love as the
  result of strong sexual attraction

• Between 1184 and 1186, Andreas Capellanus
  composed On The Art of Honorable Loving.
• Andreass book may have been an elaborate
  intellectual joke, for he takes Ovids themes of
  adulterous love and subjects it to the medieval
  methods of scholarly analysis.
• Andreas sees falling love as a spiritual
  exercise, almost a duty.

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While medieval readers found the text amusing,
they also found it useful.
They co-opted it and used its ideas to structure
their society, their literature, and the behavior
expected by its noblemen and women.
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• Medieval people were fond of codes and rules and
  lists.
• They left treatises on
• Chivalry
• Hunting
• Table manners
• Courtly life

The codes existence tells us that they
enjoyed debating the rights and wrongs of
romantic love and that the society needed it in
some way. -To make sense of something
potentially chaotic and destructive -To impose
order on experience -To provide meaning to life
32
Characteristics of Love

• 1. Love was both happily painful and deadly
  joyful
• 2. The pursuit of love was dangerous but
  necessary.
• 3. To be worthy of love one had to be discreet,
  faithful, obsessive, generous, and courteous.

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Characteristics of Love, continued

• 4. One must seek, suffer, and submit to prove
  worthy of love.
• 5. For love to remain there must be some
  obstacle.
• 6. Consummation is the desired goal of love,
  whether it is spiritual or earthly.
• 7. Jealousy is an indispensable part of love.

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Characteristics of Love, continued

• 8. Love is worth dying or insanity.
• 9. By definition, true love may not be able to
  exist within marriage.

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Conclusion

• The culture that nurtured the troubadours was
  destroyed in the first half of the thirteenth
  century.
• Pope Innocent III proclaimed a crusade against
  heretics in 1209.
• For the next thirty years the impoverished from
  the North had license to wage war on their
  wealthy neighbors.
• In 1244 the last stronghold of the heretics,
  Monségur, was taken all inside were killed.
• The society, laws, language, culture, and the
  poetry of the Occitania were silenced.

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• By then it was too late, however, to stop the
  spread of the religion of romantic love.
• The troubadours vision of love had spread across
  the whole of western Europe, and it is has been
  found in literature and human consciousness ever
  since.