Life’s basic situation in the fabliaux is cuckoldry, with variations in which an unpleasing lover is tricked or humiliated instead of the husband. While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once. Despite their more realistic characters, the fabliaux were no more true to life than the romances, but their antagonism to women reflected a common attitude which took its tone from the Church.
Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy. In the Speculum of Vincent de Beauvais, greatest of the 13th century encyclopedists and a favorite of St. Louis, woman is “the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of tempest,” and—finally the key—“a hindrance to devotion.” Vincent was a Dominican of the severe order that bred the Inquisitors, which may account for his pyramid of overstatement, but preachers in general were not far behind. They denounced women on the one hand for being the slaves of vanity and fashion, for monstrous headdresses and the “lascivious and carnal provocation” of their garments, and on the other hand for being over-industrious, too occupied with children and housekeeping, too earthbound to give due thought to divine things.
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female. Had not a woman’s counsel brought first woe by causing Adam to lose Paradise? Of all mankind’s ideas, the equating of sex with sin has left the greatest train of trouble. In Genesis, original sin was disobedience to God through choosing knowledge of good and evil, and as such the story of the Fall was an explanation of the toil and sorrow of the human condition. In Christian theology, via St. Paul, it conferred permanent guilt upon mankind from which Christ offered redemption. Its sexual context was largely formulated by St. Augustine, whose spiritual wrestlings set Christian dogma thereafter in opposition to man’s most powerful instinct. Paradoxically, denial became a source of attraction, giving the Church governance and superiority while embedding its followers in perpetual dilemma.
“Allas, alias, that ever love was sinne!” cried the Wife of Bath. What ages of anxiety and guilt are condensed into that succinct lament, even if the speaker herself does not seem to have been greatly incommoded by what she lamented. Indeed, through her, the century’s most forthright celebration of sex was given to a woman. More than in some later times, the sexuality of women was acknowledged in the Middle Ages and the marital debt considered mutual. Theologians bowed to St. Paul’s dictum, “Let the husband render to his wife what is due her, and likewise the wife to the husband,” but they insisted that the object must be procreation, not pleasure.
To divide the amative from the procreative, as if by laying a flaming sword between the two, was another daring command contrary to human habit. Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible. It embraced Augustine’s principle that God and Nature had put delight in copulation “to impel man to the act,” for preservation of the species and the greater worship of God. Using copulation for the delight that is in it and not for the end intended by nature was, Augustine ruled, a sin against nature and therefore against God, the ordainer of nature. Celibacy and virginity remained preferred states because they allowed total love of God, “the spouse of the soul.”
The struggle with carnality left many untouched; others were tortured by it all their lives. It did not inhibit Aucassin from preferring Hell to Paradise “if I may have with me Nicolette my sweet love.” Nor did it inhibit creation of the Roman de la Rose, the monumental bible of love written in two sections fifty years apart during the 13th century. Begun in the courtly tradition by one author, it was expanded in a cynical and worldly version and at inordinate length by another. When 21,780 lines of elaborate allegory finally wind to an end, the Lover wins his Rose in an explicit description of opening the bud, spreading the petals, spilling “a little seed just in the center,” and “searching the calyx to its inmost depths.”
Petrarch on the other hand, after twenty years of literary mooning over Laura while fathering elsewhere two illegitimate children, succeeded in his forties, “while my powers were unimpaired and my passions still strong,” in throwing off the bad habits of an ardent temperament which he “abhorred from the depths of my soul.” Though still subject to “severe and frequent temptations,” he learned to confess all his transgressions, pray seven times a day, and “fear more than death itself that association with women which I once thought I could not live without.” He had only to recollect, he wrote to his brother the monk, “what woman really is,” in order to dispel desire and retrieve his normal equanimity. “What woman really is” referred to the clerical doctrine that beauty in women was deceptive, masking falsehood and physical corruption. “Wheresoever Beauty shows upon the face,” warned the preachers, “there lurks much filth beneath the skin.”
The nastiness of women was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case was fading. Deschamps as a poet began in good humor and ended with a rancid tirade against women, the Miroir de Manage, in which marriage appears as a painful servitude of suffering, sorrow, and jealousy—for the husband. Through 12,000 verses, he ground out all the conventional clerical accusations of woman—as wanton, quarrelsome, capricious, spendthrift, contradictory, over-talkative, and so demanding that she exhausts her husband by her amorous desires. Since Deschamps elsewhere describes himself as a comfortably married man, this great pile of dead wood represented his atonement, as the end approached, for having enjoyed women and the pleasures of the flesh.
Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex. If the sacrament of marriage was holy, how could sexual pleasure within marriage be sinful? If enjoyment was venial sin, at what point did it become concupiscence, or immoderate desire, which was mortal sin? Was bearing a child outside marriage, though procreative, more sinful than intercourse only for pleasure within marriage? Was a chaste or virgin marriage, though non-procreative, more holy than marital intercourse? What if a man slept with his wife when she was pregnant or after menopause when procreation could not be the purpose? Or, being tempted by another woman, slept with his wife to “cool off” illicit desire: that is, committed one sin to avoid another? Or departed on crusade without his wife’s consent or without taking her along, which was anti-procreative, yet in the interests of the Church? These were questions that concerned the dialecticians probably more than the average person.
Like usury, sex defied doctrinal certitude, except for the agreed-upon principle that any sexual practice contrary to the arrangements and ends “ordained by nature” was sinful. The covering term was sodomy, which meant not only homosexuality but any use, with the same or opposite sex, of the “unfit” orifice or the “unfit” position, or spilling the seed according to the sin of Onan, or auto-erotic emission, or intercourse with beasts. All were sodomy, which, by perverting nature, was rebellion against God and therefore counted as the “worst of sins” in the category of lechery.
Marriage was the relationship of the sexes that absorbed major interests. More than any other, it is the subject on the minds of the Canterbury pilgrims and its dominant theme is who, as between husband and wife, is boss? In real life too the question of obedience dominates the manual of conduct composed by the Ménagier of Paris for his fifteen-year-old wife. She should obey her husband’s commandments and act according to his pleasure rather than her own, because “his pleasure should come before yours.” She should not be arrogant or answer back or contradict him, especially in public, for “it is the command of God that women should be subject to men … and by good obedience a wise woman gains her husband’s love and at the end hath what she would of him.” She should subtly and cautiously counsel him against his follies, but never nag, “for the heart of a man findeth it hard to be corrected by the domination
and lordship of a woman.”
Examples of the terrible fate that meets carping and critical wives are cited by the Ménagier and also by La Tour Landry, who tells how a husband, harshly criticized by his wife in public, “being angry with her governance, smote her with his fist down to the earth,” then kicked her in the face and broke her nose so that she was disfigured ever after and “might not for shame show her visage.” And this was her due “for her evil and great language she was wont to say to her husband.”
So much emphasis is repeatedly placed on compliance and obedience as to suggest that opposite qualities were more common. Anger in the Middle Ages was associated with women, and the sin of Ire often depicted as a woman on a wild boar, although the rest of the seven Vices were generally personified as men.* If the lay view of medieval woman was a scold and a shrew, it may be because scolding was her only recourse against subjection to man, a condition codified, like everything else, by Thomas Aquinas. For the good order of the human family, he argued, some have to be governed by others “wiser than themselves”; therefore, woman, who was more frail as regards “both vigor of soul and strength of body,” was “by nature subject to man, in whom reason predominates.” The father, he ruled, should be more loved than the mother and be owed a greater obligation because his share in conception was “active,” whereas the mother’s was merely “passive and material.” Out of his oracular celibacy St. Thomas conceded that a mother’s care and nourishment were necessary in the upbringing of the child, but much more so the father’s “as guide and guardian under whom the child progresses in goods both internal and external.” That women reacted shrewishly in the age of Aquinas was hardly surprising.
Honoré Bonet posed the question whether a queen might judge a knight when she was governing the kingdom in the king’s absence. No, he answered, because “it is clear that man is much nobler than woman, and of greater virtue,” so that a woman cannot judge a man, the more so since “a subject cannot judge his lord.” How, in these circumstances, the queen governed the kingdom is not explained.
The apotheosis of subjection was patient Griselda, whose tale of endurance under a husband’s cruel tests of her marital submission so appealed to male authors that it was retold four times in the mid-14th century, first by Boccaccio, then in Latin by Petrarch, in English by Chaucer in the Clerk’s Tale, and in French by the Ménagier. Without complaint, Griselda suffers each of her children to be taken away to be killed, as her husband informs her, and then her own repudiation and supposed divorce, before all is revealed as a test, and she willingly reunites herself with the odious author of her trials.
The Ménagier, a kindly man at heart, thought the story “telleth of cruelty too great (to my mind) and above reason” and felt sure “it never befel so.” Nevertheless, he thought his wife should be acquainted with the tale so that she will “know how to talk about all things like unto the others.” Medieval ladies depended on stories, verbal games, and riddles for their amusement, and a well-bred young married woman would need to be equipped to discuss the abject Griselda and her appalling husband. In the end, Chaucer too was ashamed of the story and in his envoy hastened to advise noble wives,
Let noon humilitee your tonge naille …
Ne suffreth nat that men yow doon offence …
Ne dreed hem nat, do hem no reverence …
Be ay of chere as light as leefe on linde,
And lat him care and wepe and wringe and waille!
Married love, despite the formula of courtly romance, was still a desired goal to be achieved after, rather than before, the tying of the knot. The task devolved upon the wife, whose duty was to earn her husband’s love and “gain in this world that peace which may be in marriage,” by constant attention, good care, amiability, docility, acquiescence, patience, and no nagging. All the Ménagier’s wise counsels on this matter can be rolled into one: “No man can be better bewitched than by giving him what pleaseth him.” If the Third Estate, which he represented, laid greater stress on married love than did the nobility, it was doubtless because the more continuous proximity of a bourgeois husband and wife made amiable relations desirable. In England connubial contentment could win the Dunmow Flitch—a side, or flitch, of bacon awarded to any couple who could come to Dunmow in Essex after a year of marriage and truthfully swear that they never quarreled and did not regret the marriage and would do it over again if given the chance.
While the cult of courtly love supposedly raised the standing of noble ladies, the fervid adoration of the Virgin, which developed as a cult at the same time, left little deposit on the status of women as a whole. Women were criticized for gossip and chatter, for craving sympathy, for being coquettish, sentimental, over-imaginative, and over-responsive to wandering students and other beggars. They were scolded for bustling in church, sprinkling themselves with holy water at every turn, saying prayers aloud, kneeling at every shrine, paying attention to anything but the sermon. Cloistered nuns were said to be melancholy and irritable, “like dogs who are chained up too much.” Nunneries were a refuge from the world for some, the fate of others whose families offered them as gifts to the Church, the choice of a few with a religious calling, but generally available only to those who came with ample endowment.
Evidence from poll and hearth taxes indicates that women’s death rate was higher than men’s between the ages of twenty and forty, presumably from childbearing and greater vulnerability to disease. After forty the death rate was reversed, and women, once widowed, were allowed to choose for themselves whether to remarry or not.
In everyday life women of noble as well as non-noble class found equality of function, if not of status, thrust on them by circumstance. Peasant women could hold tenancies and in that capacity rendered the same kinds of service for their holdings as men, although they earned less for the same work. Peasant households depended on their earnings. In the guilds, women had monopolies of certain trades, usually spinning and ale-making and some of the food and textile trades. Certain crafts excluded females except for a member’s wife or daughter; in others they worked equally with men. Management of a merchant’s household—of his town house, his country estate, his business when he was absent—in addition to maternal duties gave his wife anything but a leisured life. She supervised sewing, weaving, brewing, candle-making, marketing, alms-giving, directed the indoor and outdoor servants, exercised some skills in medicine and surgery, kept accounts, and might conduct a separate business as femme sole.
Some women practiced as professors or doctors even if unlicensed. In Paris in 1322 a certain Jacoba Felicie was prosecuted by the medical faculty of the University for practicing without their degree or the Chancellor’s license. A witness testified that “he had heard it said that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than the greatest master or doctor or surgeon in Paris.” At the University of Bologna in the 1360s the faculty included Novella d’Andrea, a woman so renowned for her beauty that she lectured behind a veil lest her students be distracted. Nothing is said, however, of her professional capacity.
The châtelaine of a castle more often than not had to manage alone when her husband was occupied elsewhere, as he generally was, for the sun never set on fighting in the 14th century. If not fighting, or attending the King, he was generally being held somewhere for ransom. In such case his wife had to take his place, reach decisions and assume direction, and there were many besides Jeanne de Montfort who did so. Marcia Ordelaffi, left to defend Cesena while her hot-tempered husband (he who had stabbed his son) held a second city against the papal forces, refused all offers to negotiate despite repeated assaults, mining of walls, bombardment day and night by stones cast from siege engines, and the pleas of her father to surrender. Suspecting her councillor of secretly arranging a surrender, she had him arrested and beheaded. Only when her knights told her that collapse of the citadel would allow no escape from death and that they proposed to yield with or without her consent did she agree to negotiate, on condition that she
conduct the parley herself. This she did so effectively that she obtained safe-conduct for herself and her family and all servants, dependents, and soldiers who had supported her. She was said to fear only the wrath of her terrible husband—not without cause, for, despite all the talk of courtoisie, lords of chivalry, no less than the bourgeois, were known to beat their wives. In a case of particular brutality and high rank, the Count of Armagnac was accused of breaking his wife’s bones and keeping her locked up in an effort to extort property.
Woman’s status in the 14th century had one explicit female exponent in Christine de Pisan, the only medieval woman, as far as is known, to have earned a living by her pen. Born in 1364, she was the daughter of Thomas of Pisano, a physician-astrologer with a doctor’s degree from the University of Bologna who was summoned to Paris in 1365 by the new King, Charles V, and remained in his service. Christine was schooled by her father in Latin, philosophy, and various branches of science not usual in a woman’s education. At fifteen, she married Etienne Castel of Picardy, one of the royal secretaries. Ten years later, she was left alone with three children when her husband, “in the flower of his youth,” and her father died within a few years of each other. Without resources or relatives, she turned to writing to earn the patronage that must henceforth be her livelihood. She began with poetry, recalling in ballades and rondeaux her happiness as a wife and mourning her sorrows as a widow. Though the forms were conventional, the tone was personal.
No one knows the labor my poor heart endures
To dissimulate my grief when I find no pity.
The less sympathy in friendship, the more cause for tears.
So I make no plaint of my piteous mourning,
But laugh when I would rather weep,
And without rhyme or rhythm make my songs