# Mediaeval women



## Brian G Turner (Oct 27, 2014)

"Women occupy positions of power and influence in the church. The abbess ... is invested with important executive responsibilities. Usually such posts are accorded to ladies of high rank...[and] abbesses are not afraid to assert their rights. A few years hence, an abbess of Notre Dame, Odette de Pougy, will defy the Pope's excommunication and lead a party of armed men to defend what she regards as the rights of her abbey. ... The abbess actually enjoys rights over the bishop of Troyes."

_Life in a Mediaeval City,_ Joseph and Frances Gies, p.54.

I just found this book in my TBR pile, only partly-read - which is strange, because this is the sort of book I'd normally quickly devour.

Then it occurred - it was probably a couple of points raised on the previous pages that made me realise how skewed my view of mediaeval women was, and compelled me to rewrite some of the male characters of my epic fantasy into female ones.

A very interesting book, overall, so far, which looks at the mediaeval history of Troyes in France, to reveal everyday living history. 

And apparently helped remove some of the gender bias I still held for the period.


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## Jo Zebedee (Oct 27, 2014)

It's such a fallacy that medieval society was governed purely by men. Women traditionally ran the households which, for high-born women, meant finances, staffing, the entire gamut of responsibilities. 

John de Courcy, a knight who came to Ireland with Richard de Clare (Strongbow) and conquered the north derived much of his power by marrying Afreca, the daughter of the King of Man - so much he minted his own coins and only the arrival of King John in person derailed his power. And when he died, unknown and penniless in France, Affrea maintained her position, founded a church at Greyabbey, and was, with longevity, by far the more influential.


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## thaddeus6th (Oct 28, 2014)

For a long while I considered buying some Gies books (and still might). Snippets like that are interesting. When a blacksmith left the Tower of London to accompany the King (or Black Prince, I forget which) to France his mother took over his smithy.

Women in medieval(ish) fantasy can be tricky. For my WIP, I made all the major female characters first, which has helped ensure they're not just one or two in number or semi-identical noblewomen. On the other hand, I have accidentally made them much more interesting than almost all the male characters...

An interesting bit in The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England (which I heartily recommend, review here: http://thaddeusthesixth.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/review-time-travellers-guide-to.html) was that ageing affected the genders differently. Men were viewed through the prism of power in war, so older men became seen as weaker and useless. Older women were seen as gaining wisdom (hence wisewomen), and had the added bonus of being less likely to be assaulted as their youthful beauty faded.


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## Kylara (Oct 28, 2014)

Hehe, coming up against this with the younglings at university in my middle english poetry module. Women could get quite powerful. Also widowed women were allowed to run everything their husband did and own all of the things he did, so the widow could get quite powerful  so younglings not exactly understanding the shift in power a widow would make in remarrying if they wanted to. The joys of being a "mature student"!

Anyway, interesting society and many of the books about it are very interesting  have fun finishing it!


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## The Judge (Oct 28, 2014)

I've got three books by the Gies, and they are all very well worth reading, but to my mind this one about Troyes is the best.

As for the position of women, always remember that a noblewoman's power and authority in Paris in 1450 isn't going to be the same as that of a bourgeoise in the same city at the same time, let alone a tanner's wife in York in 1150.  However, in most places and most ages a woman was subservient to her father while she lived at home and to her husband when married, and therefore much depended on the men in her life, unless and until she was widowed as Kylara suggests.  Though then she would probably come under a great deal of pressure from her family to re-marry, either to forge new alliances or to ensure the continuation of the workshop etc. 

As for running workshops, a good deal will depend on the rules of the relevant Guild, which again would be different from city to city and age to age, but almost certainly rules would be written in such a way as to make it more difficult for a woman to succeed, even if that wasn't a deliberate aim.  For instance a widow or sole heiress might be able to own a weaver's business, but might not be allowed to weave herself, which would immediately make it more expensive for her to run the workshop, since she would have to pay men to do the weaving, which in turn would make it more difficult for her to keep in business without marrying another weaver.  Women could and did succeed on their own, but I'm pretty sure they were likely to be the exception rather than the rule.

Men invariably had the whip hand in legal terms within the family, and even women with powerful relations could be badly abused within marriages, physically, emotionally and financially. Divorce (when it was available) or legal separations were usually easier for men to get (eg one instance of a wife's adultery would provide legal grounds, but a husband's adultery alone wouldn't), de facto separations much easier, and a woman could have her children torn from her skirts and thereafter be refused all contact with them on no grounds whatsoever.

So although it is important to have women in our fantasies who actually do things, if we're sticking to some kind of historical verisimilitude we can't go overboard and make the societies and the people within them the equivalent of us now, let alone wholly gender-blind.


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## thaddeus6th (Oct 28, 2014)

I agree entirely, TJ. Imposing modern morality on a supposedly medieval(ish) society would break immersion. If you're going for a realistic, in a fantasy-based context, approach it'd be a huge mistake. Of course, if you're more into a fairytale approach it could work perfectly well (but that's another bag of monkeys).


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## Brian G Turner (Oct 28, 2014)

The Judge said:


> So although it is important to have women in our fantasies who actually do things, if we're sticking to some kind of historical verisimilitude we can't go overboard and make the societies and the people within them the equivalent of us now, let alone wholly gender-blind.



Oh, absolutely. An interesting quote on the following page to the one I quoted has a preacher complaining that women no longer act like lambs to be shepherded, but have become lionesses. The inference is that social change was perceived as occurring.

However, it's also worth remembering that the Black Death of the previous century caused massive social changes throughout Western Europe.


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## Venusian Broon (Oct 30, 2014)

An excellent documentary relating to this topic is Michael Woods _Christina: A Medieval Life_ which unfortunately is not available on BBC iplayer at the moment (but no doubt will appear again on BBC4 at some point, I'm sure.) He essentially follows the documented life of Christina in 14th Century England and uses that to look at peasant life with obvious focus on a woman's position and roles.


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## Nerds_feather (Oct 30, 2014)

I think anytime one looks outside modernity from inside modernity, it pays to question all assumptions. Medieval Europe (and the rest of the world for that matter) wasn't uniformly X or Y, but different combinations of X and Y across space, across time and even in the same spaces at the same time. 

In the medieval period, oftentimes practices or norms that went against the grain would be tolerated until an ideologically rigid or opportunistic figure (in church or state) decided to make an issue if it. But we are often guilty of extrapolating from that latter event and ignoring the period of toleration.


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