GENDERING THE

MASTER NARRATIVE
 v
GENDERING THE
MASTER NARRATIVE
Women and Power
in the Middle Ages

Edited by

MARY C. ERLER
AND
MARYANNE KowALESKI

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

 Copyright© 2003 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this

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First published 2003 by Cornell University Press

First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2003

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gendering the master narrative : women and power in the Middle Ages I
edited by Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski.
p. ern.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-8014-4112-9 (alk. paper)- ISBN o-8014-8830-3 (pbk. : alk.
paper)
1. Women-History-Middle Ages, 500-1500. 2. Literature,
Medieval-Women authors-History and criticism. 3· Women and
literature-History-To 1500. 4· Social history-Medieval, 500-1500.
5· Power (Social sciences) 6. Narration (Rhetoric) 7· Women in
literature. 8. Rhetoric, Medieval. I. Erler, Mary Carpenter.
II. Kowaleski, Maryanne. III. Title.
HQ1143.G46 2003
305.4'09'02-dc21 2002151956

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 The editors dedicate this volume to JoAnn McNamara,
whose pioneering work over the last three decades has done so
much to stimulate investigations into the issues of women and
power. An energetic and devoted teacher of undergraduates
at Hunter College, City University of New York,
JoAnn has also served as friend, adviser, and informal
mentor to a crucial generation of feminist medievalists,
many of whose work is included in this volume.
 CONTENTS

Abbreviations
ix

Introduction
A New Economy of Power Relations:
Female Agency in the Middle Ages
Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski
1

1. Women and Power through the Family Revisited

JoAnn McNamara
17

2. Women and Confession:

From Empowerment to Pathology
Dyan Elliott
31

3· "With the Heat of the Hungry Heart":

Empowerment and Ancrene Wisse
Nicholas Watson
52

4· Powers of Record, Powers of Example:

Hagiography and Women's History
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
71

5· Who Is the Master of This Narrative?

Maternal Patronage of the Cult of St. Margaret
Wendy R. Larson
94
 6. "The Wise Mother":
The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary
Pamela Sheingorn
105

7· Did Goddesses Empower Women?

The Case of Dame Nature
Barbara Newman
135

8. Women in the Late Medieval English Parish

Katherine L. French
156

9· Public Exposure? Consorts and Ritual in Late Medieval Europe:

The Example of the Entrance of the Dogaresse of Venice
Holly S. Hurlburt
174

10. Women's Influence on the Design of Urban Homes

Sarah Rees Jones
190

11. Looking Closely:

Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban Home
Felicity Riddy
212

References
229

Contributors
257

Index
261

viii Contents
 ABBREVIATIONS

AASS Acta Sanctorum

ANTS Anglo-Norman Text Society
Archiv Archiv for das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen
ASV Archivio di Stato di Venezia
BL British Library, London
BN Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
CWA Churchwardens' Accounts
EETS Early English Text Society
HBS Henry Bradshaw Society
MGHSS Monumenta Germania Historica, Scriptores
MLR Modern Language Review
OP Occasional Publication
o.s. ordinary series
vc Vicars Choral, York
VCH Victoria County History
WCA Westminster City Archives, London
YML York Minster Library
ZRPh Zeitschrift for romanische Philologie
 Introduction
A New Economy of Power Relations:
Female Agency in the Middle Ages

Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski

What we need is a new economy of power relations-the word

"economy" being used in its theoretical and practical sense.
MICHEL FoucAULT, "The Subject and Power"

In 1988 we published an overview of research on medieval women's power

that prefaced a collection of essays. The task of that book was to recover
and make visible ways that women acted in history-specifically, around
the issue of what we then called power and what is now often called
agency.l In the 1970s and 198os, ground breaking work in anthropology and
sociology that asked about women's relation to culture had prepared the

All but one of these chapters were first offered as papers at the annual conference of the
Center for Medieval Studies held at Fordham University from March 31 to April1, 2001. The
conference, "Medieval Women and Power Revisited: Challenging the Master Narrative,"
proposed to reexamine the issues raised by Fordham's 1985 conference "Women and Power
in the Middle Ages" and addressed in much subsequent work over the past decade and a
half. Our aim was to assess the impact of recent scholarship-in part by confronting clash-
ing interpretations and varying perspectives-to discover how far we had come in formu-
lating new narratives of female empowerment in the middle ages. We were particularly in-
terested in how research on female agency (power) had challenged the master narrative in
various medieval disciplines.
For financial support of the conference, we are indebted to Professor Robert Himmelberg,
former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Fordham, and to his successor,
Professor Nancy Busch. We would also like to acknowledge the help of the staff and gradu-
ate assistants of the Center for Medieval Studies, particularly Janine Larmon Peterson, and
the staff of the Graduate School, Maureen Hanratty and Megan Healy, for their invaluable
logistical support of the conference.
1 Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Women and Power in the Middle Ages
(Athens, Ga., 1988). The contents are largely papers offered at a 1985 Fordham University
conference. This introduction thus concentrates on research published after 1985.

1
 way for our more specific interest in women's relation to power within a
particular historical period, the middle ages. 2 We wanted to provide some
fresh ways of analyzing women's agency (thus we attempted to complex-
ify the use of the public/private dichotomy) and to suggest some fresh
forms in which female influence could be seen (through social networks
instead of patronage, for instance, or family membership as opposed to ac-
counts of "great women"). By broadening the conventional understanding
of power as public authority and by focusing on distinctively female forms
of exerting influence and achieving goals, we aimed to provide a more nu-
anced and inclusive analysis that would demonstrate how female agency
functioned and when conditions enabling the exercise of female power oc-
curred.
The fifteen years that have intervened and the volume of work that they
have produced have brought us to different perspectives. Two theorists in
particular have affected not only the writing of feminist history but the
foundation of most disciplines in the humanities. Foremost we think of
Michel Foucault's writing on power: its widespread acceptance makes it a
current running below much contemporary thought on this topic.3 Fou-
cault's awareness of the constructed nature of subjectivity goes hand in
hand with Judith Butler's consciousness of the performative nature of gen-
der.4 One result of these philosophers' work has been to make it difficult to
speak, on the one hand, of agency, and on the other, of "women." Fou-
cault's demonstration of historic forces beyond individual control has
made the task of posing models of resistance to hierarchical domination
more complex, while Butler's work, together with the experience of women
of color, has removed the concept of a unitary "women's experience."
Both these perspectives are poststructural, part of what scholars have
learned to call "the linguistic turn" -a handy shorthand for the view,
springing from literature and linguistics, that historical inquiry does not
investigate social reality but rather a text. Feminism has also been at least
partly responsible for this direction of inquiry because in its search for an

2 For example, Sherry B. Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in Woman,
Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, 1974),
67-87; M. Z. Rosaldo, "Women, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview," ibid., 17-42;
idem, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminist and Cross-Cultural
Understanding," Signs 5 (1980): 389-427; Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dom-
inance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge, 1981). See also the introduction to
Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gen-
der and Sexuality (Cambridge, 1981).
3 Foucault's widely scattered writings and interviews on this topic have been collected in
Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al., vol. 3, Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984 (New York, 2ooo); see also Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York, 1980).
Also relevant is Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hur-
ley (New York, 1978), esp. 41-49.
4 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990).

2 Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski

explanation of the inequality between the sexes, feminism saw early on the
power of discourse to construct social reality. 5 Nevertheless, the decon-
struction of the notion of a historical subject or agent has been troubling for
feminists who had previously defined their task as the recovery of that re-
ality, now categorized as an illusion. Others have attempted to provide a
less totalizing reading, and indeed Foucault's work can be seen as vital to
feminist efforts, for instance, in his stress on the powerful shaping of the
subject through practices of identity formation, particularly the way op-
pression is internalized. His emphasis on the forces that determine the pos-
sibility of agency is present in several of the contributions in this book.
Through our earlier volume, we hoped to illustrate how forms of experi-
ence classically defined as subordinate provided a broad and recognizable
arena for activity. As a result, the explicit claims for female power made
there were read by some as polemical. The chapters in this book instead
often embody a push-pull movement that simultaneously notes women's
opportunities and the ways in which these apparent advances were shad-
owed by real losses. As one writer says, "Feminist praxis is continually
caught between appeals to a free subject and an awareness of victimiza-
tion."6 The old question of whether the glass is half full or half empty trans-
lates theory into domestic metaphor and expresses the somewhat baffled
sense that some feminists share at this point.
As a result of such uncertainty, the chapters that follow use the term
"power" infrequently. Although all are concerned with presenting versions
of women's agency, often a sobering perspective insists on the necessarily
limited nature of such claims. Dyan Elliott's history of women and confes-
sion (chapter 2), for example, shows how the sacrament empowered
women as well as impaired them. With tongue slightly in cheek, Elliott
suggests that as the Fourth Lateran Council created a class of professional
confessors, so it demanded a class of professional penitents-a role filled
by the Beguines' "confessional virtuosity." Elliott's analysis, like others in
this book, examines both women and men in relationship. Consequently
she points out that the benefits of confession were mutual: the male confes-
sor and the female mystic legitimized each other in their respective roles.
Confession could disempower women, however, since heretical revelations
often came in confessional form. Further, the practice of regular confession
was often a function of spiritual direction, and such relations between men

s See, e.g., Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988); Chris Weedon,
Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford, 1987); Mary Poovey, "Feminism and
Deconstruction," Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 52-65; Kathleen Canning, "Feminist His-
tory after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience," Signs 19 (1994):
368-404.
6 Jana Sawicki, "Foucault and Feminism: A Critical Reappraisal," in Critique and Power:
Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 347-64,
at 355·

Female Agency in the Middle Ages 3

 and women dedicated to holiness always carried some element of danger.
In sum, the problems inherent to the sacrament-the development of fe-
male scrupulosity, for instance-together with its attraction for women
tended slightly to discredit it. Elliott's analysis is explicitly Foucauldian;
confession is a power mechanism, its effectiveness increased by antifemi-
nism and concern for clerical purity. Her research on confession might be
considered paradigmatic for other feminist inquiry because it invites us to
understand empowerment/ disempowerment as swings of the same pen-
dulum, produced by the precarious balance of power inherent in every
male-female relationship.
Like confession, the social organization of the medieval parish provided
women with opportunities: a venue for collective action, the possibility of
socially recognized work, an outlet for individual piety, female fellowship,
and support. At the same time women's parish activities provoked reaffir-
mations of conventional gender roles. These took the form of clerical warn-
ings, for instance, on female purchase of pews as an expression of status
(women both purchased and changed their seats more often than men).
Katherine French (chapter 8) points out how women's participation in
parish guilds and in fund-raising gave them leadership experience but also
reinforced their separate and secondary position. A survey of the services
offered to the parish shows that women's contributions of laundry and
cleaning, identical with the work they did elsewhere, were less valued than
men's, who more often held the important administrative positions of
churchwardens. So, although the limits of gender-related behavior were
expanded in some directions by parish activity, at the same time other
forces worked to strengthen conventional gender roles. This push/pull
perspective also emerges in French's assessment of the Reformation's effect
on the parish's female subculture. She suggests that the Reformation's abo-
lition of traditional parish celebrations like Hocktide, its destruction of
saint's images and of the guilds attached to such devotions, and its new
seating arrangements by family rather than gender may have represented a
diminution in the power of women in the parish. Thus French is asking us
to gender the traditional understanding of "Reformation."
Similarly, Holly Hurlburt's study of public ritual (chapter 9) points to the
tension between the real and the symbolic contained in the frequent, albeit
silent, tableaus of women marching in the Venetian dogaresse's entrance
procession. The ceremony constituted a visual reminder of the consort's
physical proximity to the locus of political power and presented the rare
public vision of a community of women. Because the doge was not present,
and the dogaresse was seated in his chair surrounded by other women, it
would seem that models of female power were here deployed for society's
observation, particularly since Hurlburt suggests that the entrance cere-
mony constituted a symbolic marriage, like many other Venetian cere-
monies. Yet no woman was unchaperoned and all were married-their

4 Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski

honor symbolically safeguarded by the Venetian social system of patri-
archy and the honor of the state. The dogaresse thus represented the con-
stricted power of Venetian patrician women, whose responsibility was to
increase the political mobility of their natal family through marriage.
Hence the visual statement of this female ceremony was mixed and con-
tained both encouraging and discouraging messages.
All three of these chapters focus on gender relations-the social organi-
zation of the relationship between men and women-to analyze when and
how medieval women were able to acU The authors try to avoid simple bi-
nary oppositions of "male" versus "female" culture, or rigid distinctions
between public and domestic spheres, concentrating instead on showing
how female relations of power are best understood through women's con-
nections with men. Felicity Riddy's meditative exploration of the idea of
"home" (chapter n) is perhaps the most explicit of all the volume's chap-
ters in discussing the interactions of men and women. She concludes that
in the home the realities of domesticity made it impossible to speak simply
of male power and female subordination and that the home was responsi-
ble for the development of an "egalitarian discourse of intimacy" perhaps
not possible elsewhere. Most unexpected is her contention that it was
women's provision of physical care (a position formally servile) that al-
lowed such equality. By taking responsibility for the home, including the
messier functions of everyday life, women collapsed the dichotomy of
power and subordination because "bodily functions democratize hierar-
chies and are unimpressed by status." One sign of this domestic democra-
tization was the boldness with which many urban bourgeois women could
talk, and we might see the stereotype of the nagging wife as produced by
the home's relations of equality. In refusing the conventional oppositions of
male public/ female private spheres and substituting a nexus of interac-
tion, Riddy says what other contributors similarly insist on: that only fresh
structures of analysis will allow us to describe women's place in the world.
The starting point for the history of lay spirituality offered by Nicholas
Watson (chapter 3) is, like marriage, another traditional male-female pair-
ing: female anchorite and male spiritual direct.or. Disagreeing with femi-
nist readings that have emphasized the clerical misogyny of Ancrene Wisse,
Watson argues that the anonymous author's chiding was like a coach's
harshness to an athlete, meant to energize and inspire. The author offers
his readers a conception of the spiritual life at once heroic and accessible,
one that substitutes spiritual desire ("the heat of the hungry heart") for
physical asceticism. This shift was not only empowering for its original fe-
male audience but also for the increasingly male readership of the Ancrene
Wisse and its derivatives in the later middle ages, through which was

7 Particularly important in the area of gender relations is Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Use-
ful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053-75.

Female Agency in the Middle Ages 5

 evolved a demanding spirituality lived in the world-one that might take
St. Thomas More as its representative end point. Here the existence of an
originally female audience created a space for a reinvented spiritual prac-
tice that through the centuries was repeatedly transformed, becoming an
influential via media. This chapter (together with those by Elliott, Riddy,
and Rees Jones) thus sees female power not as individual or group agency
but as an effect produced by social forces acting on social conceptions of fe-
male nature-in this case the concept of interiority, a state conventionally
associated with women.
Indeed, the consolations and the opportunities women found in religion
have stimulated much research relevant to the subject of agency because
spiritual experience was one way that assumptions about gender were
challenged. When women had mystical visions, uttered prophecies, or rep-
resented their communities, they were wielding a universally recognized
form of authority. Extreme ascetic practices could also empower mystics by
allowing them to identify with the suffering and humanity of Christ and to
exercise control over their lives and their families.s Grace Jantzen's recent
redefinition of mysticism, in fact, sees it as inseparable from an agenda of
power and intimately allied with gender. Since mysticism is "a way of
defining power, whether institutional or individual, then the question of
who counts as a mystic is of immediate importance." 9 And the relation
of men and women in religion, the ways in which they conceded authority
and claimed it, is not only Dyan Elliott's subject in this volume but has now
produced a substantial body of work illustrating and analyzing this gen-
dered relationship of power.lO In addition the topic of women's public
preaching or teaching occupied both holy women and men during the pe-
riod and engaged the anxieties of important female mystics such as Julian
of Norwich and Margery Kempe. It is difficult to say whether this form of
public authority, based on private religious validation, was one that al-
lowed women a degree of access or instead was more narrowly guarded
than secular authority.1 1 A related area, that of female spiritual authority in

s The classic work here is Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious
Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987).
9 Grace Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, Cambridge Studies in Ideology
and Religion 8 (Cambridge, 1995), 1-2.
to For instance the collection Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed.
Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia, 1999); Anne Clark Bartlett," 'A Reasonable Affection':
Gender and Spiritual Friendship in Middle English Devotional Literature," in Vox Mystica:
Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. A. C. Bartlett et a!.
(Cambridge, 1995); John Coakley, "Friars as Confidants of Holy Women in Medieval Do-
minican Hagiography," in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld
Kosinski and Timia Szell (Ithaca, 1991), 222-46.
11 See Alcuin Blamires, "Women and Preaching in Medieval Orthodoxy, Heresy, and

Saints' Lives," Viator 26 (1995): 135-52. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker has suggested the impor-
tance of female age to public visibility in "The Prime of Their Lives: Women and Age, Wis-
dom and Religious Careers in Northern Europe," in New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The

6 Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski

writing, rather than in public teaching, has received more attention from
scholars. Female strategies of self-authorization in writing, according to
Jane Chance, have been extensive enough to constitute a "tradition of dis-
sonance" and, in authorizing the female writing subject, might be thought
to constitute a political act.12
In deconstructing categories, searching for disruptive strategies, accom-
modating diversity, and reformulating paradigms, postmodernist critiques
have also chipped away at the invidious domination of the historical and
the literary-historical master narrative. As the chapters in this book attest,
"master narrative" can have multiple meanings. To some it encompasses
the standard unfolding of political events as related in history textbooks.
Its literary corollary might be found in recent disputes about formation of
the canon, its artistic parallel in the reverence for "old masters." To others it
is the patriarchal narrative that privileges the actions, opinions, and texts of
men. Such narratives can be written on a large scale-in the attention paid
to church-state relations compared with changes in the institution of mar-
riage-or on a smaller scale, in the discourse on a particular text or image.
In revisiting the issue of medieval women and power, we asked contribu-
tors to address how their research might disturb the master narrative, how
it might move toward the eventual formulation of a new synthesis.
JoAnn McNamara (chapter 1) challenges the dominant historical narra-
tive on its own terms by reassessing the claims she made in a classic essay
written in 1973 (with Suzanne Wemple) on how aristocratic women could
exert public power via their involvement in the family and kinship net-
works. She notes that two central tenets of the earlier article have with-
stood the test of time: (1) that elite women encountered fewer barriers to
the acquisition of power in the early middle ages and (2) that as the power
of aristocratic families waned, so too did that of aristocratic women. Al-
though she continues to locate the decline in elite women's power around
the year 1000, she now pushes back the first manifestations of this influ-
ence through the family to the days of the Roman Empire, thus rejecting
traditional periodization, which locates a rupture between "ancient" and
"medieval" centuries later. Her new formulation also more rigorously dis-
putes the explanatory paradigms of the master narrative in arguing that

Holy Women of Liege and Their Impact, ed. Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-
Browne, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 2 (Turnhout, Belgium, 1999), 215-36. For a
recent approach that draws on art history, see Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the
Magdalene: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Late Middle Ages (Princeton, 2000).
12 Jane Chance, "Speaking in Propria Persona: Authorizing the Subject as a Political Act in

Late Medieval Feminine Spirituality," in New Trends in Feminine Spirituality, 269-94- Classic
essays on the topic of women's literary authority are Sarah Beckwith, "Problems of Author-
ity in Late Medieval English Mysticism: Language, Agency, and Authority in The Book of
Margery Kempe," Exemplaria 4 (1992): 172-99, and Lynn Staley Johnson, "The Trope of the
Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich and
Margery Kempe," Speculum 66 (1991): 820-38.

Female Agency in the Middle Ages 7

 the fundamental change took the form of a "shift in the gender system"
that affected both men and women and substituted class for gender as the
basic organizing principle of society. In pointing to the influence of the Gre-
gorian "reforms," particularly the emphasis on clerical celibacy, she also
queries the value of "reform" movements that are conventionally cast in a
positive light.13 Although her investigation focuses on the ruling elite, her
deliberate challenge to the prevailing account of medieval history, here and
as far back as 1973, is all the more compelling for the rigorous scrutiny,
mounted by herself and others, that her ideas have sustained over the past
three decades.
McNamara's reevaluation of historical periods, her insistence that the
master narrative consider shifts in how gender was constructed, and her
efforts to highlight changes in women's power reflect current, lively de-
bates on whether, when, and why women's status may have changed dur-
ing the middle ages. 14 McNamara, along with Susan Stuard and others, ar-
gues for what can be termed "change for the worse." These historians
point in particular to the eleventh and twelfth centuries when women's ac-
cess to education and positions of power in monasteries and in ruling cir-
cles dwindled.1 5 Other scholars have singled out such major processes as
the Carolingian reforms, the Norman conquest of England, and the rise of
humanism as responsible for declines in the status of women.16 Those who
advocate these positions tend to focus on women from the upper ranks of
society and to consider power in terms of public authority, over long peri-
ods of several centuries. In contrast, historians who point to improvements
in the status of women tend to focus on working women and economic
fluctuations over the shorter term, such as occurred after the Black Death
when wages rose and opportunities for work widened in response to labor
shortages.17 Judith Bennett rejects both of these positions, preferring to em-
phasize long-term continuities in the status of women. In criticizing the

13 This theme comes out even more strongly in her book, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns
through Two Millennia (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
14 For a summary of this debate, on which the following account draws, see Judith M.

Bennett, Medieval Women in Modern Perspective (Washington, D.C., 2000), 19-25. The charac-
terization "change for the worse" is also hers.
15 Susan Mosher Stuard, "The Dominion of Gender: Women's Fortunes in the High Mid-

dle Ages," in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2d ed. (Boston, 1987), 153-72; Mc-
Namara, Sisters in Arms; and idem, essay in this volume.
16 Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister sao to 900
(Philadelphia, 1981); Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and So-
ciety, ca. soo-1100 (Chicago, 1998); Pauline Stafford, "Women and the Norman Conquest,"
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 4 (1996): 221-50; Margaret L. King, "Book-
Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance," in Beyond Their Sex:
Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York, 1984), 91-116.
17 See, e.g., P. J.P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in
York and Yorkshire, c. 1J00-1520 (Oxford, 1992); Caroline Barron, "The 'Golden Age' of
Women in Medieval London," Reading Medieval Studies 15 (1989): 35-58.

8 Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski

tendency of many feminist scholars to overemphasize transformations in
women's history, she suggests an alternative model of "patriarchal equilib-
rium" to describe how women's experiences might vary (for example, they
received slightly higher wages after the Black Death), yet their status re-
mained essentially the same (they still worked largely in humble, poorly
paid positions).lB
Whatever stance scholars adopt in analyzing changes in women's power
and influence, however, the current trend-itself an outgrowth of post-
structural inquiry-is to criticize the prevailing master narrative for its ex-
cessive reliance on political and institutional themes, its adherence to peri-
odization that privileges clearly demarcated transformations in public
authority, and its inattention to gender as a category of analysis. In one
way or another, all the chapters in this book question some aspect of this
conventional understanding.
Still, a new understanding has yet to emerge. Indeed, it has been sug-
gested that efforts to provide a new textbook account of women in history
have so far mostly consisted of "adding women and stirring."19 Works
such as McNamara's, however, which refuses to accept the Gregorian "re-
forms" as necessarily representing a move forward, and Elliott's, which re-
jects the post-Lateran development of frequent confession as simply posi-
tive and instead insists on the inclusion of pathology and power,
demonstrate the sort of larger rethinking that an eventual synthesis must
include.
Equally firm in its rejection of conventional "grand narratives" in literary
history is Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's chapter, which calls for a collectively ar-
rived at chronology that registers women's "informal, quotidian, underrec-
ognized, significant, and continuous presence." This vision of a different
sort of female history, as original in its way as McNamara's in hers, springs
from a base that at first appears narrowly codicological-examination of a
manuscript collection of saints' lives read in the East Anglian nunnery of
Campsey-but expands from this specialist base to urge a reconsideration
of how traditional "placement" of literary texts, as well as the audience for
them, is connected with older narratives of nationalism. The early English
text of Ancrene Wisse, for instance, was subsumed into a discourse of "Eng-
lishness," while Anglo-Norman texts that reveal a different, often fuller,
women's literary history were ignored. The Campsey manuscript also re-

18 Judith M. Bennett, "Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide," in

Culture and History 1350-16oo: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed.
David Aers (London, 1992), 147--'75· For her ideas on "patriarchal equilibrium," see "Con-
fronting Continuity," Journal of Women's History 9 (1997): 73-94-
19 The phrase is from Judith M. Bennett, "When the Master Takes a Mistress" (paper de-
livered at Fordham University's Medieval Studies conference March 31, 2001) in which she
discussed her experience with the master narrative in revising C. Warren Hollister's Me-
dieval Europe: A Short History (New York, 8th ed., 1998).

Female Agency in the Middle Ages 9

 veals how power relations were exercised through production of texts that
catered to the nuns' interests, including references to real places associated
with the manuscript's patrons in East Anglia and to precedents for the ex-
ercise of female power, particularly in the foundation of female monastic
communities.
The topic of women's alliances with one another, raised here in several
chapters, has received surprisingly little attention, although as a recent col-
lection of essays points out, given the scarcity of institutional structures for
women beyond the family, study of women's connections could provide a
perspective on agency that goes beyond the individual.2D In suggesting that
women's networks and women's lineages remain substantially underex-
plored, Wogan-Browne's chapter, as well as research by French on women's
parish guilds in England and by Hurlburt on the rare vision of a commu-
nity of women in Venice, demonstrate that the work of historical recovery
can never be seen merely as part of feminism's initial goal for itself, but
must continue as an ongoing initiative-ideally, linked (as here) with bold
retheorizing. Alliances between women, however, did not always produce
positive results for them. The tensions inherent in religious community life,
for both men and women, are revealed in bishops' visitation accounts. And
the power of female gossip to reveal men's secrets and subvert patriarchal
authority raised considerable anxiety and could provoke harsh retaliation.
Such gossip, moreover, was often more likely to be aimed at other women
than at men.21 Institutionalized alliances of women, such as women's craft
guilds, were not only rare but also less autonomous than men's guilds.22
The interest shown by scholars in women's reading and women's read-
ing communities in the chapters by Wogan-Browne and Watson also repre-
sents an attempt to assess women's place in intellectual history. Recent
stress on the communal and oral nature of medieval reading has seemed
particularly relevant to the culture of reading women. Riddy has taught us
to see this culture as emphatically devotional in its reading choices, com-
posed of both nuns and laywomen, and characterized by the exchange of
both books and ideas between members of these two female states.23 His-

2o Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, eds., Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens:
Women's Alliances in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), introduction.
21 See, e.g., Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia,

1999), 66-79; Karen Jones and Michael Zell, "Bad Conversation? Gender and Social Control
in a Kentish Borough, c. 1450-c. 1570," Continuity and Change 13 (1998): 11-31; Steve Hindle,
"The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender, and the Experience of Authority in
Early Modern England," Continuity and Change 9 (1994): 371-93; Laura Gowing, Domestic
Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996).
22 Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith M. Bennett, "Crafts, Guilds, and Women in the Mid-
dle Ages: Fifty Years after Marian K. Dale," in Sisters and Other Workers in the Middle Ages,
ed. J. M. Bennett eta!. (Chicago, 1989), 11-38.
23 Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public (Cambridge, 1998); Felicity Riddy,
'"Women Talking about the Things of God': A Late Medieval Subculture," in Women and Lit-

10 Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski

torical recovery continues to be important here, as more books belonging
to women are identified and as these material objects allow us to speak
with more certainly about women's reading choices.24
Such a gendering of material culture is one of the approaches used in Sarah
Rees Jones's chapter, which draws both on York's "built environment" and its
tenantry records. Like many contributors, she situates her analysis in the
larger context of gender relations, noting, for instance, the "overlapping gen-
der identities" evident in the layout of bourgeois homes, which contained
shops or offices alongside domestic accommodation. But a variety of changes
did occur in housing practice that together fostered among the urban elite an
attachment to the individual house as home, where women were acknowl-
edged to have particular rights and interests, and where family identity was
reproduced. This increasingly autonomous household was seen as there-
sponsibility of the "housewife," whose care produced the discourse of
"homeliness" analyzed by Riddy. The situation differed for poorer women
(many of them widows or newly arrived singlewomen), who accounted for a
larger share of renters after the Black Death, but at the lower end of the market.
By the mid- to late fifteenth century, the numbers of these female tenants fell
even below those of the period before the plague, a development Rees Jones
explains chiefly in terms of declining work opportunities for women in York.
This changing proportion of female tenants in medieval York can also be
interpreted as the measured response of working women-many of them
widows or recent immigrants from the countryside-to the widening op-
portunities for waged work in post-plague towns. We know little about
these women other than their names and tenant histories, yet these faceless
women, when they react similarly to specific economic conditions, to-
gether represent a potent example of women's collective power. Although
scholars hotly debate the effects of the plague on women's work, they rec-
ognize that peasant and urban working women were economic actors
whose decisions influenced the rate of rural-urban immigration and the
urban property market, as Rees Jones shows.
Recent attempts by medieval demographers to explain long-term popu-
lation swings also emphasize women's agency by singling out the crucial
role of nuptiality (at what age and whether a woman married) and fertil-
ity (the rate at which women bore children). 25 Indeed, early modern de-

erature in Britain c. llOD-1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge, 1993), 104-27; Jocelyn
Wogan-Browne, "Analytical Survey 5: 'Reading Is Good Prayer': Recent Research on Fe-
male Reading Communities," New Medieval Literatures 5 (2002): 229-97.
24 Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2002).

25 For an overview of the debates and implications for women's history of recent demo-

graphic findings, see Maryanne Kowaleski, "Singlewomen in Medieval and Early Modern
Europe: The Demographic Perspective," in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-18oo, ed.
Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia, 1999), 38-81, 325-44. For medievalists
who offer evidence for a fertility-driven model of population change, see Richard M. Smith,

Female Agency in the Middle Ages 11

 mographers now argue that the proportion of lifelong singlewomen exer-
cised more influence over variations in the total size of communities than
any other single factor. 26 Historical demography, therefore, along with
methods such as prosopography, offers feminist medievalists valuable
tools to recover the history of larger groups of women, not just the well-
documented and elite members of society.27 These methods also provide
us with avenues to explore different forms of female agency, ones that
may not immediately empower-or disempower-individual women,
but which over the long run alter the structures of medieval society be-
cause of their aggregate effect. Such demographic analysis, whose focus is
women in groups, will certainly take a central place in changing the his-
torical narrative.
This view of women's collective impact is echoed in Wendy Larson's
account of how female attachment to St. Margaret as childbirth advocate
persisted despite clerical disapproval (chapter 5). Larson quotes the
warnings of various clerical authorities against an overly literal reading
of the saint's iconography, as she bursts forth from a dragon's belly. In the
substantial survival of material artifacts displaying this devotion, how-
ever, women's own interpretation of the image-a mother's hope for her-
self and her child during birth-triumphed. Conventionally such perse-
verance might have been theorized as an instance of women's sustained
resistance. Larson refuses this analysis and instead offers a model of
power through utility: "the version of St. Margaret's legend that served
the needs of a larger and apparently more influential set of patrons pre-
vailed." Here, as in Rees Jones's chapter, the force of a continuing female
collective reality is visible. In addition, Larson's redefinition of patronage
to include a full range of practices (not just financial or intellectual spon-
sorship) allows us to rethink this traditional area of female power, which
has recently come to seem rather too familiar, in a fresh way. Her defini-
tion moves patronage from an elite, individual level to a broadly popular

"Hypotheses sur Ia nuptialite en Angleterre aux XIIIe-XIVe siecles," Annales E. S. C. 38

(1983): 120-24; L. R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350-1525 (Cambridge,
1991); Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle.
26 David R. Weir, "Rather Never Than Late: Celibacy and Age at Marriage in English Co-
hort Fertility, 1541-1871," Journal of Family History 9 (1994): 340-54; Roger Schofield, "Eng-
lish Marriage Patterns Revisited," ibid. 10 (1985): 2-20. The proportion of women who never
marry affects nuptiality, which in turn affects fertility, which many early modern demogra-
phers see as exercising the most influence over changes in population size. Thus far the data
to prove these theories for the middle ages are sparse, but they have been persuasively ar-
gued for the early modern period when data are more abundant.
27 Prosopography is "collective biography," or the history of specific groups; for an expla-

nation of the methodology and overview of recent developments, seeK. S. B. Keats-Rohan,

"Prosopography and Computing: A Marriage Made in Heaven?" History and Computing 12
(2ooo): 1-11. For the application of the method to the history of women (in this instance,
English nuns), see Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England:
Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350-1540 (Woodbridge, U.K., 1998).

12 Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski

one, allowing the possibility of viewing devout women as a patronage-
dispensing class. Larson's rethinking of patronage is similar to McNa-
mara's reconception of historical periods and Wogan-Browne's rejection
of nationalist literary paradigms. All three chapters say, "the categories
are different than we've thought" and move toward conceptual changes
that go beyond the mere addition of remarkable women to the familiar
narrative.
Like Wendy Larson, Pamela Sheingorn (chapter 6) investigates the pro-
liferation of a specific visual image-in this case, St. Anne teaching the Vir-
gin Mary-despite the absence of a scriptural foundation for this mother-
daughter exchange. Depictions of St. Anne teaching from a book promoted
ideas of mothers as instructors, daughters as diligent pupils, and literacy
as the norm among elite women-ideas that trickled down, as demon-
strated by the appearance of the image even in the wall paintings and in-
expensive alabaster figures of ordinary parish churches. Sheingorn attrib-
utes the absence of this image from art history's master narrative to its
replacement by Victorian ideologies of femininity as submissiveness and
the tendency to focus on the affective relation of mother and son, as op-
posed to the domestic, household relationship of mother and daughter.2s
She notes the image's emphasis not only on the crucial role of mothers in
the dissemination of learning but also on the potentially subversive power
that literacy offered in making possible criticism and commentary. Shein-
gorn asks whether this image was particularly frequent in manuscripts
owned by women. If this were so, we might see in such a continuing devo-
tional practice evidence, as in Larson's chapter, of women's collective pref-
erence as a cultural force.
Women's seeming preference for particular female images raises the
question of the extent to which it is possible to describe specific female cul-
tures-for instance, women participants in the parish, or women readers
and book owners-not as reduced, parallel versions of more visible male
analogues but as sounding characteristic female notes. Even more vexing is
the question of whether such female subcultures empowered women. Did
they encourage women to shape their own lives? Did they help them de-
velop coping strategies (such as the power of resistance, or gossip)? Did
their very exclusion of men nourish powers of the powerless? On the one
hand, such female cultures could provide emotional and even financial

28 Appearing in the same year as Sheingorn's article on reading and St. Anne was an

essay by Wendy Sease, "St. Anne and the Education of the Virgin: Literary and Artistic Tra-
ditions and Their Implications," in England in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Nicholas Rogers,
Harlaxton Medieval Studies 3 (Stamford, 1993), 81-96. For more recent work that further
develops this topic, see Patricia Cullum and Jeremy Goldberg, "How Margaret Blackburn
Taught Her Daughters: Reading Devotional Instruction in a Book of Hours," in Medieval
Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain, Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn
Wogan-Browne eta!. (Turnhout, Belgium, 2000), 217-26.

Female Agency in the Middle Ages 13

 support, instill self-confidence, and foster leadership skills, especially
when occurring within institutionally sanctioned female communities
such as monasteries. On the other hand, they were often informal, margin-
alized, viewed with mistrust, and open to attack when they began to exer-
cise power that threatened the patriarchal status quo, as gossips and Be-
guines sadly discovered. The difficulty of recovering genuine female voices
from the male-authored texts that survive must also be considered.29 And
of course efforts to identify elements of a putative female culture can easily
fall into essentialism, and perhaps can only be viable when they issue from
accounts of specific situations, as, for instance, in Wogan-Browne's charac-
terization of upper-class female interests based on the Campsey manu-
script's contents. Analyses that attempt a description of historically specific
women's cultures represent one of the continuing directions of feminist
scholarship.
Barbara Newman's chapter asks a related question, about how medieval
culture understood the concept of nature as it was historically shaped by
literature. The questions about what is "natural" to women, which both
Roman de Silence and Christine de Pizan ask, are ones that vex us still. New-
man examines the Romance of the Rose (in which Nature represents hetero-
sexual fulfillment), Roman de Silence (which searchingly explores the notion
of gender), and Christine's work (where Nature encompasses a broadly de-
fined productivity, both intellectual and physical). In Newman's chapter,
more than any other in this book, a powerful woman stands at the center of
activity, as Christine reconceives and rewrites her predecessors' definitions
of Nature, evolving a figure of all-purpose female creativity expressed
equally through motherhood, domestic labor, or intellectual work. All op-
position between nature and culture ceases as Nature becomes a promoter
of women's cultural achievements.
By developing such an androgynous conception of Nature (a philosoph-
ical/literary abstraction of great historical power), Christine makes it pos-
sible for those who came after her to think differently about intellectual
and cultural archetypes. Newman's account of Christine's work proceeds
in the way a recent overview of medieval literature has called for: refusing
the grand recit in favor of observing literature's cultural specificity, even
slipperiness, its historical reformulation in "new textual configurations,
generative of meanings undreamed of at the moment of first conception."30
If Watson's chapter shows the power of literary work in shaping culture
and woman's role in that work, Newman's chapter, unusually, assigns that
power to a single influential female thinker. What the two chapters share is

29 On this point, see in particular the essays in Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices.
30 David Wallace, "General Preface," to The Cambridge History of Medieval English Litera-
ture, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), xvii.

14 Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski

their interest in the process of textual and ideological transmission and
women's part in it.

The chapters in this book all work to create a "new economy of power rela-
tions"31 not only by acknowledging how deeply embedded power rela-
tions are in the social nexus but also by deconstructing the fixed categories
of "female" and "male." In locating power relations in discourses on
women, they also deliberately gender the master narrative by querying its
interpretive efficacy, historicizing specific texts and experiences of women,
and offering new paradigms that insist on understanding female relations
of power through women's connections with men. They also bring these
power relations to light not by examining the political level of the state, but
by focusing attention on discourses at the micro-level of society, whether
an official religious discourse such as confession, the everyday discourse of
the home, or the discourse surrounding a specific ceremony. They also ex-
plore the mechanisms of power, showing how, for example, power rela-
tions could be exercised through the production of texts or images that
catered to women's interests, or through the reinterpretation of conven-
tional texts and images by women to suit their ends.
In our earlier volume, we identified several aims. One was the produc-
tion of "realistically complex analyses of the power relations between men
and women." A second desire was to identify "chronologies ... which
chart the rise and fall of women's power and link it to particular historical
situations."32 The contributors to this volume continue to see these as
areas for further work. The evolution of gender studies has produced a
great deal of new research in which the complexity of the interrelationship
between men and women is a central theme. The call for new historical
chronologies, specifically for revisions of periodization that take gender
into account, is likewise regularly heard. The multiplicity of such
chronologies has been impressed on us more forcibly since we first wrote.
It has recently been pointed out that historical trajectories that move
through the same set of circumstances can often be imagined as proceed-
ing in opposite directions.33 So, for instance, the rise of universities re-
duced educational opportunities for women while expanding them for
men. At present, investigation of women's agency must develop a sensi-
tivity to such multiple narratives, often coexisting or even conflicting, and

31 Foucault's 1982 phrase, used in our epigraph, and the essay from which it is taken are
reprinted in Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Power, ed. Faubion, 328, but Foucault did
not apply the phrase in a feminist context.
32 Erler and Kowaleski, eds., Women and Power in the Middle Ages, 11. A third concern, re-
sisting the divorce of literature from history, hardly seems necessary now because the mar-
riage is obvious in most of the chapters that follow.
33 Wallace, "General Preface," xviii.

Female Agency in the Middle Ages 15

 must recognize lines of inquiry that run parallel rather than converging in
a satisfying manner.
These topics from our earlier book-attention to the relations between
men and women and revision of chronologies-continue to provide di-
rections for fruitful work. New approaches, some of them illustrated in
these chapters, will also gradually unfold further in future research.
Prosopography and demography, for example, offer students of female
agency an opportunity to facilitate study of women in groups, a focus
that deemphasizes the "great woman" model. By developing new geo-
graphical and linguistic categories for texts, literary history can be re-
vised, away from its earlier nationalist focus. Scholars must also attend
to familiar categories of activity such as patronage and domesticity, refin-
ing and rethinking the apparently well-known. And, for the present at
least, we will necessarily work with narratives that are partial rather than
comprehensive.

16 Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski

 CHAPTER ONE

Women and Power through

the Family Revisited

JoAnn McNamara

Heraclitus tells us that you cannot step into the same river twice, and later
philosophers have added that, indeed, you cannot really step into the same
river once. We try to build bridges, embankments, and dams, devices that
will put us in a position to chart the flow of time, to get the past organized,
and to capture it once and for all. But even as we try to fit time into cate-
gories, labeling the minutes, years, decades, and centuries, we find that we
have been caught ourselves in its relentless current. In this chapter, it is my
interesting duty to play a double role, as observer and as swimmer in the
river.
Thirty years ago, Suzanne Wemple and I presented a joint paper to the
first Berkshire Conference on women's history entitled, "The Power of
Women through the Family in Medieval Europe, 500-1100." That paper
was subsequently published in Feminist Studies, reprinted in a collection
called Clio's Consciousness Raised, and reprinted again with the collected pa-
pers from the first "Women and Power in the Middle Ages" conference at
Fordham University.l I have been asked to revisit that scene to determine
how my view of the river has changed since I first attempted to step into it.
I must emphasize that this time I am acting solely on my own without the
insights and the scholarship of Professor Wemple. As a result, this has be-
come a highly self-referential paper, pointing to conclusions drawn not

1 Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne Wemple, "The Power of Women through the Family,"
Feminist Studies 1 (1973): 126-41; reprinted in Clio's Consciousness Raised, ed. Mary Hartman
and Lois Banner (New York, 1974), 103-18; and in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed.
Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens, Ga., 1988), 83-101.
 from an initial encounter with the sources but from the thinking and re-
thinking I have done about many of those same sources over the decades
since, in the light of my own continuing research and the ever-swelling
flood of interesting work produced by my contemporaries.
As our title indicated, our paper represented a preliminary sweep
through a current full of shoals and rapids barely charted by scholarly ex-
plorers. In those days, the master narrative concentrated on the develop-
ment of governments and institutions, quite indifferent to the fact that
nearly all the actors were male. The middle ages were neatly framed by the
fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, with a lesser chapter ush-
ered in by the twelfth-century renaissance and with a condescending dis-
missal of the claim that people at the turn of the millennium trembled in
fear before the opening of a new era in history. Peter Brown's World of Late
Antiquity had just been published. 2 No one had yet labeled Georges Duby's
initial work "the feudal transformation" and thus refocused our sense of
transition on the year 1000. 3 Neither of these great authorities framed their
chronologies in terms of women's experience, and David Herlihy had
barely begun the creative analyses that would enable him and his students
to penetrate the documentary evidence of charters and other quantitative
sources for social history.4 In brief, our work was slightly in advance of the
quickening currents of modern scholarship. It suffered from lack of the evi-
dentiary and theoretical support that has developed over the ensuing
decades, but it profited in prestige from the lucky fact that it anticipated
views that have subsequently come to dominate the field.
Our paper generally respected the chronological markers favored at the
time, fitting an account of women into the narrative of Rome's fall in the
fifth century, followed by a barbaric age with Europe's revival developing
in the twelfth century. Briefly, we proposed a scheme for the history of Eu-
ropean ruling-class women that began with recognition of their private ac-
cess to wealth and its privileges despite their exclusion from the public life
of the Roman Empire.s
We explained the competitive success of individual women who accu-

2 Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, AD 15o-750 (London, 1971).

3 Georges Duby, La societe aux XIe et XIIe sii!cles dans Ia region maconnaise (Paris, 1953) acted
as the springboard for Pierre Bonnassie, From Slavery to Feudalism, trans. Jean Birrell (Cam-
bridge, 1991), which outlined a dramatic social revolution in the early eleventh century. The
concept was expanded by Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel, The Feudal Transformation,
900-1200, trans. Caroline Higgitt (New York, 1991).
4 His study, "Land, Family and Women in Continental Europe, 701-1200," which we
cited from its original venue, Traditio 18 (1962): 89-113, was subsequently reprinted in
Women in Medieval Society, ed. Susan M. Stuard (Philadelphia, 1976), 13-46.
s At the same conference, Sarah Pomeroy presented some of the early research that
would go into her pioneer study of women in antiquity, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves
(New York, 1975).

18 JoAnn McNamara
mulated wealth and power in the violent world of deteriorating legal and
political structures. That disorder was followed by the fortunate evolution
of a legal system that benefited women's overlapping membership in natal
and conjugal families. We devoted the bulk of the paper to women's active
role in the power conflicts of the early middle ages and the developing Eu-
ropean polities of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. 6
To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever seriously challenged our
conclusion that in this period aristocratic women encountered few struc-
tural barriers to the acquisition of power in almost every capacity except
the priesthood. If this has appeared to some scholars to suggest a "golden
age," it is because we did not dwell on the carnage that surrounded such
women and to which they contributed.
Further, it has been commonly accepted that class was the decisive factor.
Women derived their power from families intent on deploying all their
human resources on a broad horizontal plane for the immediate acquisition
of wealth and status in an expanding world. They endowed daughters and
widows with wealth in pursuit of strategies dependent on marriage al-
liances and military enterprise. Eleanor Searle would eventually character-
ize this system as "predatory kinship." 7 At the time, Claude Levi-Strauss's
work was just becoming familiar.s Gayle Rubin's powerful essay on the ex-
change of women was still several years in the future.9 Our work turned out
to be compatible with the passion for applying structural anthropology to
medieval situations that would develop in the decade that followed.
To understand the dramatic presence of powerful women in the invasion
period, we relied heavily on the efficacy of law codes devised under
Roman influence but incorporating barbarian customs like bride price. We
felt that the power later granted to queens and, by extension, women of
noble rank further down in the political hierarchy, was drawn from their
membership in the great kindreds of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian

6 We accepted without question the framework established by Marc Bloch in Feudal Soci-
ety, trans. L.A. Manyon, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1970). Today, Bloch's distinction between two feu-
dal ages has been abandoned. No one seems to believe any longer in "the first feudal age,"
and growing numbers of medievalists have come to reject the entire concept of feudalism,
largely because he broadened the concept to encompass every aspect of society. Neverthe-
less, the sense of a shift around the millennium has received very strong support even from
those who do not see it as an abrupt revolution. A selection of the most important argu-
ments in this debate can be found in Barbara Rosenwein and Lester Little, Debating the Mid-
dle Ages (New York, 1998), 105-210.
7 Eleanor B. Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840-1066 (Berkeley,

1988).
8 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston, 1969) had a massive
impact on scholars of the 1970s seeking the aid of other disciplines to make sense of the ac-
tivity of women in history and in society in general.
9 Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in To-

ward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York, 1975), 157-210.

Women and Power through the Family Revisited 19

 age. Relying on legal texts ornamented with anecdotal evidence, we were
able to demonstrate a convergence of marriage settlements, inheritances,
and gifts that enabled some women to accumulate wealth from both natal
and conjugal families and enjoy it without legal hindrance. We attributed
the widely attested presence of women in positions of influence and even
juridical power to the continuing absence of a public authority powerful
enough to curb their private enterprise. We noted briefly that women
sometimes used these advantages for their own ends without predictable
deference to family interests, but emphasized that they drew their impor-
tance from their familial roles.
We saw an evolution in women's ability to inherit and control property
and the powers of jurisdiction and patronage that went with it. Subse-
quently, we proposed, the restoration of public authority, which we dated
roughly to the twelfth century, came at the expense of the great kindreds.
Facing a decline in status due to the rising power of central states and re-
stricted opportunities to enlarge wealth through loot and territorial expan-
sion, aristocratic families adopted new strategies, restricting the propor-
tion of property that daughters or even younger sons might inherit or
receive as dowries and limiting the dower rights of widows to use of a por-
tion of the husband's income without the unrestricted power of alienation.
Soon after, our thoughts on the evolution of a dowry system were ex-
panded and strengthened by an important essay by Diane Owen Hughes.IO
We were all launched upon a stream of social history in which women's
history was an indispensable component-a stream that swelled the origi-
nal river far beyond its original narrow banks.
Even when we wrote, Georges Duby had begun to elaborate his theories
concerning a change in family structure in the late eleventh and twelfth
centuries that had an obvious impact on the position of women, though he
never saw them as active agents in his sources. He proposed that the great
kindreds that had accumulated power by means of a broad horizontal de-
ployment of their branches in the expansive early middle ages began sys-
tematically to prune their family trees, aiming for a tight system of primo-
geniture that would guarantee the consolidation of wealth and power in
the patrilineage.11 It seems to me now that our paper was in some way im-
perceptibly enlisted in what became the reigning theory of recent decades
to fill the gap left by Duby's general inattention to women. I came myself to
believe that we said considerably more on this subject than in fact we did
say. Nevertheless, there can be no serious doubt that our thoughts ran on

10 Diane Owen Hughes, "From Brideprice to Dowry in Mediterranean Europe,"

reprinted in The Marriage Bargain: Women and Dowries in European History, ed. Marion A. Ka-
plan (New York, 1985), 13-58.
11 Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage, trans. Elborg Forester (Baltimore, 1978). These lec-

tures were later expanded in the text of The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of
Modern Marriage in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray (New York, 1985).

20 JoAnn McNamara
the same lines, and I certainly based some of my own later work on Duby's
proposition.
Duby's last work summarily relegated women of the twelfth century to
silence and ineffectiveness, consigning them literally to an isolated domes-
tic sphere.12 These claims have not gained much credence. It is hard to
imagine that anyone with the slightest knowledge of medieval history
would seriously contend that individual women were not significant ac-
tors on its stage throughout the period. Duby himself eluded the problem
by focusing on a peculiar body of texts that included women only as pro-
genitors of noble families. His conclusions have elicited a powerful re-
sponse in a collection of essays edited by Ted Evergates.13 The authors
focus on the broad variety of evidence for virtually every important
province in France to assert that aristocratic women played active roles in
public life. The data collected by the contributors are indisputable, and I
would not be surprised to find that it could be extended to similar situa-
tions elsewhere in Europe. Evergates himself and Amy Livingstone in par-
ticular called into question at least one of the premises on which Wemple
and I based our conclusions: the practice of primogeniture as the center-
piece of aristocratic family strategy and the shift from a horizontal to aver-
tical kinship structure. I would still contend, however, that those families
that did not practice primogeniture, including the Counts of Champagne,
eventually died out while those who did, like the French monarchs, ab-
sorbed their lands through their manipulation of the marriages of
heiresses.14 And no one, as far as I can tell, has challenged the limitations
that developed on women's control of the dower: their inability to alienate
the property they got from their husbands or to bring it away from his heirs
into another marriage.
But I agree that we must free ourselves from the illusion of abrupt struc-
tural change in family development and factor in the vagaries of individual
interests and affections and even miscalculations. A more realistic model is
probably that developed by Martha Howell for the abundant evidence of
bourgeois marriage and inheritance practices in late medieval Douai. 15
There, a shift from conjugal partnership to lineal inheritance becomes evi-
dent over several centuries as hundreds of individuals assessed their eco-
nomic advantages. Nevertheless, I think our original conclusion still
stands: the power of great families declined and that of aristocratic women
declined with them. This might better be expressed, however, by use of a

12 Georges Duby, Women of the Twelfth Century, trans. Jean Birrell, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1998).
13 Theodore Evergates, ed., Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (Philadelphia, 1999).
14 The same meticulous research without the concentration on women confirms these
conclusions: Theodore Evergates, Feudal Society in the Bailliage of Troyes under the Counts of
Champagne, 1152-1284 (Baltimore, 1976).
15 Martha C. Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of
the Low Countries, 1300-1550 (Chicago, 1998).

Women and Power through the Family Revisited 21

 model advanced by Judith Bennett in her book on brewsters in England.l6
The aristocracy certainly continued to be powerful for many centuries, and
women more or less held their position within the aristocracy. But other
powers surpassed them in the high middle ages, and those powers did not
incorporate women. Thus aristocratic women continued to derive power
from their familial status, but that status was reduced as other roads to
power, closed to women, were broadened.
These theories fit neatly into the larger debate over the ongoing rewrite
of the master narrative focused on the reconstruction of the power structure
around the year 1000, that ancient favorite among watersheds. Whether it
should be characterized as a "feudal transformation" or formulated with-
out the offensive construct altogether, I leave to others to contest. Whether
we should imagine the turn as a gradual evolution or a violent revolution is
also a matter of contention. But it seems clear to me that women were dis-
advantaged by the development of more centralized states, a more hierar-
chical church, and an urban society based on the money economy. Where
women continued to inherit from fathers and husbands, their ability to
enjoy their wealth was inhibited by lords able to control their marriages.
The religious life continued to offer an alternative, but the opportunities for
women within the church were severely limited by increasing concentra-
tion of spiritual power within the priesthood. Appointments to royal, comi-
tal, or ecclesiastical governments did not compensate women as they did
their elder brothers. Their exclusion from universities guaranteed their in-
eligibility to enter the new bureaucracies and professions that absorbed
their younger brothers. It is surprising that R.I. Moore, usually so sensitive
to questions of exclusion, could have outlined the transfer of power from
the aristocracy as a class to the clerici so cogently without noticing that this
new ruling class deliberately excluded women. Instead, he mused that the
proclamation of a gender revolution to complete the range of changes that
constituted The First European Revolution could be far awayP
In fact, the publication of the papers presented in 1990 at the Fordham
University conference on "Medieval Masculinities" constituted such a
proclamation. It grew out of the recognition that a revision of the master
narrative to include women must necessarily lead to the perception that
men were gendered beings and that the tension between women and men
and the roles they played against one another must be basic to our under-
standing of all history. My own address, along with a second paper written
a year or so later, tied a shift in the gender system to the effects of the Gre-
gorian revolution.l 8 Today, I would go even further with that analysis and

16 Judith Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-16oo
(Oxford, 1996).
17 R.I. Moore, The First European Revolution, 900-1200 (Oxford, 1998), 4·
18 "The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050-1150," in Medieval

Masculinities, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis, 1994), 3-29; "Canossa: The Ungendered Man

22 JoAnn McNamara
claim that one of the most significant components in the millennia! revolu-
tion was the substitution of gender for class as the basic organizing princi-
ple in the new society. In an ecclesiastical society where offspring did not
officially exist, a certain egalitarianism could prevail among men whose
talents brought them to the highest ranks. This is not to deny that those
who sprang from wealthy and influential families had the best chance to
develop their talents and win the positions they could be trained to fill. But
it does mean that their sex alone endowed them with their initial eligibil-
ity.I9 The imposition of celibacy on the clergy created a womanless space
within which men could discourse and organize. Men even came to define
potency by the repudiation of women rather than by their domination. 2o
With a celibate clergy monopolizing the highest positions, determined
by a combination of educational credentials and political skills, married
men were reduced to second-class citizenship as were encratic (sexually
abstinent) women.21 But married men gained a privileged position once re-
served for the celibate by virtue of a new gender theory emphasizing alter-
ity or complementarity against the old Aristotelian continuum. Ironically,
the theory was first delineated by Hildegard of Bingen, according to Pru-
dence Allen, but it had a mighty future before it in the hands of men deter-
mined to consign women to the sphere of family life while they occupied
the expanding public spaces of the second millennium.22
Throughout the early middle ages, a modified Aristotelian concept of
gender prevailed, enabling some women to play masculine roles while
maintaining their inherent inferiority. Indeed, it still survived in Thomas
Aquinas's justification of women's subservience and, incidentally, their ex-
clusion from the priesthood on the grounds that she was a misbegotten
man. Our painful struggles with construction and deconstruction in the

and the Anthropomorphized Institution," in Render Unto Caesar, ed. Sabrina Petra Ramet
and Donald Treadgold (Washington, D. C., 1995), 131-50. Institutional history has returned
to the idea of the eleventh century as a turning point with renewed appreciation of the rev-
olutionary character of the Gregorian movement, as in Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolu-
tion: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
19 I pushed this thesis further into the high middle ages and lower in the class structure
with "City Air Makes Men Free and Women Bound," in Text and Territory: Geography and Lit-
erature in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia, 1998),
143-58.
2o I have looked for the origins of this turn in the Cluniac movement in "Chastity as a
Male Virtue in Odo of Cluny's Gerald of Aurillac," to be included in a Festschrift for James
A. Brundage.
21 Encratic is taken from early Christian usage, describing a heretical sect that preached

that salvation could not be achieved without strict sexual abstention. It is a convenient term
for anyone who wishes to retain celibacy to describe the unmarried clergy and acknowledges
that chastity is often applied to the monogamous sexually active.
22 Allen first advanced her theory in "Hildegard of Bingen's Philosophy of Sex Identity,"
Thought 64 (1989): 231-41, papers from an earlier Fordham conference. It then found its
place in her larger work, The Concept of Women: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 BC-AD 1250
(Montreal, 1985).

Women and Power through the Family Revisited 23

 last couple of decades have taken us a long way from the simple indigna-
tion we felt in 1970 at Aquinas's formulation.23 As used by Aquinas, the
proposition was subtly altered to fit a social system where gender took
precedence over class. Subsequent studies of classical formulations have
revealed a single-gender system, a continuum that allotted a greater or
lesser degree of virility to every individual. Under this system, females as
well as males were effectively masculine in gender, though the majority
failed to achieve a high degree of potency. Now we can see that a theory
that endows every individual with their own quotient of manliness intro-
duced the probability that females of the right genetic mix would invari-
ably be more manly than males from inferior races or classes. Thus aristo-
cratic descent overcame deficiencies of gender in the early middle ages. In
an issue of Speculum devoted to gender, Carol Clover illustrated this con-
cept convincingly for Scandinavian women of the Viking age. 24 In general,
early medievalists have been prone to accept the proposition that women
could be drafted by their families to play the roles of men where a suitable
male was lacking.zs
When I started to write this chapter, I had no problem with that proposi-
tion and simply intended to draw on the more sophisticated theoretical
principles of recent decades to support our original scheme. But looking
back through the evidence we used, I was struck with the realization that
few of the narrative sources chronicling female exercise of power (as op-
posed to legal sources) seem to bear out this quasi-anthropological scheme.
We did find a handful of marriages being made for the sake of political al-
liances in the Carolingian period, and those, on the whole, ranged from un-
satisfactory to disastrous. The marriages of Judith of Bavaria with Louis
the Pious and of Teutberga with Lothar created far more political furor
than any alliance could have been worth. Charlemagne himself was swift
to repudiate his Lombard wife, and he decided against marrying off any of
his daughters, presumably from fear of creating overpowerful sons-in-law.
Similarly, Otto the Great preferred to endow his daughter with an ecclesi-
astical principality rather than risk a powerful son-in-law. Considering that
he had become emperor in Italy as a result of his wife Adelheid's inheri-
tance from her first husband, which she diverted from her children by that
marriage, we can only admit that he was right to worry. Whatever the rea-
son, it is actually extremely rare to find women deriving power from their

23 When we wrote, collections of quotes from early and medieval Christian sources like

those presented in Julia O'Faolain and Lauro Martinez's anthology Not in God's Image (New
York, 1973) were the latest word in understanding gender relations.
24 Carol J. Clover, "Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Eu-

rope," Speculum 68, no. 2 (1993): 364-88.

zs An excellent example of integrating women into our view of the early medieval power
structure is provided by Karl Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian
Saxony (Bloomington, 1978).

24 JoAnn McNamara
positions in their natal families as daughters or sisters and rarer still to lo-
cate power in motherhood except at the child's expense.
The gender system that developed in the second millennium changed
the nature of woman's position as part of a couple and advantaged the
male, whether celibate or married, by divorcing men from the couple as a
functioning social unit and barring women from the exercise of an inherent
manliness that earlier theorists had recognized in them.26 The homosocial
bond facilitated male commensurability and relegated women to an onto-
logical femininity that effectively barred them from potency.
Obviously, these changes did not fall like a thunderbolt on the stroke of
midnight, 1000. But if the power of women through the family should ac-
tually be understood as the power of women as wives and, eventually, as
widows, a shift in the nature of the couple would have a major impact on
women's power. And this does seem to be the case. Even those women
whose aristocratic connections were among their major qualifications to
marry a highly placed man were significantly without family support in
their public careers. This includes the German empresses, Adelheid and
Theophano, and the Merovingian queens, Brunhild and Radegund.
On the other side, the Merovingian period produced some dramatic in-
stances of queens who had made their way up from slavery through per-
sonal attraction alone. The Carolingian and post-Carolingian periods pro-
vide several dramatic examples of royal widows who appeared to carry a
claim to their husband's crown with them into a new marriage. 27 If I were
now to create an evolutionary scheme, I would say that women's impor-
tance as bearers of familial alliances had little significance until the end of
the first millennium. Their importance as counters in aristocratic family
strategies apparently emerged only when their personal autonomy was re-
duced by parental and public control of the passage of wealth and status,
in effect, when their masculinity gave way to a heightened concept of fem-
ininity.
Now I would propose that manly women did indeed play powerful
roles in the early middle ages, and no one was particularly surprised that
they could do so successfully. They led armies and defended towns. They
sat in judgment and made treaties. They controlled resources and de-
ployed them to gain greater wealth and power. Their female sexuality pro-
vided an armory of seductive weapons whereby they attracted and held
the most powerful men as their husbands. The virility that a single-gender

26 I attempted some outline of these twists and turns in "An Unresolved Syllogism: The
Search for a Christian Gender System," in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men
in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York, 1999), 1-24.
27 The Empress Adelheid is an obvious example. This proposition appears to be the only
explanation for the scandalous marriage of Charles the Bald's daughter Judith with her
stepson, his father's heir to the English crown, and the marriage of Canute with his prede-
cessor's widow, Emma of Normandy.

Women and Power through the Family Revisited 25

 Aristotelian system conferred on them enabled them to use the position
gained by marriage effectively.
As the church slowly imposed the principle of indissoluble monogamy,
the corporate couple became ever stronger.zs Joined as one flesh, their in-
terests were also one. Once formed, the marriage alliance looks like the
only one that a beleaguered potentate could trust, especially if his bride
had no protector but himself. Clovis could kill all his relatives and then
complain that he had no brothers at his side, but his wife was his true part-
ner and confidante. Women like Brunhild and Fredegund, even the sainted
Clothild, were ferocious to everyone but their husbands. Fierce Merovin-
gian queens and saintly Ottonian empresses seemed immune from charges
of sexual infidelity, perhaps because they acted as alter egos to their hus-
bands.
During marriage, women acted as partners and surrogates for their hus-
bands, and after marriage they often stepped into their roles. The most
powerful women were those who took up the government of kingdoms
and the leadership of armies after their husbands were dead. The evidence
does not even bear out the proposition that widows acted for the sake of
their children. Some had no children, and others seem to have had few
scruples in dominating their children, shoving them aside for their political
interests or even eliminating them from their public lives. Occasionally
they went so far as murder. Thus it is the conjugal family that seems to har-
bor the key to women's power, and it is this thread that I mean to pursue
backward in time.
In the partnerships of Germanic kings and queens, a gendered division
of labor is often noticeable while the marriage lasts. The king plays the part
of the violent warrior, stern judge, and mighty ruler. The queen develops
the virtues of sanctity, healing and prayer, intercession for the guilty, and
charity for the weak. This is what we might expect from the Ottonians, as
shown by Patrick Corbet.29 But in my own hagiographic studies, I came to
realize that the same rule applied to the Merovingians whose kingdoms
were not based on any notion of Christian polity.3o Moreover, unless she
elected to spend her widowhood in a convent, a Merovingian queen soon
forsook her softer role when taking on the manly powers of her deceased
husband.
Was this, as the Romans might have conjectured, a reflection of the bar-

28 JoAnn McNamara and Suzanne Wemple, "Marriage and Divorce in the Frankish King-

dom," in Women in Medieval Society, ed. Stuard, 95-124.

29 Patrick Corbet, Les saints ottoniens: Saintete dynastique, saintete royale et saintete feminine

autour de I'an Mil (Sigmaringen, 1986).

30 "The Need to Give: Suffering and Female Sanctity in the Middle Ages," in Images of

Sainthood in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea
Szell (Ithaca, 1991), 199-221, and implicitly in the texts compiled in Sainted Women of the
Dark Ages (with John E. Halborg and Gordon Whatley) (Durham, N.C., 1992).

26 JoAnn McNamara
barity of the northern European peoples, daughters of the Amazons, of
Boudicca? Tacitus, more than any other author, created the barbarian
woman and linked the partnership of women and men to the uncivilized
and wild, to people with no proper sense of boundaries. Wemple and I
began with the idea that despite their personal wealth, women were ex-
cluded from the public life of the Roman Empire and gained access to mas-
culine roles only with the collapse of imperial power. But later research has
shown that Theodosian empresses played the same game in the Christian
Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries that the Ottonian empresses played
in the tenth.31 The sources themselves insist that the model of sainted
queenship throughout that ever-lengthening period now known as "late
antiquity" was Helena, the mother of Constantine, who played the role of
his queen after the execution of his wife.32
Tracking the power of women through the conjugal family, therefore, has
moved us back into the heyday of the Roman Empire and right through
that wall that once divided the master narrative so unshakably into ancient
and medieval history. Can we therefore look at Christianity as an instru-
ment of power for women and insist on revising our chronological frame-
work to incorporate the fourth and fifth centuries? To some extent, I think
we can. The first ecclesiastical legislation aimed at imposing indissoluble
monogamy appears in that period, and missionaries carried the principle
with them into the northern forests. It was contested and partial through-
out the settlement period until the ecclesiastical revolution of the eleventh
century. Only then could we reasonably suggest that there was, at least the-
oretically, some sort of domestic sphere in Europe to which women could
reasonably be assigned.
However, it now seems that Constantine and his immediate successors
did little to interfere with the commitment to monogamous partnerships
that characterized the pagan society of the empire. 33 Inspired by Stoic writ-
ers, Foucault and his followers have situated the Roman turn to couple-
hood in the early empire. 34 Plutarch and Paul alike preached mutual sup-
port and affection between husbands and wives.35 In the first century, the
outcry was very strong against the late Republican aristocratic habits of
seeking family power through marriage alliances and frequent divorce. In

31 Kenneth Holum, Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity
(Berkeley, 1982).
32 JoAnn McNamara, "Imitatio Helenae: Sainthood as an Attribute of Queenship in the
Early Middle Ages," in Saints, ed. Sandro Sticca (Binghamton, 1996), 51-80.
33 Judith Evans Grubb, Law and Family in Late Antiquity: The Emperor Constantine's Mar-
riage Legislation (Oxford, 1995).
34 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York, 1988).
35 JoAnn McNamara, "Gendering Virtue," in Sarah B. Pomeroy, ed., Plutarch's Advice to
the Bride and Groom and a Consolation to His Wife: English Translations, Commentary, Interpretive
Essays, and Bibliography (Oxford, 1999), 151-61.

Women and Power through the Family Revisited 27

 fact the family power and the activity of women as instruments of family
power that I now see as characteristic of dynastic Europe after the turn of
the millennium seems to belong also to the Roman Republican period. But
the last great Roman who used his daughter in this way was Augustus.
From the first century on, Roman sentiment was turned toward respecting
the durability of marriage, the bond of the couple to one another, and the
consent of the parties involved to seal the validity of the marriage. Christ-
ian law as it developed after Constantine put the seal on these sentiments
and gave them legal force.
Moreover, if the fourth century seems to sanctify the role of the wife, the
real power that empresses had over their husbands and, at least indirectly,
their subjects extends much further back. Perhaps it is not entirely coinci-
dental that Tacitus, the chronicler of the terrifying Boudicca, was no less
the narrative creator of the frightful Livia. The partnership of husband and
wife in wielding power and influence was inherent in the nature of the em-
pire itself and if it is to be a marker in the history of the European gender
system, its beginning must be placed in the Augustan age. Thus it would
seem that we must look behind the fourth century for the roots of the
power that aristocratic women carried into barbarian Europe. 36
So the power of women as wives, sharers of a common destiny with their
mates, did not arise out of the collapse of patriarchal institutions when
Rome fell. It was the hallmark of the Roman Empire itself. Of course, the
second great pillar of early western civilization developed in the same pe-
riod. The Christian religion, from the beginning, privileged the couple over
the natal family. Moreover, its female martyrs and ascetics, from at least the
second century on, enjoyed the adjective "manly" outside the boundaries
of the couple. Over the past three decades, this phenomenon has attracted a
number of commentators.37 In the monastic movement, women could be
classed within a third gender in which males and females alike enjoyed the
higher dominance of self-control envisioned by classical authors.3s There,
women could most effectively utilize the power and wealth of their natal
families as abbesses and church administrators (metropolitanae), but the real
enabling factor was their indissoluble marriage to Christ.

36 This was the belief I pursued in two early articles on Christian women in the Roman
family: "Cornelia's Daughters: Paula and Eustochium," Women's Studies 11 (1984): 9-27, and
"Wives and Widows in Early Christian Thought," International Journal of Women's Studies 2,
no. 6 (1979): 575-92.
37 I first grappled with the question of the "manly woman" before there was a developed
gender theory to enlighten my efforts, "Sexual Equality and the Cult of Virginity in Early
Christian Thought," Feminist Studies 3, no. 3/4 (1976): 145-58. Newer thoughts on those lines
have been offered by Gillian Cloke, "This Female Man of God": Women and Spiritual Power in
the Patristic Age (350-450) (New York, 1995).
38 I develop this idea at greater length in "Chastity as a Third Gender in the Work of Gre-
gory of Tours," in Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood, eds., The World of Gregory of Tours (Lei-
den, 2002).

28 JoAnn McNamara
 In the light of this new history of women, the family, and gender, I see
the "middle ages" dissolving into nothing and the more recent "late anti-
quity" giving way to a simple division between the first and second mil-
lennia. Over the course of the first millennium, the European gender sys-
tem underwent a series of shifts and changes. Still, there is a certain unity
to be found in the dramatic presence of women in the master narrative. The
first millennium began with the collapse of a gender system that excluded
women firmly, even from the physical precincts of the Senate in Rome. The
patriarchy of the Republic may be only a myth created by nostalgic impe-
rial subjects. Its aristocracy was largely destroyed by the civil wars, but as
late as the fourth and fifth centuries, we can still see a coterie of die-hard
pagan senators clinging to those hoary traditions while their wives, their
mothers, and their daughters were diverting their fortunes and obliterating
their patrilines.
Thus I envisage European civilization emerging like the Nile out of a
tangle of marsh and tributaries around the turn of the first century B.C.E.
into the first century C.E. A new master narrative will, I hope, privilege the
experiences of women and men over the destinies of institutions and poli-
ties. I believe that the relationships between the two sexes within the ma-
trix of a single gender gives coherence to the entire first millennium. It also
provides a metaphor for the ongoing development of western civilization.
The imperial father and the ecclesiastical bride/mother were sometimes
partners, sometimes rivals. The separation of church and state is a product
of their dual beginning and like a first millennium marriage, it fluctuated
erratically between rivalry and union. Sometimes they played out oppos-
ing roles as ruler and nurturer. Sometimes they competed for the same
powers: acting out the tensions implicit in the dominant single-gender sys-
tem. These institutional conflicts penetrated the real world of men and
women as well; bishops competed with queens as imperial consorts, for
example. This was a society in which women played vital roles in the on-
going history of dynasties. As a consort, the Roman Catholic church-not
necessarily the religion that is shared by the Greek and Russian churches or
converts spread as far away as China and India-shared and supported the
imperial power. And with the death of her first partner, this same church
became in some respects his heir, exercising his power by herself in Rome
and, to strain my metaphor, carrying it to successive husbands among the
Franks and Germans of the north.
Romanization and Christianization are grand terms. They give an intel-
lectual framework to our study of those myriad peoples, slowly accumu-
lating inherited or acquired skills, steadily clearing and populating the
Latin West, hardly hampered at all by that event once known as the fall of
the Roman Empire. It is a story centered on growth and the opportunities
as well as the insecurities that went with it. Above all, it is a master narra-
tive that proposes that in its origins, European civilization was based on

Women and Power through the Family Revisited 29

 the cooperation of men and women whether in the encratic union of a third
gender or the intimacy of married consortium. I started once upon a time
with a vision of women enjoying power in violent times and losing it to the
oppressive security of a more ordered age. I now see that first age as a time
of growth and creativity. It was not Arcadia nor even a golden age, but it
was a time when the sexes collaborated for good or evil more closely than
they did in the millennium that followed. I hope that the feminist move-
ments of our own day may be pointing the way to a newer and better part-
nership.

30 JoAnn McNamara
 CHAPTER TWO

Women and Confession:

From Empowerment to Pathology

Dyan Elliott

In the thirteenth century, western Europe (or, more precisely, Latin Chris-
tendom) witnessed a truly astonishing surge of popular piety. This wave of
religious fervor tended to foreground women, particularly laywomen, in
an unprecedented way. And, women, on the crest of this wave, would in
turn be conceived as confessing subjects.! There are some pragmatic rea-
sons for this representation. First, we have to consider clerical bias. In the
life of any holy woman, the figure of the confessor usually hovers some-
where on the horizon. He could loom large or small, according to his dis-
cretion, since he was generally responsible for recording his penitent's life
and revelations. 2 Then there was the fact that confession was one of the
most basic ways of affirming a holy woman's orthodoxy, and a partisan
confessor would, of course, avail himself of this opportunity. But clerical
representations suggest that the association between women and confes-
sion extends far beyond pragmatism and that confession is positioned at
the very center of female spirituality. Women were not only regarded as es-
pecially prone to frequent confession, but their spiritual lives were seem-
ingly organized around their confessional needs and desires. Yet assuming
that such a sacramental dependency did exist, I would argue that it was a
costly one. For if confession enriched the spiritual lives of some, it brought

I For a Foucauldian discussion of the construction of the "confessing subject" in the con-
text of trials for heresy, see John Arnold's Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing
Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, 2001), esp. 98-no.
z See Dyan Elliott, "Dominae or Dominatae? Female Mystics and the Trauma of Textuality,"
in Women, Marriage, and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory of Michael M. Shee-
han, C.S.B., ed. Constance Rousseau and Joel Rosenthal (Kalamazoo, 1998), 47-77.

31
 infamy and danger to others. My purpose here is to assess the pendulum-
like swing of the association between women and confession, with its
many vacillations from empowerment to disempowerment, and the places
in between.
Two roughly contemporaneous vignettes from northern Europe provide
an interesting point of departure for an exploration of the vexed subject of
women and confession. The first is from the life of Mary of Oignies, as ren-
dered by her confessor Jacques de Vitry shortly before her death in 1213.
The work constitutes one of the earliest notices of the Beguine movement.
It is also considered to represent the ur-life of a female mystic.

If sometimes it seemed to her that she had committed a little venial sin, she
showed herself to the priest with such sorrow of heart, with such timidity
and shame and with such contrition that she was often forced to shout like a
woman giving birth from her intense anxiety of heart. Although she
guarded herself against small and venial sins, she frequently could not dis-
cover for a fortnight even one disordered thought in her heart. Since it is a
habit of good minds to recognize a sin where there is none, she frequently
flew to the feet of priests and made her confession, all the while accusing
herself and we could barely restrain [ourselves] from smiling when she re-
membered something she had idly said in her youth. 3

The invocation of "the habit of good minds" is a direct, albeit silent, quota-
tion from the letter to Augustine of Canterbury attributed to Gregory the
Great. 4 Jacques then proceeds to describe how, every Vespers, Mary would
carefully search her day's activities to ascertain that they had been properly
regulated, and then proceed to make a fearful confession. The various cler-
ics in the community could themselves discover no real faults in Mary's be-
havior: "in this alone we sometimes reprimanded her, seeking consolation
for our own sloth, because she would confess these small sins we men-
tioned above more frequently than we would have wished."5 Mary's exem-
plary confessional habits are framed by the lengthy prologue to her life in
which Jacques reminds Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, to whom the life is dedi-
cated, that when the latter was visiting Liege while on the run from Cathar
heretics, he marveled over how many of the Beguines would weep more
for a single venial sin than the men of his own country would have wept
for a thousand mortal sins. 6

3 Jacques de Vi try, "Vita B. Mariae Oignacensis," in Acta Sanctorum (Paris and Rome: Vic-
tor Palme, 1867)[hereafter AA SS], June, 5:551; The Life of Marie d'Oignies, trans. Margot King
(Saskatoon, 1986), 20.
4 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People 1.27, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and

R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), 92-93.

5 AA SS, June, 5:551; Life of Marie, trans. King, 20-21; cf. AA SS, June, 5:567, Life of Marie,
trans. King, 88.
6 AA SS, June, 5:54T Life of Marie, trans. King, 3·

32 Dyan Elliott
 My second vignette, from the chronicle of the monk Richer of Sens, de-
scribes the nefarious activities of a certain Dominican, Robert of Paris-
now identified as one of the earliest papal inquisitors, Robert le Bougre.
Richer relates that one day a beautiful matron attended Robert's preaching.
Sizing her up, Robert told her to wait for him after the sermon. When she
obediently followed him to a private spot "where she expected to make her
confession to him," he attempted to seduce her. Robert countered her re-
sistance with the threat of having her burned for heresy. On the next day he
made good his threat, interrogating her in public. Placing his hand (which
contained a concealed piece of parchment inscribed with certain magical
words) on her forehead, she was compelled to confess herself a heretic
even though she was innocent of such an offense. The woman was saved
by her son, who fortunately learned of the ruse from someone familiar
with Robert's techniques. Thus appearing at the bishop's consistory where
his mother was to be reexamined, the son wrested the parchment from
Robert's hand, breaking the spell and permitting the woman to protest her
innocence. Robert was perpetually enclosed in a stone prison.?
The two tales may, at first, seem to have little in common. In one, the con-
fession is voluntary; in the other, magically constrained. One concerns an
exemplary sacramental confession; the other, the devolution from sacra-
mental confession into a bogus confession of heresy. Similarly, the clerics in
question are at a variance: a sympathetic confessor versus a ruthless in-
quisitor.
But the stories are nevertheless united by deeper, more enduring struc-
tures. Confessor and inquisitor should in no way be construed as terms of
opposition that cancel each other out. From its inception, the Dominican
order was intended to help detect heresy and supplement the overtaxed
parochial clergy in the hearing of confession. The Franciscans likewise
assumed parallel pastoral and disciplinary functions. The potential con-
flation or perhaps even confusion in functions is suggested by the tale
wherein the matron is drawn into a private interview with the confessor I
inquisitor, anticipating the performance of one kind of confession, but en-
acting another. The respective roles are likewise fixed: the priestly inter-
rogator is, by definition, male, even as the suppliant is female. And both
tales suggest a pronouncedly female affinity for sacramental confession,
intrinsic to which is-what most Christians would agree to be a virtue-a
willingness to accuse oneself.

7 Richeri gesta Senoniensis ecclesiae 4.18, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS (Hanover, 188o), 25:307-308.
On Robert's career, see Charles Homer Haskins, "Robert le Bougre and the Beginnings of
the Inquisition in Northern France," in Studies in Mediaeval Culture (Oxford, 1929), 193-244,
esp. 210 ff. The episode described here is translated on pp. 225-226. Cf. Robert's parallel per-
secution of the matron Petronilla of La Charite in 1236, whom Robert refused to acquit even
after her canonical compurgation. She eventually appealed to the pope successfully (see Lu-
cien Auvray, ed., Registres de Gregoire IX [Paris, 1896], vol. 2, no. 3106).

Women and Confession 33

 Women and Church: Hand in Glove
Auricular confession did not come easily to western Europe. When annual
confession was first made mandatory at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215
(Lateran IV), Christendom required considerable coaching-parish priests
and the laity alike. The new mendicant orders were partially created and
soon streamlined into teams of professional confessors, whose incursions
into the parish structure were vigorously defended by mendicant
spokespersons, such as Bonaventure.s
But the promotion of confession needed something more than just the
right amount of clerical personnel. Professional confessors called out for
professional penitents, and this personnel was very often female. Unlike the
Franciscans, whose lay character was effaced within a couple of decades of
the death of its founder, women, however pious, were frozen in an eternally
lay condition that not only rendered them recipients, versus administrators,
of the sacraments, but further cast the power of sacerdotal sacramentalism
into sharp hierarchical relief. Thus Jacques de Vitry and Thomas of Cantim-
pre, early sponsors of the Beguine movement, were especially intent on
modeling correct confessional habits by emphasizing the exemplarity of
their holy charges. As is evident from the above description, Mary's confes-
sional practices far outstripped the bare requirements of Lateran IV, antici-
pating the recommendation for daily confession that would later be ad-
vanced by authorities such as Raymond of Pefiafort.9 Moreover, this
confessional avidity eddied outward. For example, Mary and the other Be-
guine mystics were miraculously sensitive to the unconfessed sins of others.
Their supernatural radar was akin to the ability that this same group of
women possessed to discern unconsecrated hosts, in keeping with female
eucharistic piety described by Caroline Walker Bynum.JO And indeed, the
two types of sacramental devotion were closely connected insofar as con-
fession was progressively understood as a precondition for communion. 11
Moreover, Beguine spirituality, generally, did not only corroborate the
newly emphasized importance of confession, but accommodated most as-

8 Norman Tanner eta!., ed. and trans., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London, 1990),
Lat. IV, c. 21, 1:245. Also Bonaventure, Opusc. XIV, "Quare fratres minores praedicent et con-
fessiones audiant," inS. Bonaventurae . .. Opera Omnia (Florence, 1898), 8:375-385.
9 See Raymond of Pefiafort, Summa de poenitentia et matrimonio 3·34-6 (Rome, 1603; reprint

Farnham, Hants., 1967), 442.

10 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to

Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987), 141, 228-29.

11 As Louis Braeckmans demonstrates, this sequence was not mandatory until the Coun-

cil of Trent. Even so, the association between confession and communion was already dis-
cernible in the mid-thirteenth century with the writings of Albert the Great, Thomas
Aquinas, and Bonaventure (Confession et communion au moyen age et au concile de Trente [Gem-
bloux, 1971], 14-15, 42-43, 46, 47). Note that many eminent confessors' manuals do not
make this association (p. 72).

34 Dyan Elliott
pects of the penitential system. Mary of Oignies can again be seen as repre-
sentative here. Her vigorous acts of penance, both on behalf of herself and
others, emphasized that certain works on earth could affect one's destiny
in the afterlife. The visions and supplicatory interventions of Beguine mys-
tics on behalf of individuals in purgatory not only secured the still nebu-
lous existence of this supernatural zone of expiation but also helped to fill
church coffers by reifying the need for indulgences and masses for the
dead.1 2 This kind of sponsorship, though perhaps beginning with the Be-
guine movement, did not stop there. Not surprisingly, it is a prominent
part in the profile of sanctity for the few women who actually achieved for-
mal canonization-mystics such as Bridget of Sweden and Frances of
Rome.1 3
In fact, the institutional gains in the foregrounding of female confes-
sional practice were so palpable that a skeptic might wonder whether the
practice was invented to suit the exigencies of the church's sacramental
program. But I doubt that clerical masterminds like Jacques de Vitry in-
vented women's confessional virtuosity, nor do I think it originated with
the Beguines. There is fragmentary but compelling evidence that this ten-
dency was already present in female spirituality. For instance, when the
penitential movement was beginning to make itself felt, one of the first life
confessions on record was made by the German Empress Agnes to Peter
Damian. (Many historians would argue that she had a lot to be sorry for in
forwarding the goals of the papacy against the Empire.) Her care was such
that she began to review her faults from the age of five-that is, two years
before an individual is capax doli (capable of deceit) and considered truly
culpable.14 By the same token, the relations between Robert of Arbrissel

12 On Beguine mysticism and its role in validating purgatory, see JoAnn McNamara's im-
portant analysis arguing that certain economic shifts unfavorable to women between 1050
and 1150 transformed the role of the pious female from almsgiver and patron of the living to
intercessor on behalf of the dead: "The Need to Give: Suffering and Female Sanctity in the
Middle Ages," in Images of Sainthood, ed. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Szell, 199-221, esp. 213ff.
Cf. Barbara Newman's analysis of women's important intercessory role on behalf of souls in
purgatory, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature
(Philadelphia, 1995), 109-36.
13 A number of Bridget's Revelations turned on this capacity. See particularly her vision of
her deceased husband, Ulf, in Revelaciones Extravagantes 56, ed. Lennart Hollman, Samlingar
utgivna av Svenska Fornskrifsallskapet, ser. 2, Latinska Skrifter, vol. 5 (Uppsala, 1956),
178-79. Cf. article 32 of Bridget's process, concerning her ability to see the destiny of souls
(Acta et processus canonizacionis Beate Birgitte, ed. Isak Collijn, Samlingar utgivna av Svenska
Fornskrifsallskapet, ser. 2, Latinska Skrifter, vol. 1 [Uppsala, 1924-1931]). Also see Barbara
Obrist, "The Swedish Visionary: Saint Bridget of Sweden," in Medieval Women Writers, ed.
Katharina Wilson (Athens, Ga., 1984), 234-35. Cf. Frances of Rome's visions of purgatory
described in the life written by her confessor, John Matteotti inAA SS, March, 2:172, and her
process of canonization in Placido Tommaso Lugano, ed., I processi inediti per Francesca Bussa
dei Ponziani (1440-1453) (Vatican City, 1945), art. 40, 81-82; art. 43, 85.
14 Henry Charles Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church
(London, 1896), 1:196.

Women and Confession 35

 and the Countess Ermengard of Brittany in many ways anticipate the spir-
itual intimacy prevailing between later holy women and their confessors.ls
A socially constructed reading of this female drive is also close at hand. In
the high middle ages, everything was expanding except women's social
role, which was proportionately contracting. Men, socially enabled, could
search the world. Women, socially hobbled, could search their souls. From
the negative standpoint, women could be understood as victims who
could not resist the pressures toward internalizing the rhetoric of blame
that extended from Eden to medieval wives' manuals. From the positive
standpoint, however, they could be seen as finally turning this disparaging
rhetoric to their advantage.
Nor should these exemplary Beguine penitents be regarded as mere
pawns in the church's larger sacramental agenda. Scholars such as John
Coakley have made the mutual gains of confessor and female penitent suf-
ficiently clear that my comments in this context will remain gestural.16 The
individual priest provided the mystic with an experience of the Godhead
that was intrinsic to his office: paralleling the priest's Christological role in
the course of the mass, the confessor, admitted to the secrets of the peniten-
tial forum, had the privilege of "knowing as God," and this authority was
frequently played back to him by his penitents. The confessional relation-
ship also provided the priest with the direct experience of divine alterity
since the female penitent's mystical revelations were frequently revealed in
the context of sacramental confession. Indeed, some clerical authorities,
such as Jean Gerson, would assume confession to be the natural medium
through which these revelations were disclosed.17 But certain shared
propensities make the confessional relationship potentially self-indulgent
for both priest and penitent. From Gerson's perspective, clerics were often
prone to the vice of curiosity, which he also characterizes as a quintessen-
tially female character flaw. Women "itching with curiosity" are more in-
clined to turn away from the truth, both embracing and generating novel

1s See Rene Nidurst, "Lettre inedite de Robert d' Arbrissel a Ia comtesse Ermengarde,"
Bibliotheque de !'Ecole de Chartes 3,5 (1854), esp. 232-35.
16 See particularly John Coakley's "Gender and the Authority of the Friars: The Signifi-
cance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans," Church History
6o (1991): 445-60, and idem, "Friars as Confidants of Holy Women in Medieval Dominican
Hagiography," in Images of Sainthood, ed. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Szell, 222-46. Also see
Elizabeth Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York, 1994),
esp. pt. 3, 13g--6o; Elliott, "Dominae or Dominatae?" and the recent collection of articles as-
sessing the relations between various holy women and their assisting clerics, Gendered
Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters, ed. Catherine Mooney (Philadelphia, 1999).
17 See Jean Gerson, De probatione spirituum, in Oeuvres completes, ed. Palemon Glorieux
(Paris, 1960-1973), 9:184; trans. Paschal Boland, in The Concept of"Discretio spirituum"in John
Gerson's "De probatione spirituum" and "De distinctione verarum visionum a falsis" (Washing-
ton, D.C., 1959), 39·

36 Dyan Elliott
teachings.IB Scholarly curiosity, a vice Gerson would frequently stigmatize
in his writings, would render clerics especially susceptible to the novelty of
female revelations.19

Female Hand Out of Patriarchal Glove

Thus far I have been examining ways in which women's confessional prac-
tice could be harnessed by the church in support of the penitential system
to the advantage of both parties. But there are also ways in which women
could make tactical use of confession to achieve certain personal goals that
were frequently at odds with the interests of patriarchal authorities. Such
an instance occurs in 1276 when Philip III sent two representatives on a
delicate mission. He wanted to know if his beloved second wife, Mary of
Brabant, had had a hand in poisoning his son by his first marriage, as his
enemies claimed. At the time, there were three local "pseudo-prophets,"
two of whom were male. But the third and most efficacious of these sooth-
sayers was a Beguine named Isabella, whom some scholars have since as-
sociated with the controversial stigmatic, Elisabeth of Spalbeek. The bishop
of Laon, a relative to the chamberlain, Peter of Broda, who was behind the
campaign to malign the queen, got there earlier and had the advantage of
questioning Isabella first. Indeed, by the time the other representative, the
abbot of St. Denis, arrived, she refused to answer his questions altogether.
Moreover, when the bishop returned to court, he likewise rebuffed ques-
tions, claiming that he had heard her testimony under the seal of sacra-
mental confession. The exasperated king's retort was that he hadn't sent
the bishop to hear her confession, but to learn the truth. A second applica-
tion was made to the prescient Beguine, on which occasion she testified to
the queen's innocence.2o

1s Gerson, De probatione, in Oeuvres completes, 9:184; trans. Boland, in Concept of 'Oiscretio

spirituum', 37; cf. De examinatione doctrinarum, in Oeuvres completes, 9:468, 473·
19 See particularly his Contra curiositatem studentium, in Oeuvres completes, 3:224-49. A sec-
tion of this has been translated in Steven Ozment's, Jean Gerson: Selections from A deo exivit,
Contra curiositatem studentium and De mystica theologia speculativa, Textus minores, 38 (Lei-
den, 1969), 26-45.
20 William of Nangis, Gesta Philippi tertii Francorum regis ann. 1276, in Recueil des historiens

des GauZes et de Ia France, ed. Danon and Naudet (Paris, 1840), 20:502. It is the French version
that claims the Beguine was more renowned than the other two prophets. Also see Ch.-V.
Langlois, Histoire de France illustree, ed. E. Lavisse (Paris, 1901), 3, 2: 104-5; Ernest McDon-
nell, Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture, with Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene
(New Brunswick, N.J., 1954), 331-32. For an identification of the Beguine with Elisabeth of
Spalbeek, see A. Mens, "L'Ombrie italienne et l'ombrie brabanc;onne: Deux courants re-
ligieux paralleles d'inspiration commune," Etudes franciscaines annual supplement 17
(1967), 27, n. 1. Elisabeth's life appears in the Catalogus codicum hagiographicorum Bibliothecae
regiae bruxellensis (Brussels, 1886), pt. 1, 1:362-78. Also see W. Simons and J. E. Ziegler,
"Pheonomenal Religion in the Thirteenth Century and Its Image: Elisabeth of Spalbeek and

Women and Confession 37

 Clearly the bishop cannily chose to avail himself of the seal of confession
in order to frustrate the king's will. By agreeing to make her confession to
the bishop, Isabella was either the unwitting dupe of his machinations or
she was complicit with his aims. The fact that she initially refused to re-
spond to the king's second messenger, the abbot of St. Denis, suggests the
latter because the seal of confession only bound the priest-not the peni-
tent. But temporary complicity with episcopal goals was, in itself, oppor-
tunistic. Since Isabella would eventually help to clear the queen's name,
she may have fallen in with the bishop's plan momentarily in order to buy
time. Presumably, prophecy has its own internal timing that may or may
not be aloof from the exigencies of politics.
Isabella demonstrates a tactical use of sacramental confession that per-
mitted her subtly to control and time her intervention in public affairs. A
second instance, also from the thirteenth-century Beguine milieu, demon-
strates ways in which the confessional relationship itself could be tactically
deployed. The chronicler Richer balances his account of Robert le Bougre's
deception by immediately following it up with a parallel example of fe-
male treachery. A certain woman of the city of Marsal in the archdiocese of
Metz, appropriately named Sybil, was envious of the visibility achieved by
the local Beguines, and self-consciously imitated their spiritual practices in
order to con the entire diocese.21 Her web of deception extended from the
parish priest, to the bishop, to both mendicant orders-who were avidly
preaching the virtues of Sybil. Some highlights of her fraudulent repertoire
were her three-day raptures, during which she ostensibly refused food and
drink, only to indulge herself late at night;22 conversations with angels
(after which she spread aromatic spices to simulate the angelic presence);
struggles with demons (punctuated by the feathers of torn pillows); and
conversations between demons and angels (with Sybil ventriloquizing
each voice). For obvious reasons, most of Sybil's chicanery was perpetrated
in privacy, with the admiring populace on the outside of a closed door, but

the Passion Cult," in Women in the Church, ed. W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood, Studies in Church
History, vol. 27 (Oxford, 1990), 117-26.
21 Richer, Gesta 4.9, MGH SS, 25:309-10.

22 For another spectacular case of fraudulent raptures, see Dyan Elliott, "The Physiology
of Rapture and Female Spirituality," in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. Peter
Biller and Alastair Minnis (Woodbridge, 1997), 169-71. Note that fraudulent raptures were
not invariably evil. See Caesarius of Heisterbach's account of how a cleric feigned raptures
to win the trust of a heretical ring of theologians who were eventually burned at Paris (Dia-
logus miraculorum 5.22, ed. Joseph Strange [Cologne, 1851], 1:306; trans. H. Von E. Scott and
C. C. Swinton Bland, The Dialogue on Miracles [London, 1929], 1:350). But generally, feigned
miracles were associated with false prophets-biblical and those again anticipated in the
period surrounding Antichrist. See especially Peter d' Ailly's discussion of feigned miracles
in De falsis prophetis. Note, however, that he grants that sometimes false prophets can per-
form true miracles "for sometimes grace is infused in hypocrites by God not only for doing
good works but also for performing miracles or predicting the future" (printed in L. E. du
Pin's edition of Gerson's works, Opera omnia [Antwerp, 1706], vol. 1, col. 521).

38 Dyan Elliott
there was one important exception. Sometimes in the evening she would
sally forth dressed in a hairy demon-suit, which she fondly referred to as
her larva (specter or hobgoblin), in order to terrify the populace with vocif-
erous threats against that pious virgin Sybil. Thus disguised, she once
railed against Sybil's intervention on behalf of a recently deceased individ-
ual, reputed to be wicked, whose soul she swept up in a three-day rapture.
The "demon" complained that Sybil's tearful suffrages and prayers had
managed to preserve the deceased from the flames that he had so richly
deserved. And the demon had been so looking forward to leading his
"friend" around his delightful field, "always scattered with the dew of sul-
fur and fire; there are my happy reptiles and viperous animals, and ser-
pents, and snakes, and toads ... [where] I live with my beloved friends and
make jokes." Sybil's sartorial aspirations were not limited to representa-
tions of the demonic, but extended to material expressions of celestial
glory. On the day after her successful demonic caper, the bishop entered
her chamber to discover her rosy-faced, as if sleeping, beneath a subtle
white material that did not seem to have been made by human hands. In
answer to the bishop's questions, her host volunteered that Sybil was often
discovered in this mode after her celestial raptures.23 The angels them-
selves provided her with such otherworldly ornaments, in addition to
making her bed. Clearly, Sybil's jaded imitation of Beguine spirituality
would be immediately put to shame by the mere presence of a Christina
Mirabilis, 24 but no such apologies are in order for her inventiveness, which
is worthy of a Jean de Meun.
Sybil was eventually exposed while simulating a debate between angels
and demons that ostensibly occurred while she was in rapture. Someone
looked through a chink in the door to discover her holding this remarkable
colloquy while making the bed herself. Sybil's short-lived success was en-
tirely contingent on the assistance of her "familiar" priest-who secretly
provided her with food and drink to sustain her during her raptures and
acted as her intermediary with the world. It is not surprising that a vernac-
ular source claimed that the whole ruse was initiated so the couple would
have the opportunity for sexual dalliance. 25 But it is much more likely that

23 Cf. an incident in Sulpicius Severns's life of St. Martin in which an individual, who
claims communication with angels, promises to appear in angelic robe that will prove "the
power of God." This beautiful robe of unidentifiable substance disappears when the at-
tempt is made to lead him before Martin (Vie de Saint Martin c. 23, ed. Jacques Fontaine,
Sources Chretiennes, no. 133 [Paris, 1967], 1:304-7; trans. Alexander Roberts, The Life of Saint
Martin, Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Church, vol. 11 [Ann Arbor, 1964],
15).
24 See Thomas of Cantimpre's The Life of Christina of Saint-Trond, trans. Margot King
(Saskatoon, 1986). Also see Barbara Newman's discussion of Christina's career in "Pos-
sessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth
Century," Speculum 73 (1998): 463-68.
2s See Gesta, MGH 55, 25:308, n. 1.

Women and Confession 39

 theirs was not an affair of the heart, but the kind of relationship that would
later be stigmatized by Gerson in his denunciations of "those who cherish
the false miracles and revelations of these little women so that they will ob-
tain profit or honor."26 Thus, in addition to the exchange of sacramental
power and supernatural services, we can see the deployment of the
prophet for profit. Through her coalition with a small-scale patriarch, here
signified by the "familiar" priest, Sybil took on and befuddled a large-scale
patriarch, here represented by the bishop.
This point could have been made with practically any partnership be-
tween a mystic and her attendant priest. But I have chosen this rather
provocative example because notable failures make visible the shared com-
ponents that are seamlessly displayed, and hence, frequently concealed, in
notable successes. Moreover, I want to draw attention to a fact that was
never lost on the higher clergy: that the would-be mystic and attendant
cleric legitimized one another in their respective roles-regardless of
whether the mystical experiences at the center of their relationship were le-
gitimate.

A Torn Glove, A Festering Hand (or Gloves Off?)

The very factors that render confession (or, in the largest sense, the peni-
tential system) efficacious as a potential source of female empowerment
contribute to its currency as a mechanism of disempowerment and con-
tainment. We need only remind ourselves of the conditions under which
confession was introduced to ascertain why this should be so. When Lat-
eran IV first made annual confession mandatory for Latin Christendom,
this was part of its many-pronged initiative to counteract the threat of
heresy. Even if confession was not precisely instituted with the detection of
heresy in mind, a point that scholars such as Pierre-Marie Gy have vehe-
mently urged, there is little doubt that within a couple of decades this un-
derstanding was annexed to confessionP
Moreover, women's prominent role as penitents would necessarily cast
their less tractable sisters into unfavorable relief. Consider, for example, the
well-known case of the Beguine mystic, Marguerite Porete. Her indiffer-

26 Gerson, Centilogium de impulsis, no. 65, in Oeuvres completes, 8:143. This invective is
grounded in the comparison of these fraudulent contemporaries with the female prophet
whom Paul condemned, despite her endorsement of his mission. He was thus persecuted
by her followers in an effort to protect this valuable asset (Acts 16.16).
27 See Pierre-Marie Gy's "Le Precepte de la confession annuelle (Latran IV, c. 21) et lade-
tection des heretiques: S. Bonaventure et S. Thomas contre S. Raymond de Pefiafort," Revue
des sciences philosophiques et theologiques 58 (1974): 444-50. Note, however, that in Bonaven-
ture's later analysis of c. 21, one of his arguments is that regular confession helps priests to
discern heretics (" ... ut discernantur obedientes ab inobedientibus vel hareticis per obser-
vantiam talis statuti," Bonaventure, Opusc. XIV, "Quare fratres minores praedicent et con-
fessiones audiant," in Opera, 8:376).

40 Dyan Elliott
ence to presenting herself in the context of some recognizable confessional
relationship-whether from the perspective of a stable confessional prac-
tice or a confessor to vet and record her revelations-ultimately meant that
she would end up at a different confessional tribunal altogether: an inqui-
sitional tribunal for heresy. When the cleric, Guiard de Cressonessart, at-
tempted to defend Marguerite before this dire forum, thus providing her
with suitable clerical cover, she rebuffed his overtures. 28
But compliance with Lateran IV could furnish as many difficulties for
women as resistance to its strictures. From the beginning, there were prob-
lems with the observation of the celebrated seal of confession. An ominous
exemplum by Jacques de Vitry, for example, relates some awkward confes-
sional exchanges that occurred between the early Dominicans and various
religious women in the Low Countries.

Certain of the said women showed their infirmities and temptations and the
failing of their fragile nature to those men just as they would to religious, so
that they would be helped specially by their prayers. But those men not
only suspected them with temerity to be otherwise but in different lay and
clerical congregations ... they preached that the renowned communities of
holy virgins were really prostitutes rather than religious groups and thus
the defects of the few were poured out to all ... [and] they scandalized
many. 29

In the case of the Prussian mystic, Dorothea of Montau, a frank disclosure

of her revelations to an unsympathetic priest in the course of confession led
directly to an accusation of heresy, stimulating a handful of clerics to insist
on her immolation.3o
Furthermore, female volubility, however commendable, was almost im-
mediately problematized, particularly among the mendicants. The Francis-
can statutes of the general chapter at Narbonne in 1260 already determined
that the frequency of women's confession should be limited. Noncompliant
friars would be denounced to their superiors by well-wishing brethren.31

2B The documents for the trial of Marguerite and Guiard have been edited by Paul
Verdeyen as "Le Prod~s d'inquisition contre Marguerite Porete et Guiard de Cressonessart
(1309-1310)," Revue d'histoire ecclesiastique 81 (1986): 47-94. Verdeyen also includes select
chroniclers who discussed the trial.
29 Jacques de Vi try, The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de
Vitry, ed. Thomas Frederick Crane, Folklore Publications, no. 26 (London, 1890), no. 8o, 36.
The confessors in question are, in all likelihood, marked as mendicants-not only because
they are designated preachers but also because their presence in the area was in order to
preach and hear confession.
30 I discuss this episode in "Authorizing a Life: The Collaboration of Dorothea of Montau

and John Marienwerder" in Gendered Voices, ed. Mooney, 187-8.

31 Michael Bihl, ed., "Statua generalia ordinis edita in capitulis generalibus celebratis

Narbonae an. 1260, Assisii an. 1279 atque Parisiis an. 1292. Editio critica et synoptica," in
Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 34 (1941): Narbonne, 1260, 6.5, 70. Also see Donato Soli-
man, II ministero della confessione nella legislazione dei frati minori, Studi e testi Francescani, no.

Women and Confession 41

 Though these constraints were partially inspired by limited resources in
personnel, fear of intimacy between the sexes was also undoubtedly an
issue. St. Francis's reluctance to assume responsibilities for female orders is
a case in point. A parallel caution is apparent on a more local level as well;
the first rule of Francis already barred friars from receiving vows of obedi-
ence from women.32 In a similar vein, Bonaventure would develop an elab-
orate twelve-point series of justifications for the Franciscan refusal to pro-
mote the Third Order, the sixth of which turns on the risk that pastoral
responsibilities to women entail_33
But even those who worked hardest to foreground female virtuosity in
the penitential system could rarely restrain their fears of the potential dan-
gers that might arise from the privileged rapport between confessor and
penitent. Despite his impeccable credentials as a promoter of the Beguine
movement and his personal spiritual indebtedness to the influence of Lut-
gard of Aywieres, Thomas of Cantimpre's anxieties are especially palpa-
ble.34 In the course of his work Concerning Bees, in which he ostensibly sets
out to write a history of the Dominican order but does so by meandering
amid various contemporary scandals, a potentially staggering insight
emerges: that many clerics are more tempted by women who appear to
have embraced a religious way of life. Likewise women, who would auto-
matically spurn the attractions of secular men-stimulated by the devil
and spurred on by twisted minds-frequently cannot resist the allure of
holy men, monks, or other ecclesiastics. Thomas associates the perverse
logic informing such attractions with Pliny's ruminations on the nature of
the pig which, when agitated by the furies of lust, will rush at any person
dressed in white.3s

28 (Rome, 1964), 145. Cf. fourteenth-century efforts to limit female frequency of confession
(147>-
32 Caietanus Esser, Opuscula sancti patris Francisci Assisiensis (Rome, 1978), c. 12, 265. (This
is what is, in fact, referred to as the first rule. The original rule, which Francis presented to
Innocent III in 1209 or 1210, has not survived, however.) See Soliman, II ministero della con-
fessione, 145. Also see the general council of Narbonne in 1260, which forbids a friar to as-
sume responsibility for a female house and repeats the first rule's prohibition against receiv-
ing a vow of obedience from a woman (ed. Bihl, "Statua generalia," 6.6, 70-71).
33 See Bonaventure, Opusc. 17, pt. 2, q. 16, in Opera, 8:368-9.
34 Thomas's vita of Lutgard has been translated by Margot King, The Life of Lutgard of Ay-

wieres (Saskatoon, 1987). See particularly 2.32, 59, where she is referred to explicitly as mater
spiritual is. On Thomas and his instructions regarding confession in De apibus, see Alexander
Murray, "Confession as a Historical Source in the Thirteenth Century," in The Writing of His-
tory in the Middle Ages, ed. R. H. C. Davies and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford, 1981), 286-305.
35 Thomas of Cantimpre, Bonum universale de apibus 2.30.44 (Douai, 1627), 348-49; cf.
Pliny, Hist. nat. 10.63. Thomas also enlists a porcine analogy in the preceding warning to
women to be resistant to masculine suasions even as the Virgin initially was to the angel
Gabriel's words. Citing Aristotle, he invokes the behavior of the sow who, as long as she is
holding her ears rigid, is resisting the male pig's sexual overtures. A relaxation in the ears
corresponds to her sexual receptivity (2.30-42, 346-47). For more on the attraction between
clerics and holy women, see 2.30.19, 329; 2.30-46,351-53.

42 Dyan Elliott
 This not very edifying reflection is buttressed by an example concern-
ing a friar named Dominic, who was a monk at the same monastery as
the order's founder. The friar's reputation for sanctity had so impressed
the king of Castile that when a certain prostitute claimed that she could
seduce him, the outraged monarch threatened to execute her for slan-
der-a charge that forced her to make good her boast. The prostitute ac-
cordingly attended Dominic's sermon, during which she feigned a tear-
ful, credible conversion. The cleric felt exhilarated at such puissant proof
of his impact as a preacher. He heard her confession and advised her to
assume a more seemly manner of dress. For her part, the woman simu-
lated the demeanor of a humble and obedient penitent to perfection. This
performance was crowned with an exaggerated sorrow, punctuated by a
becoming flood of tears, though the reason for her bitter compunction
was veiled in mystery. Eventually, at the preacher's urging, she revealed
the reason for her grief: that she needed to sleep with him once in order
to be saved. Now fully alerted to her ruse, the preacher nevertheless
promised to fulfill her desire at an appointed place and time. She accord-
ingly summoned the king to witness the downfall of his saintly favorite.
They arrived to find the holy man, in the spirit of the hagiographical or-
deal, on a bed of live coals, from where he invited the woman to join him.
The king's men rushed up to coax him out of the fire, while the prostitute
took his place, being burned at the king's orders.36 Thomas thus advises
confessors to behave with circumspection, keeping their comments brief,
harsh, and rigid.

Nor should they be the less avoided if they seem to be of good character
and honest life; because by how much more religious they are, by that much
more do they entice; and under the guise of religion the vitals of lust [viscus
libidinis] especially flourish. Believe me: I speak as a bishop [i.e., as bishop's
penitentiary] and an expert.37

The capstone for such warnings recalls a recent and lamentable example
from Cambrai, this time involving two individuals of good will. A cleric,
chaste from youth, was a canon in a conventual church. Out of zeal for pas-
toral work, he relinquished his prebend for a parish, in which he piously
toiled for seven years. But then on a fateful day, the sixty-year-old virgin
who was accustomed to wash the priest's hair shirt entered his bedroom
unattended: "Before the woman and the priest separated, they were both
deprived of their long preserved lily of virginity and chastity." The woman

36 Thomas of Cantimpre, De apibus 2.30.45, 349-51. For other instances in which saintly

chastity is demonstrated through parallel ordeals involving fire, see Dyan Elliott, Spiritual
Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, 1993), 70, 77, go, 129, 272.
37 Thomas of Cantimpre, De apibus 2.30.46, 352. Note that when he claims to speak as a

bishop he means as someone who hears confessions on behalf of the bishop.

Women and Confession 43

 soon died of sorrow; the man, reveling in his vice, went from bad to
worse. 38
Thomas's hortatory examples, though effective, lack the sophistication of
some later treatments. The literature of spiritual discernment, which flour-
ished in the later middle ages, would provide a slightly more dignified
analysis on the transformation of spiritual into carnal love by interpreting
it in terms of demonic occlusion. Hence Henry of Freimar censures the ini-
tially innocent, but all the more dangerous, impulse that will seek private
and excessive conversations with a devout person.39
The manuals produced to assist the clergy in hearing confession would
eventually become replete with detailed advice for deflecting the tempta-
tions afforded by female penitents. Raymond of Pefi.afort had instructed the
priest to make a woman sit across from him and to avoid looking into her
face. Gerson concurs, but adds that the confessor should assume a stance in
which he is least likely to be aroused-even if this entails full prostration.
By Antoninus of Florence's time, women were only to be confessed in pub-
lic with witnesses. Nor should priests tarry, rather imposing a strict time
limit on women "who wish to confess excessively frequently.... [The
priest] should always use harsh and terse words with them rather than gen-
tle."40 Antoninus further condemns priests who hear daily confessions,
thinking it a waste of time and source of scandal. Similar views would be
expressed by John Nider. 41 Therefore, if we approach confession from the
vantage point of social control or the kind of Foucauldian surveillance asso-
ciated with power, the above discourse-grounded in a concern with cleri-
cal purity and peppered by antifeminism-would add an additional layer
to these mechanisms of constraint. The net result would inevitably work to
the diminution of female power.
Thus far, I have outlined some of the ways that women could be derailed
from the careful observance of the sacrament through outer constraints.
But there were also dangers that allegedly arose from within, whereby an
exacting penitent might sink too deeply into the sacrament-inadvertently
crossing a subtle barrier beyond which a virtue can be deformed into a
vice. We can already see this transformation beginning in the thirteenth

38 Ibid., 2.30-47, 353·

39 See Henry of Freimar, De quatuor instinctibus, in Insignis atque preclarus de singulari trac-
tatu de quatuor instinctibus (Venice, 1498), 4th sign, fol. 6u. Henry claims to be following the
contours of Augustine's De trinitate and the Ps.- Augustinian treatise De singularitate clerico-
rum.
40 Raymond of Pefiafort, Summa de poenitentia 3·34·30, 464-65; Gerson, De cognitione casti-
tatis, in Oeuvres completes, 9:63; Antoninus of Florence, Confessionale Anthonini (also known
by its first word, Defecerunt) 3.11 (Paris: Jehan Petit, 1507?), fol. 28r.
41 Antoninus of Florence, Confessionale 3.11, fol. 28v. Cf. John Nider's Confessionale sue
manuale confessorum fratris Johannis Nyder ad instructionem spiritualium pastorum valde neces-
sarium (Paris, n.d.), see 2.1, 6th rule. (This edition is unpaginated.)

44 Dyan Elliott
century when theologians such as Thomas Aquinas went to work on Gre-
gory's characterization of the "habit of good minds to recognize a sin
where there is none" by asking if someone could go so far as to confess a
sin that he or she had not really committed, concluding that this was im-
permissible.42 This problematization of confessional practice continued
apace among pastoral theologians, such as Jean Gerson, under the rubric of
scrupulosity or pusillanimity. 43 Gerson's discussion is grounded in the
premise that fear is a passion, and that someone predisposed to this pas-
sion is especially prone to suffer from scrupulosity of conscience. 44 Com-
plexion might further be a contributing factor. If an individual had thin,
cold blood, and their natural moisture was dominated by phlegmatic hu-
mors, he or she would be prone to fear and pusillanimity, which was fre-
quently associated with a weakness of the heart. 45 Nor is Gerson oblivious
to the potential good inherent in a fearful disposition. To this end, he fore-
grounds the statement in Proverbs "Blessed is the man that is always fear-
ful" (Prov. 28:14) in his writings on spiritual discernment.46 And yet, the
devil, disguised as the angel of light, works on the passions in different
ways. For instance, he is capable not merely of exciting lust but also re-
pressing it, hence simulating spiritual tranquility and sweetness. 47 Simi-
larly, pusillanimity can also masquerade as a virtue. The naturally timor-
ous suffer from defects in their complexion that are open to demonic
exploitation. The ensuing fear should thus be fled rather than embraced.4S
From Gerson's perspective, a classic case of needless scrupulosity is an
individual's concern about insufficient attention during prayers-some-
thing that, to Gerson's mind, is perfectly understandable, and hence excus-
able, considering human frailty. Even so, there are many who think them-
selves insufficiently contrite, wearing themselves and their confessors out
over such light sins-hence putting their own deficiencies ahead of God's
clemency. Such individuals who "from infirmity have accidentally exces-
sively fluxible phantasies lfluxibiles nimis habent phantasias] and are dis-

42 Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super sententiis, bk. 4, dist. 21, q. 2, art. 3, resp. and resp. ad

4 (Paris, 1947), 4: 1066, 1067.

43 On scrupulosity, see Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation

(Princeton, 1977), 156ff.

44 Gerson, De remediis contra pusillanimitatem, in Oeuvres completes, 10:381. An alternative

title to this work is De scrupulis conscientiae. Also see the French translation of this treatise in
Oeuvres completes, 8:386-398. Glorieux is unclear as to which version came first, but believes
that the Latin was written before 30 July 1405 (see his introduction to the French, 8:386). Ger-
son returns to the problem of scrupulosity in many different contexts. See, e.g., his Regulae
mandatorum no. 8, 9:97; De signis bonis et malis, 9:163; De praeparatione ad missam consideratio
3, 9:37-39; De meditatione cordis c. 17,8:82, 83; Traite des diverses tentations de l'ennemi, T346, ff.
45 Gerson, De passionibus animae c. 18, c. 20, in Oeuvres completes, 9:17, 20.

46 Gerson, De distinctione revelationum, in Oeuvres completes, 3:49.

47 Gerson, De remediis contra pusillanimitatem, in Oeuvres completes, 10:378.
48 Ibid., 10:379.

Women and Confession 45

 tracted willy nilly from their proposition by a light breeze of wind to other
things" are not in any way culpable. 49
But there were other dangers implicit in scrupulosity that were more
costly than either the penitent's niggling self-torture or the confessor's ex-
asperation. The impulse to confess every sinful or potentially blasphemous
thought could have the effect of reinforcing the thought.SO Even more
alarming ramifications occur if an individual manages to convince him- or
herself that a morally neutral act is sinful or that a venial sin is a mortal sin.
Such convictions become self-fulfilling prophecies because the conscience
constitutes a tribunal unto itself. To go against what conscience prompts is
sinful, even if its dictates are wrong. 51 Moreover, while Gerson is constantly
reproving the scrupulous that their fearfulness puts divine clemency and
even divine grace in doubt, what is also at issue is the priest's power of ab-
solution. 52
In other words, the scrupulosity of the Beguine milieu had been an im-
portant prop in promoting the sacrament of confession, but by the time
Gerson was writing, this same trait had come to undermine the sacrament.
Mary of Oignies exhibited precisely the kind of sorrow over the commis-
sion of a venial sin that Gerson would target as suspect. The confessional
profile of Mary's contemporary, Lutgard of Aywieres, was even more
vexed, at least when regarded through a late medieval lens. Not only was
insufficient attention over the saying of her hours a constant concern for
Lutgard, but this anxiety was not restricted to her own religious practice.
She also (correctly) predicted a plague on the nuns who served in the infir-
mary of her community for similar inattention. 53 Moreover, Lutgard's fears
for herself were eventually assuaged, not through confession, but through
the mysterious arrival of a shepherd from afar who reassured her, in the
presence of her entire community, that she was pleasing to God. 54
Already in Gerson we find a predisposition to be especially concerned

49 Gerson, De remediis contra pusillanimitatem, in Oeuvres compli~tes, 10:381. This exculpa-

tion does not apply to those who are simply carnally minded and slothful (pp. 381-82). Cf.
Gerson's parallel evocation of the recitation of the hours and scupulosity (De praeparatione ad
missam, in Oeuvres completes, 6th consideration, 9:43). See Dyan Elliott, Fallen Bodies: Pollu-
tion, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1999), 27-29.
5o Gerson, De remediis contra pusillanimitatem, in Oeuvres completes, 10:382, 385.
51 Ibid., 10:381; cf. Regulae mandatorum no. 7, 9:96; no. 8, 9:9T no. 23, 9:100.
52 Gerson, De remediis contra pusillanimitatem, in Oeuvres completes, 10:381. Tentler points
out that the tradition of consolation of the scrupulous is at least partially intended to build
up the church's power against the overscrupulous who have doubts regarding sacerdotal
power (Sin and Confession, 158).
53 Thomas of Cantimpre, The Life of Lutgard 2.17, trans. King, 45-46; 3.2.14, 90, and 3.22,
101-2; cf. the way Margaret of Ypres was likewise obsessed with the saying of her hours
(Thomas of Cantimpre, The Life of Margaret ofYpres c. 20, trans. Margot King, 3d ed. [Toronto,
1999], 35-36).
54 Thomas of Cantimpre, Life of Lutgard 2.2.17, trans. King, 45; cf. idem, De apibus 2.52-4-
482-83.

46 Dyan Elliott
with scrupulosity in women. In a confessional context, scrupulosity in-
creases the contact between confessor and penitent, enhancing the
chances of a gradual devolution from spiritual to carnallove.ss But even
more important, Gerson created a framework for stigmatizing and even
pathologizing scrupulosity. Predictably, others would move in and gender
this pathology as female. When reviewing the reasons for excessive
scrupulosity in his Consolation of a Timorous Conscience, John Nider leads
off with a discussion of complexions. Women, particularly old women
and individuals with a melancholic complexion, are especially liable due
to excessive coldness. In women especially, a certain constriction of the
heart attends their fearfulness, and they frequently tremble, while the
members attached to the heart are the more afflicted. The voice falters and
the lips quaver, as is evident with respect to the woman with flux who
fearfully approached Christ for healing (Mark 5:25), who is thus rendered
as something of a type for scrupulosity. This association invites the resur-
facing of a suppressed subtext for the entire issue of scrupulosity. For the
original context of Gregory the Great's "habit of good minds" was over
the question of whether a menstruating woman should be permitted tore-
ceive communion-a context withheld in Jacques de Vitry's later appro-
priation of this characterization. Although Nider does not invoke Gregory
explicitly at this point, his analysis nevertheless unerringly rejoins scrupu-
losity with the flawed, bleeding, female body. Elsewhere, Nider will in-
voke Albert the Great, who alleges that the combination of woman's lack
of heat and dominant moisture "into which terrible things are poured"
render her naturally fearful. In addition to this complective propensity,
other factors, such as retention of corrupt menstrual blood, inordinate vig-
ils, fasting, care, solitude, or deep thought can also intrude to stimulate
the disease of mania or melancholy (which is distinct from a naturally
melancholic disposition)-the main symptom for which is excessive fear-
fulness. Certain individuals-referred to as energuimini or, more conve-
niently still, lunatics-are affected by the movement of the moon, which
manipulates the moisture in their heads causing them to howl with fear.
Demonic temptation can also wreak havoc with a healthy complexion, af-
flicting it with a black jaundice (calera nigra) likewise associated with
fear. 56 When differentiating scrupulosity from the other passions, Nider
makes the telling point that "it is that much more dangerous by the extent
55 Cf. the comments regarding the scruples that arise in the course of meditation that ap-

pear in one manuscript of De meditatione cordis, in Oeuvres completes, 8:83-84. Also see his ac-
count of a recently converted matron who, in her fervor, was directed by her intense attrac-
tion to various religious who might easily have taken advantage of her, had they not been
stronger (De simplificatione cordis, 8:95). See his condemnation of priests whose carnal lust in-
terferes with the performance of God's work-the example evoked being a confessor who
prefers a beautiful over an ugly penitent, or young over old, or male over female penitent
(De signis bonis et malis g:166).
56 John Nider, Consolatorium timorate conscientie (Paris, 1502?) 3.4-5 (unpaginated).

Women and Confession 47

 to which it is falsely reckoned a virtue."5 7 He will accordingly trim Gre-
gory's "habit of good minds" with Aquinas's interpretation of "good" in
terms of the perfection of justice.ss
The disinvestment in women as confessional exemplars, associated with
Jean Gerson and sustained in the work of John Nider, interestingly corre-
sponds with a parallel, but independent, Wycliffite critique of the sacra-
ment. Gerson was a prime mover at the Council of Constance in 1415, dur-
ing which views attributed to John Wyclif, including his rejection of
auricular confession as a papal invention and a demonic snare, were con-
demned.59 The same council consigned Hus, a continental exponent of
Wycliffite views, to the flames. But their followers would continue to reject
what had become the standard penitential package of the high middle
ages. Thus a vernacular Wycliffite treatise on confession excoriates the
practice, pointing out that Christ neither practiced confession nor taught it;
that both Mary Magdalene and Peter were reconciled without confession,
as was the woman taken in adultery. Nor was confession a practice of the
early church. Confession as it came to be known in the later middle ages
was nothing other than the invention of Innocent III and a device of the
Antichrist.60 Another Wycliffite treatise asks if it were at all likely that a
God who values chastity "ordeyned sich a lawe to men, that prestis &
wymmen shulde turne her faces to-gider, & speke lustful thoutes & dedis,
which myght do harme to hem bathe; but this lawe gyueth occasioun to do
synne as it fallith oft"? 61 In other words, both orthodox and heretical expo-
nents were similarly apprised of how the sexual risks implicit in confession
might far outstrip any possible spiritual benefits.

The Iron Glove: Confession and Inquisition

Nider's Consolation of a Timorous Conscience presents scrupulosity as a po-
tentially lethal affliction, which could generate the life-threatening sin of
despair.62 His colorful Formicarium, moreover, adduces data in support of
this point. A nun from Nuremberg named Kunegond was in constant fear
that her confession was insufficient-a concern that Nider describes as nat-
ural in the fragile sex. The inordinate fear that she had committed a mortal
sin, compounded by excessive fasts, not only caused her confessors to be
concerned for her sanity but actually delivered her to death's door. Fortu-
nately, God effected a timely removal of the fear of damnation a mere three

57 Ibid., 3.2.
58 Nider, Consolatorium 3.16; cf. 3.15.
59 Session 15, arts. 9-11; Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councii,1A22-23.
6o F. D. Matthew, ed., The English Works of Wyclif, EETS o.s., 74 (London, 188o; rev. ed.,

1902; reprint, Millwood, N.Y., 1973), 328-29.

61 Ibid., 330.
62 Nider, Consolatorium 3.2.

48 Dyan Elliott
days before her death. The pious widow and prioress, Catherine de West-
husen, afflicted by the identical concern, was likewise liberated under sim-
ilar circumstances.63
Yet there were also instances in which the inward disposition of scrupu-
losity could lead to external dangers that, to the modern mind, might seem
even more pressing than the fear of damnation. In particular, the propen-
sity for confession and self-accusation could lead to the kind of self-incrim-
ination that would facilitate the merging of the penitential forum with its
harsher double: the inquisitional forum against heresy.64 At this juncture, I
should add that from a theological standpoint, even the confession of an
unrepentant heretic is protected by the seal of confession. In theory, he can-
not be denounced by his confessor. Canonical authorities, however, in par-
ticular, Raymond of Pefiafort, believed that a heretic had relinquished the
privilege of sacramental secrecy and that his confessor should denounce
him to the inquisition-a view that, however contested, would remain in
circulation due to the immense popularity of Raymond's manual for con-
fessors.65 We have also seen that at least one of Dorothea of Montau's con-
fessors availed himself of Raymond's fiat.
But female scrupulosity often dispensed with the need for clerical de-
nunciations. Indeed, following the basic contours of William of Auvergne's
juristic analogy of the sacrament of penance, the perfect penitent was both
culprit, accuser, arraigner, and prosecutor of him- or herself. 66 Even so, we
should attempt to differentiate between two basic groups. First, there were
those who, in the spirit of Gregory's "habit of good minds to recognize a
sin where there is none," would accuse themselves without any real war-
rant. Stephen of Bourbon, a Dominican inquisitor who was active in France
in the 1230s, tells of a noblewoman in a city where he was conducting
heresy trials. "Holy and innocent, she approached me saying that she of-
fered herself to me for burning as a heretic worse than all the others who
were burned for infidelity, as she was thinking the worst things about the
articles of the faith and the sacraments." When she acknowledged that she

63 Nider, Formicarium 2.12 (Douai, 1602), 175-76. Cf. a similar instance, this time concern-
ing a monk (176-77).
64 On the parallels between these two confessional fora, see Annie Cazenave, "Aveu et

contrition. Manuels de confesseurs et interrogatoires d'inquisition en Languedoc et en Cat-

alogne (XIIIe--XIVe siecles)," in La piete populaire au moyen iige, Actes du 99e Congres Na-
tional des Societes savantes, Bescan<;on, 1974 (Paris, 1977), 333-52.
65 Raymond of Peftafort, Summa de poenitentia 3·34.60, 490-91.
66 William of Auvergne, De sacramentis (De sacramento poenitentiae) c. 3, in Opera omnia, 1:

461; cf. 486; see also William's earlier Tractatus novus de poenitentiae of ca. 1223, where he out-
lines a similar plan (c. 1, in Opera, 1:571 [570-92]). Also see Nicole Beriou, "La Confession
dans les ecrits theologiques et pastoraux du XIIIe siecle: Medication de !'arne ou demarche
judiciare?" in L'Aveu: Antiquite et Moyen Age, Actes de Ia table ronde organisee par !'Ecole
fran<;aise de Rome avec le concours du CNRS et de l'Universite de Trieste, Rome 28-30 mars
1984 (Rome, 1986), 275-76.

Women and Confession 49

 never consented to these thoughts, he convinced her of her innocence and
she left happy.6 7 The scrupulosity of Aude, whose tortured doubts about
the Eucharist soon brought her to the attention of Bishop Fournier's inqui-
sition, seems to be of the same caliber. 6B Both women were fortunate in that
inquisitional attention ultimately resulted in exculpation. But this was not
invariably the case. For instance, Constance de Rabastens, one of the sev-
eral female prophets who arose during the papal schism anticipating Joan
of Arc, was sufficiently concerned about the orthodoxy of her revelations
that she submitted them to the inquisitor of Languedoc. She was ultimately
imprisoned for her scrupulosity.69
A second category might consist of women who were actually impli-
cated in heresy, in which case the impulse to confess would be injurious to
their personal safety, however salubrious for their souls. It is also worth
noting that in the primarily female heresy of the Guglielmites, several
women came forward without being summoned and confessed to the in-
quisition voluntarily, while none of the men didJO The testimony of the
Olivite Na Prous Boneta, moreover, gives the impression of the kind of
preparation for confession advocated by the clergy so that the penitent can
easily "vomit forth her virus"-as Gerson would have it.71 Her "confes-
sion," proffered without contrition or repentance, however, places her
somewhere at the crossroads between the well-prepared penitent and the
sacrificial witness at the center of a martyr's passio.n
But however we characterize the different kinds of confession, it is im-
portant not to be misled by the medieval emphasis that confessions be
made sponte-voluntarily or even spontaneously. Medieval confessions
were not "spontaneous" self-disclosures in the modern sense of the word.
Rather, they were sponsored or elicited self-disclosures that are shaped
within a patriarchal structure. The occasion and framework for any confes-
sion are institutional, as are the officers responsible for assessing the culpa-

67 Anecdotes historiques, legendes et apologues tires du recueil inedit d'Etienne de Bourbon, ed.
A. Lecoy de la Marche (Paris, 1877), no. 227, 196.
68 See Peter Dronke's discussion of her case in Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical

Study of Texts from Perpetua (d. 203) to Marguerite of Porete (d. 1310) (Cambridge, 1984),
21J-14.
69 See Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski's "Constance de Rabastens: Politics and Visionary Ex-

perience in the Time of the Great Schism," Mystics Quarterly 25 (1999): 147-68.
70 See, e.g., the testimony of Petra de Alzate and Katella de Gioziis, who sought out the in-

quisitors and confessed spontaneously without having been cited, in Marina Benedetti, ed.,
Milano 1300: I processi inquisitoriali contra le devotee i devoti di santa Guglielma (Milan, 1999),
n6-2o. They had been explicitly warned by the ringleader of the heresy, Mayfreda, not to
reveal their heretical beliefs to their confessors. She further enjoined them to consult with
her before seeing the inquisitors in the event that they were summoned. The inquisitors or-
dered that they reveal their errors in sacramental confession.
71 See Gerson, De confessione castitatis, in Oeuvres completes, 9:63.
72 See the translation of her testimony by Elizabeth Petroff, in Women's Visionary Literature

(Oxford, 1986), 284-90.

50 Dyan Elliott
bility of penitent and defendant alike. However, these self-disclosures also
emerge in the course of a relationship. Thus, according to Antoninus of Flo-
rence's Confessionale, "In truth, every confession occasions a revelation
which cannot exist without the revelation of one and the perception of an-
other."73 The roles are determined in a fixed and gendered hierarchy. And
yet, like all relationships, confession can be easily derailed and trans-
formed by an imbalance in power.
The incident of Robert le Bougre and his nameless female victim can be
read as a potential repository for social anxieties on the subject of confes-
sion-probing and possibly critiquing the essence of the confessional rela-
tionship. The occurrence lends itself to analysis as the monkish chronicler's
encoded characterization of the mendicant orders and their auspicious
(though resented) papal authorizations or even their lead in the newfan-
gled learning of the schools. On a more figurative level, however, the
episode can be read as a commentary on the relation of writing and mo-
nopolistic learning to coercive power. The fact that the central act of con-
juring is effected by a cleric wielding an obscure piece of writing requires
little commentary from a lay perspective: inquisitional registers were per-
manent records of individual and familial guilt. In a context where a re-
lapse into heresy meant death at the stake and the detection of heretical an-
cestry meant confiscation of inheritance, these records were feared every
bit as much as the inquisitors themselves.74 The parchment further effaces
the boundaries demarcating the penitential forum and the heretical forum
and, ultimately, between the heretic's stake and the martyr's pyre, suggest-
ing the illusory nature of such divisions.
But in addition to the overt magic of the parchment, there are more sub-
tle forces at work. First, there is the female predisposition to confess,
whether this is understood in terms of complexion or social construction.
This predisposition has the effect of minimizing the distances between the
dutiful confessee, the heretic, the blameless defendant, and the shameless
seductress. And then there is the woman's beauty that, from a clerical per-
spective, is capable of working its own magic-transforming a preacher
into a confessor, a confessor into a seducer, a seducer into an inquisitor, and
an inquisitor into an agent of the devil. Like any relationship, confession
was potentially transformative, frequently incalculable, and never safe.

73Antoninus of Florence, Confessionale Anthonini, fol. 32v.

74See James Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in
Languedoc (Ithaca, 1997), 25-51; Arnold, Inquisition and Power, 82-88.

Women and Confession 51

 CHAPTER THREE

"With the Heat of the Hungry Heart":

Empowerment and Ancrene Wisse

Nicholas Watson

Introduction: Embodiments of the Inner Self

One of the spaces in which we experience ourselves as having, or lacking,
power is the one we call the inner self: the space of interiority. Interiority is
not the same, historically, as individuality. On the contrary, in Christian, as
in Platonic and Stoic, thought, the inner self is in some respects less "indi-
vidual" than the outer because closer to the image of God in which it was
made. Even now, to experience the self as powerful means to experience it
stereotypically, within known models. Yet an abiding strand of western
thought still associates this space with the hidden, conceiving it as inacces-
sible to others or even to the self itself, and gazing at its imagined separate-
ness with a mixture of wonder and fear. For Augustine, a thousand years
later for Julian of Norwich, and five hundred years after that for Freud, the
self remains exemplary and extraordinary at the same time. Whole literary
and social institutions have formed around the need to expose this self to
view, to help it achieve self-understanding, to conquer it from without, or
to theorize the interpenetration of self and world or God. Elsewhere in this
book, Dyan Elliott writes about one such institution, confession, and there
are others, from the genres of confessiones, meditationes, and soliloquia (de-
veloped under the sign of the adage nosce teipsum) to psychoanalysis and
Foucault's anatomizations of selfhood.l

1 See David N. Bell, The Image and Likeness: The Augustinian Spirituality of William of St.
Thierry, Cistercian Studies Series 78 (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1984); Charles Taylor, Sources of the
Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); Michel Foucault, The Order of
Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1994).

52
 The most anti-institutional of these institutions is the way of life of the
hermit or anchorite. Whether as public prophets, private gurus, or potently
silent signs, hermits are the nearest Christian culture has come to figuring
interiority as a bodily mode of being. Martyring their social and sexual na-
tures, hermits manifest to the world the essential integrity of the inner, lend
fleshly clothing to the spiritual. Indeed, a certain glamour even today at-
taches to the word hermit, sustained by the reiteration of a cluster of
metaphors, narratives, and paradoxes that are basic to eremitic identity. Re-
jecting community, including the monastery, hermits live "out" of the world
in a space named the "desert," in which they challenge themselves, the soci-
ety they have left behind them, and the forces of good and evil that struggle
for jurisdiction over both. Heroic warriors, spiritual athletes, extremists
whose existence both critiques and in their eyes embodies the meaning of
the church as a whole, hermits remind us of the limits of the dichotomies
that construct worldly living: soul and body, death and life, intent and act,
ideal and institution, powerless and powerful, female and male. After ape-
riod of glory as the desert fathers and mothers of the early church, memori-
alized in the Vitae patrum and Cassian's Collationes, hermits achieved a sec-
ond apogee in the reformation of the twelfth century,2 but thereafter
diminished in importance: the flexibility of their outward lives increasingly
held suspect, their status increasingly subsumed by the friars and devout
laity, the topoi that had seemed to guarantee their integrity increasingly in-
voked satirically, as signs of hypocrisy.3 Since about the fifteenth century,
hermits have had more purchase as images than as living practitioners. As
such, however, they continue to wield authority as symbols of perfection or
wisdom, as embodiments of the secrets of the heart. The spiritual director,
the wise old woman, the romantic artist, the analyst, the social worker-all
these ministers to selfhood have links to the figure of the hermit.
2 For the desert fathers, see John Cassian, Conferences, trans. Colm Lubheid (New York,
1985); Apophthegmata Patrum: The Desert Christian: Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabeti-
cal Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward (New York, 1980). For the twelfth-century eremitic re-
vival, see Henrietta Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism: A Study of Religious Communi-
ties in Western Europe, 1ooo-nso (New York, 1984); Giles Constable, The Reformation of the
Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1996).
3 The last English hermit of international stature was Richard Rolle, the hermit of Ham-

pole (d. 1349). William Langland's complex attitude to hermits at the end of the fourteenth
century is a clear sign of their decline, given their earlier English prestige. In the prologue to
Piers Plowman are "Eremites on an hep with hokede staues," who "Wenten to Walsyngham,
and here wenches aftir" (a heap of hermits with hooked staffs went to Walsingham, their
mistresses in tow). These are contrasted with "ankeres and eremites pat holdeth hem in here
selles" (anchorites and hermits who keep to their cells). See Derek Pearsall, ed., Piers Plow-
man by William Langland: An Edition of the C-text, York Medieval Texts (London, 1978), Pro-
logue 51-52, 30. For a study, see Ralph Hanna III, "Will's Work," in Written Work: Langland,
Labor, and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia, 1997),
23-66. We await publication of Paulette L'Hermite-Leclercq's study of the history of an-
choritism, but see "La Reclusion volontaire au moyen age: Une institution religieuse spe-
cialement feminine," in La condici6n de Ia mujer en Ia Edad Media (Madrid, 1986), 136-54.

Empowerment and Ancrene Wisse 53

 This chapter reflects on ways in which the power associated with the
hermit was and was not available to medieval women, by looking at per-
haps the most influential eremitic text composed in England, the early
Middle English Ancrene Wisse. Ancrene Wisse, probably a product of the
first two decades after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, was written by
an anonymous but highly educated cleric who may have been a Domini-
can, on behalf of a small group of women living as anchorites in the West
Midlands. 4 As much a study of the ideals represented by its implied read-
ers as the guide for them it purports to be-ancrene wisse means "informa-
tion about anchoresses" as well as "instructions for anchoresses" -the
work is as complex a product of the spiritual aspirations and tensions of its
era as we have, especially as these relate to women. Not even Jacques de
Vitry's pioneering attempt to modernize female sanctity, the Vita of Mary
of Oignies, comes close.s On the one hand, Ancrene Wisse testifies to the de-
cline of institutional opportunities for religious women from the late
twelfth century on-addressed as it is not to nuns but to one of the infor-
mal groups Herbert Grundmann nicknamed "semi-religious"-and occa-
sionally seems to share the antifeminist assumptions some scholars think
were influential in that decline. 6 During the last fifteen years in particular,
feminist readings of the text have often presented it in a negative light, as
another example of the bad faith clerical writers are thought to have kept
with their women readers, sometimes even as a frank expression of misog-
yny.? On the other hand, as we shall see, there is quite a bit that is gen-
uinely radical about the work, from its refusal to make its readers submit to
a vow of obedience, a specific habit, or a religious rule-a refusal that does
as much to identify them with the eremitic tradition as the work's many
references to the Vitae patrum-to its claims for the state of perfection they
embody and will attain in eternity if they persist in their way of life.
Ancrene Wisse does describe its female readers as fragile vessels, who
have to exert the utmost vigilance in guarding their lives from their carnal
female natures: as anchoresses, like the recipient of Aelred's De institutione

4 For an introduction, see Bella Millett, "Ancrene Wisse," the Katherine Group, and the Wooing

Group, Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle English Literature 2 (Cambridge, 1996).
5 See Jacques de Vitry, Two Lives of Marie D'Oignies, trans. Margot King, Peregrina Trans-
lations Series (Toronto, 1998); also Brenda Bolton, "Thirteenth-Century Religious Women:
Further Reflections on the Low Countries' 'Special Case,"' in New Trends in Feminine Spiritu-
ality: The Holy Women of Liege and Their Impact, ed. Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn
Wogan-Browne, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 2 (Turnhout, 1999), 129-58.
6 Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between
Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women's Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth
Century with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre
Dame, 1995).
7 An example of this vein of criticism is a scholarly howl of anguish by Sister Ritamary

Bradley, chillingly entitled "In the Jaws of the Bear: Journeys of Transformation by Women
Mystics," Vox Benedictina 8 (1991): 116-75. See also Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devo-
tional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville, 1990).

54 Nicholas Watson
inclusarum (one of Ancrene Wisse's main sources) who is expected to focus
intently on guarding her virginity, a sealed state in need of the protection
of the sealed cell that makes an anchorite an anchorite.s By reminding its
readers of the "weakness" of their female flesh, which cannot endure much
hardship, it repeatedly represents the heights of heroic asceticism as re-
served for men only, deferring to the ascetic machismo of so much twelfth-
century spirituality.9 Although it gives them a limited role in instructing
their servants and visitors, Ancrene Wisse further envisions the readers as
recipients of teaching more than as teachers of others, explaining their use-
fulness as "anchors" of the church in terms of the effectiveness of their
prayers and silent example. There is much talk of the exemplary silence of
the Virgin, and almost no hint of the role of the hermit-as-prophet that ed-
ucated male hermits, from Peter Damian to Richard Rolle, could play. More
positively, the work presents the anchoresses with another, erotically
charged image of their receptive femininity, by picturing Christ as their
lover and spouse and stressing their need to choose him, as he has chosen
them. But it tends to present even this choice in terms of worldly self-inter-
est rather than spiritual idealism and omits much of the more elevated
mystical language found in some of its sources.
Yet Ancrene Wisse also addresses its readers in a different way: as tough-
minded, ambitious descendants of the heroic solitaries of the early church,
attempting something the author himself cannot: as hermits, who are also
women but whose gender is not of fundamental importance, and for
whom enclosure is less a flight to safety than a stage on which the infinite
desert of the inner self can be explored. The setting for parts III and IV of
the work, on the inner self and its temptations, is specifically this desert,
pictured as a refuge and place of prayer, but also as a place of persecution
and combat, full of desert birds who represent aspects of the anchoritic life
(the pelican, the sparrow, the nightingale) and desert animals who repre-
sent perversions of that life and the trials it encounters (the fox, the wolf,
the lion, the pig, the unicorn, the bear, the serpent, the scorpion). In facing
these animals as fiercely as her life demands, the anchoritic reader is im-
aged not so much as male (as in Barbara Newman's "virile woman") but
rather as genderless, as an exemplary figure for all Christians, whose less
rigorous lives still force them to battle temptation in their more muffled
ways.lO Thus part V of Ancrene Wisse, perhaps the first treatise on confes-

8 Aelred of Rievaulx, A Rule of Life for a Recluse, trans. Mary Paul MacPherson, in Treatises;
the Pastoral Prayer, Cistercian Fathers Series 2 (Spencer, Mass., 1971).
9 Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century, 151-53, 193-94 points out that twelfth-cen-
tury asceticism was moderate compared with that of earlier periods, pointing to a "human-
izing" trend in attitudes to self-inflicted suffering, while citing examples of admiration for
such suffering.
10 Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and

Literature (Philadelphia, 1995).

Empowerment and Ancrene Wisse 55

 sion in Middle English, is explicitly addressed to a general audience-be-
fore part VI, on penance, which describes the anchoritic life as a crucifixion,
reverts to the notion that the reader is uniquely burdened and privileged
by suffering, and part VII, on love, which is full of spousal imagery, refem-
inizes her and reencloses her, this time not in a cell but a bower of spiritual
bliss.
This chapter analyzes the implications of this shuttling in and out of gen-
dered language, both for the text's first readers and for their late medieval
descendants, in an exploration of the influence of the trope of the hermit on
religious women's constructions of the inner self. I have two main areas to
cover.
First, I revisit the question of the status of the anchoritic readers in the
author's eyes, arguing that, despite the ambiguous institutional position he
finds and leaves them in and despite his use of misogynistic rhetoric, he re-
ally does conceptualize them as the heroes he makes them out to be:
women on the cutting edge of the spiritual movements of his time, whose
lives are at once supremely elevated over others by their difficulty and
supremely appropriate for others to know about and imitate. For the au-
thor, anchoresses are a harbinger of the breakdown of the hierarchical dis-
tinction between clerical and lay that his own status as (perhaps) a friar
could also imply, and that was a long, slow outcome of the twelfth-century
reformation: a conduit between the world of the professional religious,
bound by their distinctive rules and habits, and the wider community to
which anchoresses belonged, as laypeople and members of the secular
communities that fed them; a conduit, equally, between these communities
and the ascetic spirituality of the desert fathers.
Second, I suggest how Ancrene Wisse itself functioned as such a conduit,
by looking at several late medieval derivatives of the text addressed to a
more general readership, in some of which the anchoritic life has become
portable, the cell internalized and made a figure for the heart. In these
works, we see the translation of the eremitic mode into a structuring
metaphor for devout gentry or bourgeois subjectivity, as the process of lai-
cization announced by Ancrene Wisse and vigorously pursued by the late
medieval English church reaches its climax, a century before the Reforma-
tion.11

Tender Flesh and Spiritual Athletics

Ancrene Wisse treats the anchoresses' lack of affiliation with a religious
order-a matter the work suggests that they viewed with anxiety-by in-

u This chapter is a companion piece to another essay on which it draws extensively: "An-
crene Wisse, Religious Reform, and the Late Middle Ages," in A Companion Guide to "Ancrene
Wisse," ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge, 2003).

56 Nicholas Watson
structing them, in its Introduction, to tell inquirers who want to know if
they are black or white, Cistercians or Benedictines, that they belong to the
"order of St. James" because they follow the second half of James's defini-
tion of religio (James 1:27b) and "from pe world witen him deane and un-
wemmet" (keep themselves from the world, pure and unstained) (f.
3a.12-13/ 50).12 This is a fascinatingly ambiguous move, on the one hand
consigning the work's readers to a position on the institutional margins of
the religious life, on the other making their very lack of formal institutional
affiliation into a spiritual advantage, a sign of the dominance in their lives
of what the work calls the "lady" rule of love over the "servant" one of
mere practice:

Pawel, pe earste ancre, Antonie and Arsenie, Makarie and te opre, neren ha
religiuse and of Sein lames ordre? Alswa Seinte Sare and Seinte Siclecice,
and monie opre swucc, hewepmen ba and wummen, wiO hare greate mat-
ten and hare hearde heren: neren ha of god ordre? And hweCler hwite oCler
blake-as unwise ow easkeCl, pe wene() pe ordre sitte i pe curtel-Godd wat
noCleles ha weren wel baCle: nawt tah onont claC'les, ah as Godes spuse singe()
bi hire seoluen, Nigra sum set formosa, "lch am blac and tah hwit," ha seiCl. (f.
3b.2-12)

[Paul the first anchorite, Anthony and Arsenius, Macarius and the others,
were they not religious, and of St. James's order? Also St. Sarah and St. Syn-
cletica and many other such, both men and women, with their rough sleep-
ing-mats and their harsh hair shirts: were they not of good order? And
whether they were white or black-as the foolish ask you who believe that
the order lies in the habit-God indeed knows that they were truly both:
though not in their clothing, but in the sense God's spouse sings of herself,
Nigra sum set formosa (Canticles 1:5): "I am black and yet white," she says.]
(50)

The author cuts anchoritic readers off from active roles as preachers, as-
sociating those roles with the other half of James's definition of religio
(James 1:27a)-how it consists of helping "widewen and federlese chil-
dren" (widows and fatherless children), as do "prelaz and treowe
preachurs" (prelates and true preachers) when they aid a soul "pe haueo
forloren hire spus, pet is Jesu Crist, wiO eni heaued sunne" (who has lost
her husband, that is Jesus Christ, through any mortal sin) (f. }.a.n-20/50).
As Bella Millett argues in an article on "Ancrene Wisse and Books of Hours,"
in making these gestures, he aligns his text with the informal rules for an-

12 Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Ancrene Wisse are from The English Text of

the "Ancrene Riwle": Ancrene Wisse: Edited from MS. Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402, ed.
J. R. R.
Tolkien, EETS o.s., 249 (1962). Here and elsewhere, punctuation and capitalization
have been modernized. Translations are adapted from Anchoritic Spirituality: "Ancrene
Wisse" and Associated Works, trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (New York, 1991),
with separate page references.

Empowerment and Ancrene Wisse 57

 chorites, Hospitallers, and Beguines that were coming into being all over
Europe in the early thirteenth century. He does something similar when, in
part I (on devotions), he advocates use of the Little Hours of the Virgin in
preference to the full office, a clear sign of his laicizing tendencies.l3 Still,
the passage also presents anchoresses as members of a mixed community
of radical religious, whose emphasis on interiority is so firm that they un-
derstand questions about their clothing in a purely spiritual sense. At this
moment of trial, moreover, as they defend the paradoxical and ungendered
community to which they belong, the passage offers them voices: abrasive,
riddling voices, intended to throw their interlocutors into confusion, by
challenging their assumptions with "wundur and sullich" (strange and
wonderful) (f. 3a-4/ 50) words. In the twelfth-century Libellus de diversis or-
dinibus, hermits are seen as holy for their very diversity and lack of "order,"
for their role as reminders of the limits of institutional religion. 14 Here, it
seems, Ancrene Wisse is thinking in the same way about anchoresses.
It is not, of course, immediately clear how far anchoresses themselves
could take advantage of this idealizing of their institutional marginality, al-
though scholars who argue that English women tended to become an-
choresses in fairly large numbers because there were so few regular places
in convents need to take into account the extent to which the institutional
tenuousness of the anchoritic life could be a reason for embracing it.lS Nor
is it immediately obvious how this heroizing of women solitaries is consis-
tent with the antifeminist images the author directs at his readers in part II,
on the custody of the senses: invoking Eve, Dinah, and Bathsheba as types
of bad, curious, or "totilde" (peeping) anchoresses, and describing the face
of "wummon pet schaweo hire to wepmones echne" (a woman who shows
herself to the eyes of men") as a pit (6g).1 6 These passages, which seem to
define the anchoritic ideal in exclusively negative terms, have contributed
much to the work's reputation for misogyny in recent years (perhaps be-
cause they are so seductively easy to teach, confirming [as they seem to do]
all the crudest assumptions students bring to their first encounters with
medieval literature). But the crudity of these passages is the point. The au-
thor of Ancrene Wisse is doing something different here from revealing his
attitude to women. He is deploying offensive language and offering delib-

13 Bella Millett, "Ancrene Wisse and Books of Hours," in Writing Religious Women: Female
Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania
Whitehead (Cardiff, 2000).
14 Libel/us de diversis ordinibus et professionibus qui sunt in aecclesia, ed. Giles Constable and
Bernard Smith (Oxford, 1972), discussed in Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century,
47-55·
1s For the lack of institutional opportunities for women, see Sally Thompson, Women Re-
ligious: The Founding of English Nunneries after the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1990).
16 Two leaves are missing from the Corpus manuscript here: text supplied from The Eng-
lish Text of the "Ancrene Riwle": Edited from B.M. Cotton MS. Cleopatra C. vi., ed. E. J. Dobson,
EETS o.s., 267 (1972), f. 24r. 6-7.

58 Nicholas Watson
erately extreme advice in the way a modern coach scolds an athlete for
weakness and sets high standards as a strategy for getting her to outper-
form.17 If you accept the ascetic spirituality of the text on its own terms-
and there, of course, is the rub-its misogynistic rhetoric is an important
means of empowering its readers, by giving them the energy they need to
repudiate easy patterns of behavior in favor of the virtuosically controlled
lives they have chosen.
My athletic image is a careful one, not only because modern athleticism
can plausibly be understood as a cultural translation of medieval asceticism,
but because part II of Ancrene Wisse also images its readers as spiritual ath-
letes, in a passage that casts more light on its treatment of gender. The con-
text of the passage is an attack on grumbling anchoresses who have grown
depressed by the arduousness of their life and the insults of others and have
let their standards go. "Al fleschliche iwuroen: lahinde, lihte ilatet, ane hwile
lihte iwordet, an ooer luoere iwurdet ... grucchildes, meanildes ... cur-
sildes and chidildes, bittre and attrie wiO heorte tobollen" (they have grown
all fleshly: laughing, frivolous, speaking carelessly at one time, foully at an-
other: grumblers and complainers, cursers and chiders, bitter and poisonous
with swollen hearts) (f. 28b.29-29a.5/88). So the author begins, before giving
a vignette of the virtuous alternative to this behavior, in which the anchoress
speaks out only against the guilt of sin, and even then "setteo hire wordes
swa efne pet ha ne punche ouersturet, ne nawt ilead ouer skile, ah in-
wardliche and sooliche ... in a softe steuene" (pronounces her words so lev-
elly that she does not seem stirred up and is not led beyond reason, but
speaks thoughtfully and truthfully in a soft voice) (f. 2ga.1o-12/88). There
follows a richly metaphorical account of what the anchoress needs to do to
maintain the second pose and avoid slipping into the first:

Filia Jatua in deminoratione erit. Pis is Salomones sahe. Pet hit limpe to ei of
ow, godd ne leue neauer! "Cang dohter iwuro as mone i wonunge." Priueo
as pe cangun, se lengre se wurse. 3e, as ~e wulleo waxen and nawt wenden
hind ward, sikerliche ~e moten rowen a~ein stream, wiO muchel swine breo-
ken foro and gasteliche earmoes stealewuroliche sturien. And swa ~e moten
alle. For alle we beoo i pe worldes wode weater, pe bereo adun monie. Sone
se we eauer wergiO and resteo us i slawoe, ure bat geao hindward, and we
beoo pe cang dohter pe gao woniende, pe wlecche pe Godd speoweo, as is
iwriten herefter, pe bigunnen i gast, and i flesch endiO. Nai, nai. Ah lob seiO,
pe delueo efter gold hord, eauer se he mare nahheo hit, se his heortes glead-
schipe makeo him mare lusti and mare fersch to diggin and deluen, deoppre
and deoppre, aoet he hit finde. Ower heorte nis nawt on eoroe, for pine
purue ~e ne nawt deluen dunewardes. Ah heouen uppart pe heorte. For pet

17 Athletics still receives too little attention in feminist studies of the body, a point well
made in the otherwise not very helpful collection Sport, Men, and the Gender Order: Critical
Feminist Perspectives, ed. Michael A. Messner and Donald F. Sabo (Champaign, Ill., 1990),
1-15.

Empowerment and Ancrene Wisse 59

 is pe uprowunge a~ein pis worldes stream: [l>a pe heorte walde lihtliche
adun lihten mid the stream], driuen hire a~einward to deluen pe golthort
pet is in heouene. And hwet is pet deluunge? 3eornful sechinde poht: hwer
hit beo, hwuch hit beo, hu me hit mahe ifinden. l>is is pe deluunge: beon
bisiliche and ~eornfulliche eauer her abuten, wiO anewil ~irnunge, wiO
heate of hungri heorte; wad en up of unpeawes; creopen ut of flesch; breo-
ken up ouer hire; astihen up on owseolf wiO heh poht toward heouene-
swa muchel pe neodeluker pet ower feble, tendre flesch heardes ne mei
polien. (f. 2ga.12-29b.13)

[Filia fatua in deminoratione erit (Ecclesiasticus 22: 3)-this is Solomon's say-

ing: may God never grant that it should apply to any of you! "The foolish
daughter becomes like the moon in its waning." She prospers like a fool, the
longer the worse. You, if you want to wax and not go backwards, must row
confidently against the current, force your way ahead with much hard work
and pull stalwartly with your spiritual arms. And so must you all. For we
are all in this stream, in the world's wild water, which carries many under.
As soon as ever we tire and rest ourselves in sloth, our boat goes backward
and we are the foolish daughter who wanes as she goes (as is written later),
who began in the spirit and end in the flesh. No, no. But as Job says, those
who dig for a hoard of gold, the closer they get to it, the more ardent glad-
ness of heart makes them, and the keener to dig and delve deeper and
deeper until they find it. Your heart is not on earth, so you need not delve
downward, but lift the heart upward. For that is this rowing against the
world's current: even though the heart would readily flow down with the
current, to drive against it, so as to delve the gold-hoard that is up in
heaven. And what is that delving? Eager, seeking thought: where it is; what
it is; how it can be found. This is the delving: to be busily and eagerly al-
ways about it, with a constant yearning, with the heat of the hungry heart;
to wade up out of sin; to creep out of the flesh; to break loose from her; to
rise above her on your own with high thought toward heaven-and so
much the more needfully, since your weak, tender flesh cannot bear harsh
things.] (88-8g)18

This remarkable piece of prose offers a good example of the author's ten-
dency to slide in and out of gendered language. Beginning with a standard
misogynistic topos of the woman as waning moon and ending with one of
many references to women's supposed physical weakness, most of the pas-
sage is a call to spiritual energy that collides three different metaphors
(rowing upstream, digging for treasure, climbing out of and over the body)
in a rhetorical mimesis of the restless and ruthless quest for holiness the
passage is advocating. Despite the use of misogynistic topoi (which func-
tion as spurs to action of the same kind as earlier allusions to Eve or

18 The bracketed passage in the Middle English was supplied by E. J. Dobson on the basis
of an early French translation of Ancrene Wisse. The two English manuscripts to contain this
passage both omit the line, probably through eye-skip. I thank Bella Millett for supplying
me with Dobson's translation and for other suggestions about the translation of this pas-
sage.

6o Nicholas Watson
Bathsheba), much of the power of the passage lies in its combination of
vivid particularity and universal applicability, since the author needs to ex-
ercise his spiritual arms quite as vigorously as his readers, hence his alter-
nation of "you" and "we." The closing reference to womanly weakness
may seem to compromise this universality, but is actually part of Ancrene
Wisse's consistent attempt to acknowledge the role of bodily mortification
in the ascetic life, while directing readerly attention toward inner and af-
fective strategies of spiritual sustenance.

From our own point of view or from that of a fourteenth-century eremitic

writer such as Rolle, the way of life depicted in Ancrene Wisse is harsh in-
deed, and it is hard at first to read the phrase "feble, tendre flesch" except
as patronizing. However, once one compares this work's attitude to morti-
fication to the scary regime of Aelred's De institutione inclusarum-which
expects anchoresses to earn their livings on a pound of coarse bread, some
vegetables, and the occasional milk dish; praises the spiritual benefits of
sleep loss; and demands silence throughout Lent-things begin to look dif-
ferent.19 Even Aelred's prescriptions do not include the requirement to per-
form self-flagellation, a practice our author elsewhere recommends as a
last resort in dealing with sexual temptation, but seems to have associated
with men. 2o In this passage, the author of Ancrene Wisse is substituting the
exercise of mental vigor for the physical mortifications he might otherwise
have prescribed, which he alludes to at the end of the passage in the word
"heardes" ("harsh things"). The reference to women's lack of physical en-
durance functions not as a slur against them but as a justification for this
substitution.
This substitution is a significant move, both inside the text, where it en-
ables the author to offer a relatively moderate version of the ascetic life to
readers, and outside it, as part of the larger history of asceticism. The most
serious hindrance to the lay appropriation of the eremitic ideal that took
place in the late middle ages was the association between hermits and
harsh physical mortification, which in its extreme forms could only be en-
dured by specialists. All ascetic works emphasize the virtue of discretio as a
bulwark against excessive discipline, but what counts as discretion varies
greatly from era to era. 21 In this passage of Ancrene Wisse, we see the
ground being laid for a mode of asceticism that internalizes the notion of

19 Aelred, Rule of Life for a Recluse, 45-61.

20 Anchoritic Spirituality, 155-56, a discussion of "Benedict's remedy" for sexual tempta-
tion, carefully hedged around with warnings about the need not to go too far.
21 Aelred is actually dismissive of discretio in relation to bodily suffering: "I do not say this

in disparagement of discretion ... [but] true discretion is to put the soul before the body,
and where both are threatened and the health of the one can only be obtained at the price of
the suffering of the other, to neglect the body for the sake of the soul" (Rule of Life for a
Recluse, 23).

Empowerment and Ancrene Wisse 61

 discipline, and in so doing makes a devout lifestyle more easily available to
everyone, as the definition of discretio moves sharply away from the more
rigorous forms of physical mortification (such as flagellation or wearing of
hair shirts). Here, in a move that anticipates Rolle's elevation of "the fire of
love" as the best instrument for dealing with sin in his own writings about
the eremitic and anchoritic ideals, "heate of hungri heorte" is presented as
a remedy for sloth as effective as the heat of physical pain.n
In an era where extreme physical mortification is being reinvented and
theorized as S/M, we need to be cautious in judging how far this shift from
physical to spiritual asceticism is, in and of itself, empowering; a queer
reading of Ancrene Wisse and its relationship to Aelred, for example, might
conclude the opposite. We can see the shift, however, as part of the larger
project of Ancrene Wisse: to maintain the rigor and elevation of the eremitic
ideal by which the work's readers live, while opening up the ideal to a
larger number of potential practitioners. Ancrene Wisse, a vernacular work
that refuses to identify itself as a "rule" (and thus limit its readership to
members of an order), does in the first instance limit its address to women.
But by treating these women as exemplary, as symbolic either of all Chris-
tians or of the "weak" who cannot aspire to the ascetic and intellectual
heights attained by male practitioners, the work treats its audience as the
pioneers of a movement of spiritual perfection that in theory encompasses
everyone.
One of the fantasies that energized the early friars was the apocalyptic
thought of Joachim of Fiore, who prophesied the imminence of a third "age
of the Holy Spirit" in which the entire world would be enfolded in a single
ideal of monastic perfection. However distanced it seems from apocalyptic
thinking, there is at least a broad sense in which Ancrene Wisse, generous in
its inclusiveness even as it is harsh in its specific directives, can be seen as
an attempt to bring this world into being.23

The Figure of the Inner Hermit

This brings me to my second topic, which I discuss in detail in an essay
parallel to this one (see note u): the later history of Ancrene Wisse as a con-
duit between the anchoritic life and the devout laity, both women and men.
In that essay, I analyze the Middle English works that can be shown to bor-
row from or rewrite portions of Ancrene Wisse and establish how widely in-

22 Rolle's lack of interest in asceticism is a harbinger of late medieval attitudes in other

English works. See Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Cambridge,
1991), chap. 2. See also the reflections in Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, ed. Mar-
garet Connolly, EETS, o. s., 303 (1993), written around 1400, which discusses the decline of
asceticism over the preceding centuries.
23 For twelfth-century apocalypticism, see Constable, Reformation of the Twelfth Century,
chap. 4, "The Rhetoric of Reform."

62 Nicholas Watson
fluential the work was. Just as, for its author, anchoresses often seem to
symbolize a life of perfection uncluttered by learning or attention to reli-
gious forms, so the work itself later comes to symbolize the capacity of the
English vernacular and its readership to aim as high as the work does aim.
By the fourteenth century at the latest,24 Ancrene Wisse figures the possibil-
ity of a life focused on the inner self and discreetly lived in public and in
private, especially by women, but potentially by all. I also arrive at a con-
clusion that surprised me when I reached it: that, despite the prestige of the
work among conservatives such as Walter Hilton and Nicholas Love and
despite a modern reading of the work itself as conservative, the circles in
which its influence was most direct were reformist, and in some cases asso-
ciated with Lollardy. This means that Ancrene Wisse had its most important
late medieval impact among the devout, somewhat puritanical gentry and
later merchant Christians who were the principal lay audience for re-
formist writing and whose sense of religious self-worth and hostility to
worldliness had a long history, both before and after the sixteenth-century
Reformation.
For example, passages of Ancrene Wisse, as well as some of its larger
claims and assumptions, are adapted in two late fourteenth-century trea-
tises whose interrelationships suggest they are products of the same re-
formist milieu: The Holy Book Gratia Dei and The Pater Noster of Richard Her-
mit.25 Ancrene Wisse may also have influenced a third work that circulates
with the second of these, Book to a Mother.26 All of these are addressed to or
were read by lay women, and all of them share certain attitudes: contempt
for the world, expressed as a sense of spiritual exclusivity harsher than
anything in Ancrene Wisse; belief in the value of vernacular religious educa-
tion and the Bible; and an implied antimonasticism. Unusual among Mid-
dle English works addressed to women, that is, all three construct the inner
self along ascetic or penitential, more than affective, lines.
Ancrene Wisse has left a particular mark on how these works deal with
the notion of a religious rule. Here, too, models of behavior are referred
to as "rules" only with reluctant irony, as the works assert their own rele-
24 Missing from my account is the situation in Anglo-Norman texts that derive material
from Ancrene Wisse, such as the Compileisun partly edited by W. H. Trethewey, The French
Text of the "Ancrene Riwle": Edited from Trinity College Cambridge MS. R. 14- 7, EETS, o. s., 240
(1958 for 1954).
25 See Mary Luke Arntz, ed., Richard Rolle and Pe Holy Boke Gratia Dei: An Edition With
Commentary, Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies
92, no. 2 (Salzburg, 1981); Florent G. A.M. Aarts, Pe Pater Noster of Richard Ermyte: A Late
Middle English Exposition of the Lord's Prayer (Nijmegen, 1967).
26 See Adrian James McCarthy, ed., Book to a Mother: An Edition with Commentary,

Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 92, no. 1
(Salzburg, 1981). My remarks on this work also make some use of my essay, "Fashioning the
Puritan Gentry-Woman: Devotion and Dissent in Book to a Mother," in Medieval Women: Texts
and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et
a!., Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 3 (Turnhout, 2ooo).

Empowerment and Ancrene Wisse 63

 vance for everyone, even as they question the ability of most people to
live up to their high standards. The Holy Book, the most straightforward
and least spiritually snobbish of the group, translates Ancrene Wisse's in-
junctions about prayer and silence into instructions for "ilk a mane, of
what state he be" (anyone, of whatever status), who must do "honeste
werke, withowttene lettynge of his tyme" (conscientious work, without
any time-wasting) and whose "uttire berynge, whareso he comes," must
"so honeste be and faire pat louynge be to God, and stirryng of gude all
pat hym seese" (whose appearance, wherever they go, must be so neat
and proper that it brings praise to God, and an urge to be good in all who
see them) (15). Here, discretio consists of frugality, not mortification, and
the anchoritic virtue of stability becomes care in looking for a quiet inn
when arriving in a new town (115). Despite being written in the first in-
stance for nuns, The Pater Noster acknowledges only one rule, which all
must follow but which does not of itself lead to salvation. This is the
"new reule, swipe hard to pole" (the new rule, most difficult to put up
with) laid on Adam after the fall, which replaces the "ordre softe and ful
of likyng" (lax and extremely pleasant order) he enjoyed in Eden, and
which the work derives from God's curse: "in swoot of pi face pou schalt
ete pi breed" (in sweat of your face you shall eat your bread), interpreting
this as an injunction to avoid "idilnes, glotenye, and gelous kepynge and
tendre ouer pe fleisch" (laziness, greed, and a cowardly and protective
concern for the body) (13-14). Book to a Mother claims that the only rule
worth following is "Cristes religioun" (Christ's religious rule), which
consists in "Crist ... with his conversacioun" (Christ and his way of liv-
ing) (31). So far as other religious rules are concerned, "but thei acorde
with Cristes religioun and helpe therto, thei ben noiouse, and better hit
were to leve suche ordynaunces of men" (unless they are compatible with
Christ's rule and help with it, they are a nuisance, and it would be better
to renounce such merely human systems) (122). Of these works, only
Holy Book is prepared to be treated as a rule in its own right. For the oth-
ers, the word rule is even closer to implying hypocrisy than it is for the
author of Ancrene Wisse. To live spiritually, following Christ or the law of
love certainly involves rules; indeed, in all these works there are many,
most of them fiercely puritanical. But not only are these rules seen as di-
vine, mediated through the Bible, not through any human institution.
Obedience to them is also seen as an expression of inner rectitude and
spiritual responsibility rather than as a mere gesture of submission. The
lay or vernacular reader has acquired the sturdy independence, the auto-
matic suspicion for the hypocrisies of institutional religion, that Ancrene
Wisse associates with eremitic living.
Similar attitudes to the rule also typify two more extended Middle Eng-
lish rewritings of Ancrene Wisse: a mid-fourteenth-century redaction of the
work for an audience that apparently includes nuns and laypeople of both

64 Nicholas Watson
sexes, known as The Pepys Rule; and an early fifteenth-century treatise
closely based on parts II and III of Ancrene Wisse, called A Simple Tretis. 27 Al-
though neither of these works is opposed to monasticism as explicitly as
contemporary Lollard writings, both use the eremitic nature of Ancrene
Wisse, its emphasis on irregular religious living, as a platform from which
to preach against formalism and hypocrisy. Christian living, according to
these works, is ultimately not a communal but an individual thing, rooted
in personal inner purity that expresses itself best by good living in the
world and inner detachment from the world. The walls of a convent or cell
do not act as barriers against sin, even leaky ones, but as the borders of
dangerously secret spaces in which sin hides itself from inspection, which
turn professional religious into mere simulacra of holiness. We are close,
here, to the sneering Lollard term for monasticism, "private religion," with
all its weight of disgust at improper kinds of "privity," and even closer to
Book to a Mother's characterization of the convent wall as a device that al-
lows a nun to seem "a good womman" on the outside, but be "a schrewe"
on the inside (124.11-12). Instead, the walls of the cell need to be built in-
side the self. So emerges the notion of the inner hermit or anchorite, who
carries the cell within.zs
The Pepys Rule characterizes the inner hermit in terms that derive directly
from the opening of part II of Ancrene Wisse, reusing its delicate shifts be-
tween "windows" and "senses" for its own ends:

Now vnderstondep pat a mannes body is cleped in holy wrytt sumtyme an

hous, and sumtyme a citee, and sumtyme Goddes temple and Holy Chirche.
Pan ri~th as ~ee see pat an ancre is bischett in an hous and may nou~th out,
ri~th so is vche mannes soule bischett in his body as an ancre. And perfore
vche man, lered and lewed, ~if he wil queme God and be his deciple, helde
hym in his hous, schete his dores and his wynd owes fast pat ben his fyue
wyttes, pat he take no likyng to synne ne to werldelich pynges. And pan he
is an ancre and wei better quemep God pan hij pat byschetten hem and
taken hem to hei~e lyf and ben werldelich. (44:2-12)

[Now understand that in Scripture the human body is sometimes called a

house, and sometimes a city, and sometimes God's temple and Holy
Church. So, just as you see that an anchorite is shut in a house and cannot
get out, so is every human soul shut into his body as an anchorite. And

27 The English Text of the "Ancrene Riwle": Edited from Magdalene College, Cambridge MS.

Pepys 2498, ed. A. Zettersten, EETS o.s., 274 (1976); The English Text of the "Ancrene Riwle":
Edited from British Museum MS. Royal S.C.1, ed. A. C. Baugh, EETS o.s., 232 (1956).
28 The notion of the "inner hermit" or cell has some relation to that of the "inner cloister"

popularized in the late fourteenth century by The Abbey of the Holy Ghost in particular; on
this see, most recently, Christiania Whitehead, "Making a Cloister of the Soul in Medieval
Religious Treatises," Medium Aevum 67 (1998): 1-29. Another obvious parallel is Walter
Hilton's application of the old concept of the "mixed life" to the devout laity; see S.J.
Ogilvie-Thomson, Walter Hilton's "Mixed Life," Edited from Lambeth Palace MS 472, Eliza-
bethan and Renaissance Studies 92, no. 15 (Salzburg, 1986).

Empowerment and Ancrene Wisse 65

 therefore, everybody, learned or unlearned, if he wishes to please God and
be his disciple, let him shut his doors and windows that are his five senses
tight, so that he takes no pleasure in sin nor in worldly things. And then he
is an anchorite, and pleases God better than those who shut themselves in
and set themselves to the life of perfection and remain worldly.]

In this passage, the laicization of the ascetic life proceeds apace, as the very
desire for perfect living that motivated anchoritic enclosure is revealed as a
dangerous spiritual pretentiousness: a desire for "hei3e lyf," the life of per-
fection (a crucial phrase in Ancrene Wisse; e.g., at the opening of part IV)
that all but inevitably, if paradoxically, reveals the anchorite to be secretly
worldly. Ancrene Wisse is gradually morphing here into a work whose nat-
ural readership is the laity, the group who, by the late fourteenth century,
are the heirs of the anti-institutional puritanism Ancrene Wisse derives from
the eremitic tradition.
The implied audience for Ancrene Wisse, always a mix of women and
men, is also becoming more male. Although The Pepys Rule survives in a
manuscript likely compiled for nuns and addresses female religious as one
of its main readerships, this text already contains much that is suitable for
secular priests or for itinerant preachers and their patrons. Indeed, in addi-
tion to the metaphor of the inner cell, the work shows a marked interest in
the apostolic life of preaching, a life most medieval texts by definition re-
serve for men, noting that the apostles "nere nou3t bischett" (were not shut
in) (44.29). There seems to be an unresolved tension here between two dif-
ferent ideals of perfection, both nonmonastic, but one clerical and male, the
other lay and of mixed gender-even if the work does once suggest, most
intriguingly, that holy women, too, can preach.29
A Simple Tretis, addressing the laity rather than the clergy, takes the mas-
culinization of Ancrene Wisse in a different direction, and so avoids this ten-
sion. Justifying his decision to compile a treatise about the solitary life for
laypeople, the author also claims that solitude is an inner quality:

Here wil sum men sey pat for to write or speke so mych of solitari lijf
amang pe comen people of pe world is bot foly. Forwhy and all men were
solitary, pen shold no men be marchantes, plughmen, ny men of craft, and
so sholde pe world be confounded and at an end .... To pis wil I answer ...

29 "I>ere ben two manere of wymmen pat ben trewe prelates and prechoures. Pise two
hane pe hei3est dale in heuene" (5.3-5l(There are two kinds of women who can be true
prelates and preachers. These two have the highest reward in heaven). In context, it is hard
to know what to make of this remark, part of a digression that seems either textually con-
fused or to be a copy of a draft, and "wymmen" may, unfortunately, be an error. A later pas-
sage asserts that "womman ne owe nou3th to prechen bot 3if sche be pe ouer holyer ... For
seint Poule forbedep hem, bot man ne forbedep he nou3th" (28.18-zo)(a woman ought not
to preach unless she is exceptionally holy ... For Paul forbade them, but he did not forbid a
man). Again, the thought here seems to be somewhat undigested, confirming the sense that
The Pepys Rule is partly an experiment.

66 Nicholas Watson
 [that] ... vnnethes may any man or woman be broght to such maner of ly-
fyng. Neipelese, how al men and wymmen shold in party be solitary I wil
sey a few wordys. Seynt Gregory ... spekes of two maner of peple. Per ar
sum pat setten most her hert to haue worldly worship, worldly riches, and
lust of her flesh .... Anoper peple per is pat desiren no ping pat is in pis
warld, bot as to be a mene to b[r]yng pem to endles blis [... ]For pou~ pey
haue besines outeward-as gouernance of houshold, cure of paryshens as
parsones haue, gouernance of contres and cytees as sherefes, maires, and
baylees-~it her intent is euer set on "on ping": to do right and lawe of God,
kepyng clene her conscience. And many a tyme such men, when pey are by
hemselue, pey examyn her conscience, and if pey fynd anyping amys, pey
amenden it by trew penance: pus pey are solitary in her intent, settyng her
hert [op]on "on ping," pat is on rightwisnes and Goddes plesance, wich ar
alon. And thus may every man, if he will, be in sum maner solitari and fer
from synful condicions of the world .... Neitheles, to forsake the world as
the aposteles did is a ded of perfeccion, and therfor notal men ar bounden
to that maner of forsakyng the world. Bot every man that wil be saved most
forsake the world on this wise. (43-44)

[At this point, someone will say that it is mere folly to write or speak so
much about the solitary life among the common people of the world. For if
everyone was solitary, then nobody would be merchants, ploughmen, nor
craftsmen, and so the world would be wrecked and finished. To this I wish
to reply that hardly any man or woman can be induced to undertake such a
manner of living. Even so, I wish to say a few words about how all men and
women should be solitary in part. St. Gregory talks about two kinds of peo-
ple. There are some who fix their desires most strongly on having worldly
praise, worldly riches, and fleshly pleasure. There is another people who de-
sire nothing that is in this world, except as a way to bring them to endless
bliss. For even if they have public employment-like administration of a
household, spiritual care of parishioners like parsons have, administration
of districts of communities like sheriffs, mayors, and bailiffs-their ambition
is always set on "one thing": to do justice and the law of God, keeping their
consciences clean. And such people examine their consciences many a time
when they are by themselves, and if they find anything wrong, they emend
it with sincere penance. And so they are solitary in ambition, setting their
hearts on "one thing," that is on righteousness and God's will, which are all
one. And in this way may every person, if he wants to, be in some sense soli-
tary and far from the sinful practices of the world. It is true that to forsake
the world as the apostles did is a deed of perfection, and so all people are
not bound to that way of forsaking of the world. But everyone who wants to
be saved must forsake the world in this way.]

A Simple Tretis is written for women as well as men, but here it is public,
masculine living that has become the norm, as the notion of the inner an-
chorite effaces the special connection even The Pepys Rule retains between
enclosure and women. As a result, the dichotomy between silent solitaries
and preachers found in The Pepys Rule (as in Ancrene Wisse itself) implicitly
disappears, and we are left with an image of a community of public offi-

Empowerment and Ancrene Wisse 67

 cials, conscious of their inner rectitude, spending their lives bringing "right
and lawe of God" into the social and political realm. A hundred years after
this text was written, Sir Thomas More, who wore a hair shirt all the time
he was chancellor, was to become the most famous English exponent of
this interiorized version of the eremitic ideal.
In most respects, I believe that A Simple Tretis and its colleagues form
part of a project of selfhood-building that is more continuous with Ancrene
Wisse than reactive against it. However, as Ancrene Wisse meets the secular
world in these works, we have seen that its spirituality undergoes two
major modifications, besides the shift in the implications of the term discre-
tio. First, these later works repudiate Ancrene Wisse's definition of the
reader as living a "high life," a way of perfection, not merely salvation, pre-
ferring to stress the work's equally strong focus on meekness and humility.
For them, everyone should live in the same, humble and ascetic way, and
any claim to perfection is simply a sign of pride-as the word "high"
(which can imply either "elevated" or "presumptuous") indeed suggests.
As the longest work to borrow from Ancrene Wisse, Book to a Simple and De-
vout Woman, has it: "perlus hit is on hy3 to clymbe, and siker wei to God hit
is pat mon holde hym lowe" (it is perilous to climb up high, and it is a sure
way to God that someone keep themselves low).30 Second, partly because
these works are for readers involved in the world as anchoresses are not
and partly to compensate for the loss of distinction that follows from the
universalization of the eremitic ideal, these later works tend to make more
extended use of satire and polemic than does Ancrene Wisse.3 1 Readers are
expected to think humbly of their own efforts at Christian living, but they
are also invited to judge the still more serious failures of Christian society
at large, especially those with pretensions to holiness: monks, friars, nuns,
and clerics. In a passage that implicitly suspends the general rule that
women are not encouraged to internalize the prophetic dimension of the
eremitic mode, the widow for whom Book to a Mother is written is told that
judging others is Christlike: "Crist juggede and cursede muche in this
world, and taughte forte jugge, to destruye sinne, ther as hit is opene
agenus his hestis" (Christ judged and cursed a great deal in this world, and
taught us to judge, in order to destroy sin, when it is obviously against his
commandments) (72.23-5). Such a harsh attitude is necessary because of
the way sin has infected "alle corsede popis, cardinallis, bishopis, prelatis,
prestis, freris, monkes, chanouns, [nunnes]," creating a world fraught with
hypocrisy (90.15-17). Not all Ancrene Wisse's successors are as forthright as
this, and some of them show anxiety about putting satirical weapons in the

3o Book for a Simple and Devout Woman, ed. F. N. M. Diekstra, Medieavalia Groningana 24

(Groningen, 1998), 7635-36.

31 This is not to say that satire is a foreign mode in Ancrene Wisse, which several times bor-
rows satirical passages from Aelred's De institutione in praising the anchoresses' resolution
to keep to their way of life. However, passages of satire are always brief and specific.

68 Nicholas Watson
hands of women. For example, Book for a Simple and Devout Woman gives
elaborate polemic descriptions of the sinfulness of the world, but ends by
using Ancrene Wisse's injunctions on womanly silence to imply strongly
that it is not the reader's place to speak out by herself. Taken as a whole,
though, these later works build powerfully on Ancrene Wisse's separation
of the inner from the outer, by offering their readers an attitude of disdain
for worldliness and a confidence in being able to locate it in the heart of re-
ligious and secular institutions, which gives the "inner self" an inextricably
public dimension. Where the early readers of Ancrene Wisse can see them-
selves as icons of holy living because of their very silence and notional sep-
arateness from the world-" anchoring" the Church by representing Chris-
tian heroism to their communities-their lay successors are closer to being
sermons, sober presences in a sinful world whose clothing, bearing, and
willingness to denounce sin is a living reproach to others. If Thomas More
is a male embodiment of this attitude, his female counterpart is Margery
Kempe.

Coda: Moral Power and Self-Containment

However uncomfortable Ancrene Wisse and the later works that draw on it
can make us, their success depends on their ability to inculcate a sense of
self-worth in those who try to live by them. One of their basic means of
doing this is by invoking the trope of the hermit: a trope that allows quali-
ties we tend to see as containing women-humility, silence, contempt for
the flesh-to be understood as modes of power. Admittedly, this power is
first and foremost an inner power. In differentiating so firmly between the
outer and the inner, offering readers a fundamentally anti-institutional se-
ries of self-images, Ancrene Wisse and its successors do nothing to combat
the many kinds of institutional misogyny their readers had to live with.
But the exaltation of literal or metaphorical solitude in these works does
provide both a measure of ideological protection from misogyny and, par-
adoxically, a sense of community. Ancrene Wisse surrounds the reader with
evidences of her place in an eremitic tradition, going back as far as biblical
figures such as Judith (interpreted as a solitary) and including holy women
and men from many periods of history. The work's successors offer lay
readers a similarly constructed community, partly by invoking Ancrene
Wisse itself, as they struggle to cut the reader off from secular society by in-
culcating a puritanical sense of her exclusivity: her obedience to a form of
living that is now seen as necessary for everybody, but actually practiced
by only a few.
Yet because hermits embody inner power, proclaiming the centrality of
the interior from their places on the visible fringes of secular society, the
eremitic trope does more than merely contain the women and men who in-
ternalize it: even as it allows them to speak out against sin, it makes them

Empowerment and Ancrene Wisse 69

 figures of an ideal of self-containment. In this chapter, I have tried to show
something of how Ancrene Wisse and its successors inculcate this ideal, and
why the ideal is important to the history of women and power. Women
often still figure self-containment, reflectiveness, and the mysteries of the
inner self today, even in popular culture, and in ways that can either em-
power them or justify their continuing marginalization in the public
sphere. Ancrene Wisse and its successors are part of the story of how this
came to be so.

70 Nicholas Watson
 CHAPTER FOUR

Powers of Record, Powers of Example:

Hagiography and Women's History

Jocelyn Wogan-Browne

That hagiography can serve as empowering exemplary biography and

that it can be creatively interpreted by individual medieval women for
their own purposes is a phenomenon familiar in medieval England from
the examples of Margery Kempe and Christina of Markyate. This chapter
attempts to move away from such exceptional and nowadays well-known
individual uses of hagiography to look at the genre's value in making vis-
ible what seems particularly elided from history's grand narratives-fe-
male communities.l Despite the once axiomatically accepted paucity of
English nunnery records, there are many places where female communi-
ties can be seen to be creating and deploying narratives about themselves
in a range of pragmatic and other ways. One might think of the four-
teenth- and fifteenth-century abbesses at Barking Abbey and their re-
arrangements of the house's commemorative traditions regarding their
seventh-century foundress, St. Ethelburga, and their other predecessor
saints and abbesses, or of the Syon nuns' seventeenth-century Spanish
manuscript account of their history (commissioned by the abbess Barbara
Wiseman [d. 1649] in the hope that the Infanta would intercede for Syon's
return to England if she became Princess of Wales).2 Nevertheless, conven-

1 For an account of the occlusion of female community in English scholarship, see Jocelyn

Wogan-Browne, "'Reading is Good Prayer': Recent Research on Female Reading Commu-

nities," New Medieval Literatures 5 (2002): 229-97.
2 For Barking's late medieval commemorations, much of the material is available in J. B.

Tolhurst, ed., The Barking Ordinale and Customary of the Benedictine Nuns of Barking Abbey, 2
vols., HBS 65, 66 (London, 1927, 1928). On Syon see Christopher de Hamel, Syon Abbey: The
Library of the Bridgettine Nuns and Their Peregrinations after the Reformation: An Essay by
 tual women in England are often reckoned to be missing from the in-
creased visibility to us of women's texts and literary culture that took place
in, for instance, twelfth- and thirteenth-century German convents or the
beguinages of the Low Countries. 3 Only with the increase in English texts
and literacies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the story often
runs, is there a women's literary history to reckon with in insular me-
dieval culture.
Before the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (and with a continuing
and significant afterlife during that later period), the most prominent text
of women's religious lives in medieval England for modern scholarship is
the Ancrene Wisse or Guide for Anchoresses, and its associated saints' lives,
homilies, and exemplary meditations, known as the Katherine Group and
the Wooing Group. Composed in English in the early thirteenth-century
West Midlands for a household of three anchoresses and their servants by
a cleric who was perhaps their relative or spiritual director, the Guide was
twice translated into French and several times into Latin, used in monastic
communities and among laypeople, and drawn on for many other texts in
manuscript and in print into the early sixteenth century.4
The Guide fascinates us, and seems also to have fascinated audiences in
medieval England, with its ambivalent and powerful imaging of a female

Christopher de Hamel, with the Manuscript at Arundel Castle (London, 1991), and on Syon's late
medieval culture of record, see Mary C. Erler, "Syon Abbey's Care for Books: Its Sacristan's
Account Rolls 1506/7-1535/6," Scriptorium 39 (1985): 293-307. See, for further examples,
Nancy Bradley Warren, "Kings, Saints, and Nuns: Gender, Religion, and Authority in the
Reign of Henry V," Viator 30 (1999): 307-22; idem, Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in
Later Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2001).
3 The classic account is Herbert Grundmann, Religiiisebewegungen im Mittelalter (Berlin,
1935, 2d ed., Darmstadt 1961) but see further an important critique of Grundmann's thesis
of spontaneous women's "movements," with its implicit occlusions of the continuities of fe-
male community by Carol Nee! ("The Origins of the Beguines," in Sisters and Workers in the
Middle Ages, ed. Judith M. Bennett eta!. [Chicago, 1989], 240-60). Brenda Bolton's excellent
studies of the mulieres sanctae of the Low Countries' early drew attention to the problem of
whether or not England could be seen to have female communities comparable with Be-
guines; for her recent thinking (with summary of earlier scholarship), see her "Thirteenth-
Century Religious Women: Further Reflections on the Low Countries' Special Case," in New
Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liege and Their Impact, ed. Juliette Dor, Les-
ley Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Turnhout, 1999), 129-57. On women's literacies in
thirteenth-century England, see Bella Millett "Women in No Man's Land: English Recluses
and the Development of Vernacular Literature in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries," in
Women and Literature in Britain 1150-1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge, 1996), 86-103.
4 The latest extant Latin manuscript of Ancrene Wisse is London, British Library MS Royal

7 C. x (early sixteenth century): see Bella Millett with the assistance of George B. Jack and
Yoko Wada, "The Manuscripts," in Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group and the Wooing Group,
Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle English Literature, II (Cambridge, 1996), 54·
At the end of the fifteenth century, the English text contributes to the Tretyse of Laue printed
by Wynkyn de Worde 1493 or 1494 (ed. John H. Fisher, EETS o.s., 223, London, 1951); be-
tween 1433 and 1441 a manuscript of a French version (London, BL Cotton Vitellius F. vii)
was given to the Duchess of Gloucester by the Countess of Kent (Millett, Ancrene Wisse, the
Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, 54).

72 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
self at once enclosed and autonomous in its anchorhold. 5 For my purposes
here, the reception of the Guide and its associated texts in our narratives is
the immediate point. The first modern editions of these works, Seinte Kater-
ine in 1841 and the Guide in 1853, were made as the English Evangelical and
other sororities were developing, when E. B. Pusey and others were writ-
ing regulae for women.6 These medieval texts, however, were primarily re-
ceived within the framework of a nationalizing English history, both
within and outside the academy? In the work of Tolkien and others, the
Guide and its associated texts became testimony to the continuity (pace the
Norman Conquest) of the robust, sane, masculine English language. Ques-
tions of audience and reception were dismissed in this era as womanish
and sentimental.B The Guide helped further the nationalizing mission and
credentials of the Early English Text Society (EETS, incepted in 1864),
which in 1932 published as a separate volume R. W. Chambers's account of
the Guide's role in pedigrees of Englishness and which also, from 1944,
published diplomatic editions of the Guide's every manuscript and version
(the last of these appearing in 2000).9 Although not explicitly revalued as
women's history until the early 1980s, the Guide and the associated saints'
lives of the Katherine Group and the devotional meditations of the Wooing
Group have thus had a long-sustained role in institutional narratives of the
literary history of the English middle ages.
Against this reception history, I want to contrast a much less well-known
manuscript collection, one I think quite as important as the Guide and its

5 The best guide to both medieval and modern reception is Millett, Ancrene Wisse, the
Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, 34-45 (modern scholarship on the Guide); 31-34,49-61
(medieval dissemination). For reflection on current preoccupation with the Guide, see Sarah
Beckwith, "Passionate Regulation: Enclosure, Ascesis, and the Feminist Imaginary," South
Atlantic Quarterly 93 (1994): 803-24; Nicholas Watson, " 'With the Heat of the Hungry
Heart': Empowerment and Ancrene Wisse," in this volume.
6 James Morton, ed., The Legend ofSt Katherine of Alexandria (London, 1841); idem, ed. and

tr., The Ancren Riwle: A Treatise on the Rules and Duties of Monastic Life, Edited and Translated
from a Semi-Saxon MS. of the Thirteenth Century (London, 1853). For the sororities of the 184os
and 185os, see Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women
1850-1920 (Chicago, 1985), chap. 2.
7 For a lucid overview, see Linda Georgianna, "Coming to Terms with the Norman Con-
quest: Nationalism and English Literary History," in Literature and the Nation, ed. Brook
Thomas (Tiibingen, 1998), 33-53. On the formation of professional English studies, see D. J.
Palmer, The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of English Language and Literature
from Its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School (London, 1965).
8 Millett, Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, 41-42.
9 R. W. Chambers, "On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and His
School," in The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More by Nicholas Harpsfield, ed. Elsie Vaughan
Hitchcock, EETS o.s., 186 (London, 1932, repr. 1957 as EETS 191A). The most recent edition
of a manuscript of the Guide is The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: The 'Vernon' Text, ed.
Arne Zettersten and Bernhard Diensberg, with an intro. by H. L. Spencer, EETS o.s., 310
(Oxford, 2ooo). For the EETS, see Derek Pearsall, "Frederick James Furnivall (1825-1910),"
in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 2, Literature
and Philology, ed. Helen Damico (New York, 1998), 125-38.

Hagiography and Women's History 73

 associated texts. This is a manuscript exemplifying the complex interplay
of factors that can mask women's histories. It also offers a very different
sense from the Katherine Group lives of the ways in which hagiography
might mean in women's literary culture.
London, British Library MS Additional 70513 is a manuscript collection
consisting entirely of saints' lives in Anglo-Norman French. It is the largest
single collection of Anglo-Norman saints' lives and the only one to contain
saints' lives exclusively. Many of its texts appear to have no descendants, and
eight of its thirteen lives are the only known copies of their texts. The manu-
script has been known throughout the twentieth century to some specialists
in Anglo-Norman, but known mainly as a resource for texts of individual
lives and their contribution to philological study. Appearing in journals such
as Romania and in the Anglo-Norman Text Society's editions, the lives have
been largely known to Anglicist literary scholars as "French" texts.1o For
French scholars, their provenance makes such texts "English," unless they
are included in the select pantheon of those works in Anglo-Norman, or
works whose earliest manuscripts are Anglo-Norman, which are perceived
as part of French literary history-works such as the Chanson de Roland, Tris-
tan, Saint Alexis.Jl Against the combination of modern nationalisms, linguis-
tic disciplinary boundaries, and national literary histories, it has been diffi-
cult for either francophone or anglophone scholars to see Anglo-Norman as
a source of identity or power for their subject or themselves. Thus the collec-
tion of lives in Additional70513 has barely figured in accounts of literary his-
tory in England, let alone in women's literary history in England as such.

10 A. T. Baker began editing texts from the manuscript before the First World War (in the

highly interventionist manner of the period) and continued to do so until his death in 1947.
One study of the manuscript was never published because Baker's student at Sheffield Uni-
versity, J. Malone, did not survive the war to publish his Sheffield thesis. The last text in the
manuscript without full edition (the life of Richard of Chichester) was edited in 1995· Al-
phabetically by saint, editions of the lives in the manuscript are: Audn!e [Etheldreda]: La vie
sainte Audree: Poeme anglo-normand du XII!e siecle, ed. Osten Sodergaard (Uppsala, 1955);
Catherine: The Life of Saint Catherine by Clemence of Barking, ed. William MacBain, ANTS 18
(Oxford, 1964); Elisabeth of Hungary: "La vie de sainte Elisabeth d'Hongrie," ed. Ludwig
Karl, ZRPh 24 (1910): 295-314; Seven More Poems by Nicholas Bozon, ed. Sr. Amelia Klenke,
Franciscan Institute Publications Historical ser. 2 (New York, 1951); Edmund of Canter-
bury: "La vie de saint Edmond, archeveque de Cantorbery," ed. A. T. Baker, Romania 55
(1929): 332-81; Edward the Confessor: La Vie d'Edouard le confesseur, poeme anglo-normand du
XIIe siecle, ed. Osten Sodergaard (Uppsala, 1948); Faith: "Vie anglo-normande de sainte Foy
par Simon de Walsingham," ed. A. T. Baker, Romania 66 (1940-41): 49-84; Mary Magdalen:
"La vie de Madeleine," ed. R. Reinsch, Archiv 64 (188o): 85-94; also "Die Episode a us der Vie
de Madeleine," ed. Ludwig Karl, ZRPh 34 (1910): 363-70; Modwenna: Saint Modwenna, ed.
A. T. Baker and Alexander Bell, ANTS 7 (Oxford, 1947); Osith: "An Anglo-French Life of St.
Osith," ed. A. T. Baker, MLR 6 (1911): 476-502; Paphnutius: "Vie de saint Panuce," ed. A. T.
Baker, Romania 38 (1909): 418-24; Paul the Hermit: "An Anglo-French Life of Saint Paul the
Hermit," ed. A. T. Baker, MLR 4 (1908-9): 491-504; Richard of Chichester: La Vie seint
Richard evesque de Cycestre, ed. D. W. Russell, ANTS 51 (London, 1995); Thomas Becket: La
Vie de saint Thomas le Martyr par Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, ed. E. Walberg (Lund, 1922).
11 Andrew Taylor, "Was There a Song of Roland?" Speculum 76 (2001): 28-65.

74 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
 The provenance of the manuscript, however, requires that it be considered
in this context. The manuscript was owned by the Augustinian canonesses at
Campsey in Suffolk and used, according to an early fourteenth-century in-
scription following the final text, for mealtime reading. Designed as a single
collection of ten saints' lives in the late thirteenth century, the manuscript
had three further lives by the Franciscan Nicholas Bozon (including the ear-
liest vernacular life of Elisabeth of Hungary in England) added to it in the
early fourteenth century.12 It includes two lives of late twelfth-century female
authorship from Barking Abbey (Catherine, see table 1, no. 13, and Edouard,
no. 6), and a life of Thomas Becket of c. 1176 (no. 4), patronized by Barking
and its abbess, who was at the time Becket's sister, Marie Becket.13 The man-
uscript's life of St. Etheldreda of Ely (no. 8, the Vie sainte Audree), is by a thir-
teenth-century woman writer also called Marie, but otherwise unknown
(possibly a nun or vowess from Chatteris or Barking).14 Thus all the hagio-
graphic lives certainly by women in England are collected together here (in
what, certainly in records from England, seems a relatively rare event-sev-
eral women writers in one medieval manuscript).1 5 Thus, too, a prestigious
Augustinian female house reads, in the late thirteenth century, the late
twelfth-century hagiographic compositions of a prestigious Benedictine
nunnery, and adds to the collection in the early fourteenth century with

12 The quiring, catchwords, and program of illustrated initials show that the original de-

sign embraced the last ten texts of the manuscript, to which the first three texts were subse-
quently added. The additions are on parchment, the rest of the manuscript is vellum, and
the recto of f. 9 is stained and rubbed as if it had for a time been the outer leaf of the manu-
script. The original ten lives have illustrated initials of the same rather distinctive type, with
the exception of St. Faith. The rubric for her life begins on the bottom of f. 147rb while the
life proper commences on f. 147Va; it is conceivable therefore that the illustration was inad-
vertently omitted, and the value of the illustrations as a designed element of the original
compilation remains unaffected. I have examined the manuscript myself and heard a paper
by Delbert W. Russell on its codicology; further discussion awaits the publication of his
paper and the results of Professor Russell's detailed work on the collection's scribes.
13 This epilogue, addressed to "l'abeesse suer saint Thomas," is not present in the
Campsey text, but is extant in a Picard manuscript (Paris, BN nouv. acq. fr. 13513, f. 98r-v,
early thirteenth century), La vie de seint Thomas le Martyr, ed. Walberg, app., 210, and see
xxiii-iv. A thirteenth-century abbess of Barking, Maud de Bosham (1215-47) was a relative
of another of Becket's biographers, Herbert de Bosham (d. n86): see E. A. Loftus and H. F.
Chettle, A History of Barking Abbey (Barking, 1954), 31, n. 42.
14 On Marie's identity, see further Virginia Blanton-Whetsall, "St JEthelthryth's Cult: Liter-

ary, Historical, and Pictorial Constructions of Gendered Sanctity," (Ph.D. diss., State Univer-
sity of New York, 1998), 311; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, "Re-routing the Dower: The Anglo-Nor-
man Life of St Etheldreda by Marie [?of Chatteris]," in Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval
Women, ed. Jennifer Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean (Urbana, Ill., 1995), 47-50.
15 The significance of this co-presence of texts by women is unclear. Later receptions of

women's work do not always recognize female authorship as such; the fifteenth- and early
sixteenth-century transmission and adaptation of Christine de Pizan in England, for in-
stance, rarely grants her authorial status and sometimes disguises her gender altogether. In
her study of a well-known manuscript of later contemplative writing in England, Marleen
Cre usefully challenges the notion that spiritual writings by women are ipso facto perceived
as female spiritual writing ("Women in the Charterhouse? Julian of Norwich's Revelations of

Hagiography and Women's History 75

 Franciscan writings. The manuscript gives access potentially to well over a
century of female communities and their literary culture.
The manuscript also names a lay patron, Isabella de Warenne, by mar-
riage Countess of Arundel, for its life of Edmund, Archbishop of Canter-
bury (d. 1240, canonized 1246; see table 1, no. 7).16 This life was composed
by Matthew Paris in, as he says, "deux langages" (v. 1976) and translated
"de latin en franceis apert" (vv. 32-33) for the countess. Isabella had also
been the patron of the Latin source for the Campsey manuscript's Anglo-
Norman life of Edmund's former chancellor, Richard of Chichester (a per-
sonal friend of the countess and a saint who posthumously cured her lit-
tle nephew of an apparently fatal illness). It would be splendid to be able
to show that the Countess of Arundel was also the patron of the Campsey
collection, but the manuscript's latest text was composed in 1276, Isabella
of Arundel died in 1279, and she would presumably have gifted such a
collection to her own foundation, the Cistercian nunnery of Marham, if
not to the female companion of her widowhood, Alice Tyrel.I7 In includ-
ing Isabella's hagiographic texts, however, the manuscript does testify to
the overlap of lay and religious women's reading that has been so crucial
to the reinvigoration of our sense of nunnery culture and women's liter-
ary culture generally in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, and
also offers a way into the spiritualities and patronages of thirteenth-cen-
tury baronial women (often overlapping, but sometimes distinctive from,
those of the royal women studied for this period by John Carmi Parsons
and others).lS The cultural and religious interests of elite women in thir-
teenth-century England are less well-known than the lives and texts of

Divine Love and Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls in British Library, MS Additional
37790," in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practice in Late Medieval Eng-
land, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead [Cardiff, 2ooo], 43-62). See also Kathryn
Kerby-Fulton, "Hildegard and the Male Reader: A Study of Insular Reception," in Prophets
Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Medieval England, ed. Rosalynn Voaden
(Cambridge, 1996), 1-18. The three texts by women in the Campsey manuscript may be
there simply because their provenance made them readily known at Campsey; there may be
no intent to anthologize female writing as such. Nevertheless the question of whether
women's writing could be seen as a female tradition in contemporary manuscript forms is
worth further exploration in complement to established scholarship on the influence of the
hearing, reading, or seeing of particular texts for individual women.
16 "La vie de saint Edmond," ed. Baker (henceforth referred to by line number in the text).
17 I examine the evidence in "Lives of a Widow," chap. 5 of my Saints' Lives and Women's
Literary Culture: Virginity and Its Authorizations (Oxford, 2001), but conclude that there is in-
sufficient evidence to prove Isabella's patronage. On Alice Tyrel, see ibid., chap. 5, n. 31.
18 On female literary subcultures, see Felicity Riddy, " 'Women Talking about the Things
of God': A Late Medieval Subculture," in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150-1500, ed.
Meale, 104-27. Particularly relevant among John Carmi Parsons's many studies of medieval
queens is "Of Queens, Courts, and Books: Reflections on the Literary Patronage of Thir-
teenth-Century Plantagenet Queens," in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June
Hall McCash (Athens, Ga., 1996), 175-201. See also Margaret Howell, Eleanor of Provence:
Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998).

76 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
TABLE 1. Texts and authors in the Campsey manuscript

Saint Author and date Locations/associations

1. Elisabeth of Bozon, end 13th-early Bozon probably from Notting-

Hungary 14th c. ham, perhaps Steventon
Priory
2. Paphnutius Bozon
3· Paul the hermit Frere boioun (f. 8rb)
4· Thomas Becket Guernes (de Pont-Ste- Patronage from abbess of Bark-
Maxence, f. 48rb), ing 'suer saint Thomas'
1172-6 claimed in Paris MS BN f. fr.
135 13
5· Magdalen Will' (Guillaume le clerc, G. associated with Kenilworth,
f. 55va) 1180 X 91- Augustinian priory, known to
1238 Alexander Stavensby, bp. Cov-
entry and Lichfield (1224-38)
6. Edward the Nun of Barking* 1163 X Barking: probable connections
Confessor 89 with Henry II's court
7· Edmund of Matthew Paris, 1247 X Translate de latin en romanz par
Canterbury 59 Ia requeste Ia cuntesse de
arundel (f. 85vb)t
8. Audrey of Ely Marie (f. 134a)* ?Barking ?Chatteris ?Canon-
sleigh (Hugh de Northwold,
abbot of Bury, then bp at Ely,
translates shrine 1252)
9· Osith of Chich, Anon., late 12th c. Alice de Vere (d. 1163), mother
Aylesbury, of Bp William de Vere of
Hereford Hereford (author of a Latin
version) becomes corrodian at
Chich in her widowhood
10. Faith Symon de Walsingham Horsham St. Faith cult site, Bury
(f. 148ra) before 1214- St. Edmunds (author's monas-
5? tery), Fitzwalter patronage (in-
termarried with de \aloignes,
late 12th c.)
11. Modwenna Anon., early 13th c. Based on Latin vita by Abbot
Geoffrey of Burton (Richard of
Bury becomes prior of Burton
1222)
12. Richard of Pieres de fecham (f. Based on Backing's vita of 1270,
Chichester 244va) 1276-7 dedicated to Isabella of
Arundel
13. Catherine of Clemence of Barking,* Barking, ?Henry II's court
Alexandria c. 1170 X c. 1200

*Woman writer
tWoman patron
 the men, such as Matthew Paris and Edmund of Canterbury, who wrote
for them.
In the total ensemble of its saints, the Campsey manuscript includes three
twelfth- and thirteenth-century bishops (table 2, nos. 4, 7, 12: Becket, Ed-
mund, Richard), the last Anglo-Saxon king (no. 6, Edward the Confessor),
three native British abbesses (nos. 8, g, 11: all royal virgins, one a martyr, two
married, one a widow-Audree, Osith, Modwenna), two virgin martyrs
(no. 13, Catherine of Alexandria, and no. 10, Faith of Agen and Conques),
and the high-status penitent, Mary Magdalen (no. 5), all but Catherine,
Faith, and the Magdalen native to Britain. In whatever way this selection is
to be construed-for example, three native abbesses, three universal saints,
three churchmen, one king; or one penitent harlot, one converted church-
man, eight virgins (i.e., all the saints in the manuscript except the Magdalen
and Becket)-the manuscript provides a plethora of role models for
women. Here are precedents for anyone wanting to know how to found a
monastic house (the three British princess abbesses); set up a less formal
holy household (the Magdalen); defy a husband or father and/ or woo a
preferred bridegroom (Catherine, Faith, Osith); preach a sermon or make an
eloquent speech (the Magdalen, Modwenna, Faith, and Catherine); arrange
for female successors (Modwenna, Audree); enjoy syneisactic amicitia and
influence the compositions of clerical friends (Richard of Chichester); in-
spire and lead handmaidens (Audree, Modwenna); be veiled in spite of un-
cooperative chaplains and also manage episcopal opposition (Osith); assert
rights as a baronial landholder and claim the church's and the king's recip-
rocal obligations (Osith, Audree, Modwenna); control estate reeves and
stewards (Modwenna); exchange books cooperatively between nunneries
(Osith, Modwenna); consult saints' lives for precedents (Audree); take time
out for a sabbatical (Modwenna's seven years of reclusion on Andresey in
the Trent; Edward the confessor's Queen, Edith, and her self-cloistering in
busy reading and embroidering in her chamber); see queenly patronage in
action (the royal Audree and Henry I's good queen Maud in Audree's mira-
cles); carry out female courtly mourning (Catherine, a king's daughter
mourned by an empress's household); negotiate the claims of court and
church, baronial and ecclesiastical spirituality and their perquisites (Becket,
Richard, Edmund, Modwenna); 19 run the country without being a war-
leader and while remaining a virgin (Edward the Confessor). The manu-
script has examples of all these and more and provides a very full guide to
the concerns of elite women in or associated with religious lives.

19 The manuscript's twelfth-century texts from Barking themselves represent similar

overlaps of interest between an elite female community and the court, both in the reign of
Henry II when they were composed and in their continuing thirteenth-century existence
(especially as texts of royal and episcopal cults: even the legendary Catherine of Alexandria
in the Barking Catherine is a royal princess converting an empress, with both saint and con-
vert mourned by the women of court).

78 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
TABLE 2. Types of saints in the Campsey manuscript (in order of occurrence in the
manuscript)

Activities and modern

Saint categorizations Commemorations

Early 14th c. texts

1. Elisabeth of Hungary Biological mother, ascetic, Canonized 1235, feast
charity worker (1207- 17 (19) Nov.
31)
2. Panuce, Paphnutius Desert father (?4th c.) None
3· Paule le hermite First hermit, desert father Feast 10 Jan.
(d. c. 345)
Late 13th c. texts
+ Thomas de Cantor- Archbishop of Canter- Canonized 1173, feast
bery, Thomas Becket bury (1162-70) 29 Dec., translation
7 July
5· Marie Magdalene 1st c., cult at Vezelay Feast 22 July, transla-
from nth c. tion 4 May
6. Edward the Confes- Anglo-Saxon king (1003- Feast 5 Jan., transla-
sor 66) tion 13 Oct.
7· Eadmund, Edmund Archbishop of Canter- Canonized 1246, feast
of Canterbury bury (1233-40) 16 Nov., trans. 9
June
8. Audree, Etheldreda Anglo-Saxon widowed Feast 23 June, trans-
of Ely princess abbess (d. 679) lation 17 Oct.
9· Osith of Chich, Ay- Semi-legendary Anglo- Feast 7 Oct., multiple
lesbury, Hereford Saxon married princess translations
abbess (d. ?c. 700)
10. Fey, Faith of Agen Semi-legendary young Feast 6 Oct., transla-
and Conques girl, culted from 11th c. tion 14 Jan.
at Horsham
11. Modwenne, Mod- Semi-legendary Irish Feast 6 July
wenna of Britain princess abbess (?7th
c.), culted at Burton,
12th c.
12. Richard, evesque de Bishop of Chichester Canonized 1262, feast
Cycestre (1244-53) 3 April, translation
16 June
13. Katerine, Catherine Semi-legendary virgin Feast 25 Nov.
of Alexandria (?4th c.)

By comparison, the Katherine Group mini-legendary associated with the

Guide offers three virgin martyrs of the universal church, Katherine, Mar-
garet, Juliana, each life customized and conformed to the same narrative
morphology. These saints' lives are intensely spectacular accounts of virgin
torture and eloquence designed for the inner theater of anchoritic contem-

Hagiography and Women's History 79

 plative reading, texts romancing and nuptializing enclosure and internal-
ized ascetic heroism. The Katherine Group and the Guide image an ideal
solitary self, persuasively embodied as an enclosed reader of romance
scripts. 20 Where the Guide and Seinte Katerine, for instance, figure the hero-
ine as a chamber reader of feminized nuptial romance, focused on her
Christ bridegroom and trained in what Rosalynn Voaden has so splendidly
called "the eroticization of waiting,''21 the Campsey Life of Catherine by
Clemence of Barking (whose own reading in Latin and the vernacular in
her wealthy Benedictine nunnery must have been considerable), does not
show Catherine as a solitary reader, and has her "taught letters and how to
argue a case and defend her position" against any dialectician, emphasiz-
ing her as a public speaker, a plaideresse. 22
The contrast between the West Midlands English and the East Anglian
French collections can perhaps most quickly be imaged in their topogra-
phies. With only a few exceptions, the Guide locates its female subjects in a
symbolic geography of other-worldly aspiration. The exceptions are that,
in one passage, the anchoresses, multiplied to "twenty nuoe ooer rna
[twenty now, or more]" from the original three and spreading toward "En-
glandes ende," are said to be living a common life as if they were a convent
of Chester, Shrewsbury, Oxford, and London.23 (This brief acknowledg-
ment by analogy of what must have been extraordinary influence and pres-
tige exercised by the original three recluses for whom the text was com-
posed near the Welsh border recontains a whole female religious
movement almost before we have had time to notice it.) The Guide also has
one comparison between the hills of Armenia and the European Alps as
symbolic heights of penitential achievement for the anchoresses: the hum-
bler they are, the taller they are as hills raised toward heaven and hence the
more readily the Christ bridegroom can come leaping and treading on
them, imprinting his footsteps on them, as in the "swete luue boc" of the

zo Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self Individuality in the "Ancrene Wisse" (Cambridge,
Mass., 1981); Anne Savage, "The Solitary Heroine: Aspects of Meditation and Mysticism in
Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group and the Wooing Group," in Mysticism and Spirituality in
Medieval England, ed. William F. Pollard and Robert Boenig (Woodbridge, 1997), 63-84.
21 In our joint paper, "An Eternity of Mills and Boon [Harlequin]?" (Liverpool John

Moores University Conference on Women and Popular Culture, "Romance and Roses,"
1995).
22 Vie sainte Catherine, ed. MacBain, vv. 141-44, 335, 479· In Edmund of Canterbury's thir-

teenth-century Mirour de I'eglyse (a text of diffusion and influence closely paralleling Ancrene
Wisse's), it is also clear that hearing, discussing, and inquiring about texts, rather than soli-
tary reading of them, is assumed as the basis of much female devotional learning (see Joce-
lyn Wogan-Browne, "Whose Bible Is It Anyway? Women and Holy Writings in Anglo-Nor-
man England," forthcoming in Proceedings of the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance
Conference (Villanova, Penn.).
23 The English Text of the "Ancrene Riwle": Ancrene Wisse: Edited from MS. Corpus Christi Col-

lege Cambridge 402, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien, intra. N. R. Ker, EETS o.s., 249 (1962), f. 69a/ 20-21,
27-8, and see further Watson, "With the Heat of the Hungry Heart," in this volume.

So Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Song of Songs.24 Otherwise, the places in which the anchoress is to reimag-
ine her existence are the desert of the monastic founding fathers (and two
desert mothers, Sarah and Syncletica, who are also mentioned), the cell,
and Jerusalem.zs The geography of the Katherine Group is, again, either
biblical or largely symbolic, distant, romanced, even allowing for the effect
of the crusades (of which the West Midlands were very well aware). Thus
the place-names in the three texts comprise Paradise, an unspecified "Est-
lande," Asia, Chaldea, Babylon, Armenia, Nicomedia, Antioch, the Red
Sea, Jordan (the river), Egypt, Sinai, Syon and Jerusalem, Alexandria,
Rome, Illyria and Gaul ("franclonde," SK u, ll. 4 and 9, a propos the em-
perors Constantine and Maxentius and their wars with each other), and the
Campagna ("champaine," SJ, 51V, ll. 753-4, a propos a translation of Ju-
liana's relics).26
Communities are indissociable from the recorded existence of the soli-
taries whom they support, and traces of the communities, textual and his-
torical, of the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse remain in these works,
for all their presentation of solitary reading selves.27 The way in which
women's collective history is masked in the Guide and the Katherine Group
is partly a matter of generic convention. This is hagiography as romance,
the contained empowerment and simultaneous isolation of the individual.
Campsey on the other hand provides a plethora of role models for individ-
ual enterprise, but they are set within what seems a historical rather than a
romance collection and a much fuller sense of women in the collective. The
Guide and its associated Groups are texts for women's reading; the
Campsey manuscript collects texts of women's reading. 2s
The Campsey volume with its greater number of lives contains of course
many more place-names than the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse. But
my point here is the relation between the place-names and the women
composing, reading, and hearing the texts in which they occur. Compared
with the Guide's and Katherine Group's concentration on the Christ bride-
groom, the spiritual director, and the devil as the major relations of one's
life, the networks in and implied by the Campsey manuscript are strikingly

24 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Tolkien, f. 103al 5-11.

2s For Sarah and Syncletica, see Ancrene Wisse, ed. Tolkien, f. 3b I 5, 44al 10, 63b I 14.
26 References from Lorna Stevenson and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, eds., A Computer Con-
cordance to the Katherine Group and the Wooing Group (Cambridge, 2ooo). The Wooing Group
similarly includes only Bethlehem and Syon as place-names.
27 See Millett," 'Women in No Man's Land.'"
28 I can see no evidence to substantiate the possibility that the Wooing Group is by, rather

than for the use of, women (though its meditative personae are certainly feminine). For fur-
ther discussion see Susannah Mary Chewning, "Mysticism and the Anchoritic Commu-
nity," in Medieval Women in Their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Cardiff, 1997), 121-23. For a
distinction between "transmissional" and "authorial" communities, see Ralph Hanna, "Re-
considering the Auchinleck Manuscript," in New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript
Studies, ed. Derek Pearsall (York, 2000), 102.

Hagiography and Women's History 81

 close to home, populous, and varied. Campsey, Barking, and Bozon's prob-
able circuits of activity are all in East Anglia and the East Midlands (see
map, fig. 1). Some of the saints culted in the manuscript evoke overseas ter-
ritory. Of these, St. Catherine's Alexandria can probably be considered re-
mote and exotic, but then there is the Magdalen and her "mesnee" (v. 710)
at "Marceille" (vv. 27, 676) 29 and Pontigny near Soissons, the place of
Becket's illness while in exile. It was thenceforth a politically important
French site for English ecclesiastical courtier-saints (such as Isabella of
Arundel's archbishop, Edmund, and her bishop, Richard) to be associated
with in their vitae, and one to which Englishwomen made pilgrimages.
Agen and Conques in the Garonne and Rouergues are also evoked through
the life of St. Faith in the manuscript, but again this is not an evocation of
the exotic. This life concerns French pilgrimage sites visited by English no-
blewomen, and in any case identifies itself as written in Benedictine Bury
St. Edmunds, by Simon of Walsingham, a native of the major East Anglian
cult site, Horsham St. Faith, itself founded by Sybil de Cheney and her hus-
band on their return from Conques in 1105-7. 30 An important set of wall
paintings of the foundation story was added to the Horsham priory in the
thirteenth century.3I
At the outer edges of the manuscript's English geography are Isabella of
Arundel's own foundation, the Cistercian nunnery of Marham, in the north
of the region, and in the south, Lewes castle, then belonging to her brother
and the site of her nephew's cure through the posthumous powers of
Richard, bishop of Chichester (at which the Countess herself is present in
the Campsey life of this saint). 32 Beyond the immediate East Anglian center
are contributions from further west: the two British virgin abbess lives of
Osith and Modwenna. Osith's main cult center is in East Anglia, with con-

29 "La vie de Madeleine," ed. R. Reinsch, Archiv 64 (188o): 85-94.

3D On the foundation see William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. J. Caley, H. Ellis,
and B. Bandinel (London, 1817-30), iii, 636, nos. I and II, and for the gift of "nominatim ter-
ram de Rodeham quam Sibilla uxor praefati Robertis dedit," see Cartulaire de l'Abbeye de
Conques en Rouergue, ed. Gustave Desjardins (Paris, 1879), no. 519. Sybil de Cheney was
heiress to Ralph de Cheney (see Julian Eve, A History of Horsham St Faith, Norfolk: The Story of
a Village [Norwich, 1992, rev. ed. 1994], 10). Conques itself was founded by Roger de Tosny,
whose wife Gotheline also owned land in Norfolk. Adela of Blois gave to Conques in 1101
and 1108 (Desjardins, ed., Cartulaire, nos. 470, 486) and Walter Giffard and "mater ejus
Agnes" visited Conques and donated to Horsham after 1107 (Desjardins, ed., Cartulaire, no.
497). I am grateful to Pamela Sheingorn for confirming (pers. comm.) that the cult of St.
Faith in the British Isles was particularly strong among aristocratic women. (I know of no
evidence as to whether the women of Campsey had any knowledge of Sybil de Cheney's
role in the cult.)
31 On the wall paintings see Dominic Purcell, "The Priory of Horsham St Faith and Its
Wall Paintings," Norfolk Archaeology 35 (1970-73): 469-73; David Park, "Wall Painting," in
Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200-1400, ed. Jonathan Alexander and Paul Bin-
ski (London, 1987), 313, and plates 1 and 2.
32 See Vie seint Richard, ed. Russell, 85-88, 140, n. to M89-98.

82 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
 Wei beck
o (post-medieval home of
Campsey manuscript)

Walsingham
(cognomen of Simon,
Nottingham
author of-Campsey's
0 (possible location for Bozon's
Ar-t Life of Faith) 0 o Binham
early training and work)
(de Valoignes foondation)
o Burton-on Trent Horsham St Faith
(male Benedictine house, source Faith (Norfolk cult center of
of Modwenna's Latin vita) St Faith, Fitzwalter foundation
0
0
o Polesworth Marham
(possible site of Modwenna cult, (Isabella of Arundel's foundation) O Wymondham
and of related figure Edith) (dependency of St Alban's of
Chatteris 0 which Isabella of Arundel
Ely held the advowson)
(Benedictine nunnery: perhaps
0 (Benedictine abbey,
° Kenilworth
where 'Marie' wrote Audree)

(Augustinian priory and possible

Etheldreda's cult center)
Dunwich
(site of stag's leap 0
Bury St Edmunds 0

-
location for Guillaume le clerc. in Osith Life)
author of Magdalen life in (Simon of Walsingham's Benedictine
Campsey manuscript) house; house in 1214- 15 of future bishop Campsey Ash 0
of Ely and pnor of Burton) (Augustinian canonesses,
H ereford founded by de Valoignes)
(bishopric of William
de Vere, author o Castle Hedingham
of a late 12th<. (de Vere foundation
Osith vito) 0 Bicester Hatfield Broad Oak
(de Vere foundation)
Aylesbury O St Albans 0 0
(with Bicester, 0 (Benedictine monastery of Matthew St Osyth (Chich)
site associated Paris, author of Edmund) (Augustinian canons)
0 with Osith's cult)
Steven ton
(priory and perhaps a
o Barking
location for Bozon)
London ~nedictine nunne.r:y: source of
i Campsey texts Gotherirle, Edouord,
patron of a tblrd,.Guemes llec!<•t)

Chichester Lewes
(bishopric of 5t (castle of Isabella's in-laws, site
Richard, former of St Richard's cure of her nephew)
0
chancellor of Edmund) 0 Arundel
0

Fig. 1. Sites and communities associated with the Campsey manuscript. Reproduced (with
minor modifications) by permission of O xford University Press.
 nections to London, but she has some central Midlands and Hereford con-
nections (through Alice de Vere at Chich and her son William de Vere,
bishop of Hereford, 1186-98).33 Modwenna's cult was revived by the
monks of Burton-on-Trent, but has probable connections to East Anglia.34
Guillaume le Clerc's Magdalen life is probably from Kenilworth.35 The sites
mentioned in the lives of the three British abbesses-property owned by
them, miracle and shrine sites, the homes of people cured at shrines, and so
on-suggest further ways of focalizing, so to speak, the manuscript's view-
point (see fig. 2). Less remote and exotic than Ancrene Wisse's universe or
the Katherine Group's hagiographic geography, Campsey's collection pre-
sents a knowable world, a world with contemporary possibilities of influ-
ence and with plenty of precedents for the exercise of female power in
church, family, and collective forms, especially in the foundations made by
its Anglo-Saxon and British princess-abbesses of their own and subsidiary
communities.
In these mappings, the Benedictine monastery of Bury (see fig. 1) seems a
potentially important transmission point in the networks that gather these
lives together, just as much so as the individual patron and owner of saints'
lives, Isabella of Arundel. As Virginia Blanton-Whetsall has stressed in her
work on St. Etheldreda of Ely, Hugh de Northwold, abbot of Bury, became
bishop of Ely (1229-54) and encouraged the thirteenth-century cult to
which the Anglo-Norman life by Marie in the Campsey manuscript is im-
portant testimony.36 Involved in Hugh de Northwold's notoriously dis-

33 Alice became a corrodian at St. Osyth's, Chich; her son culted Osith while bishop at
Hereford; the vernacular Osith life includes, uniquely, a miracle in which a Hereford
woman is redirected from Bury to Chich. The ecclesiastical politics of the vernacular life
focus on London, where, as a splendid recent study stresses, de Vere was brought up (at
Henry I's court) and where St. Osith's landholdings at Chich were both promoted and later
contested by Bishop Richard Belmeis I of London, object of one of Osith's vengeance mira-
cles (Jane Zatta, "The Vie Seinte Osith: Hagiography and Politics in Anglo-Norman En-
gland," Studies in Philology 96 [1999]: 367-93). On de Vere, see Julia Barrow, "A Twelfth-Cen-
tury Bishop and Literary Patron: William de Vere," Viator 18 (1987): 175-89; on Osith's cult
and texts, Denis Bethell, "The Lives of St Osyth of Essex and St Osyth of Aylesbury,"
Analecta Bollandiana 88 (1970): 75-127.
34 Modwenna's Anglo-Norman life is closely associated with that of Osith, whose cult
sites are principally in East Anglia and London in the vernacular life (Modwenna is shown
training Osith in this life and is also associated with Edith of Polesworth, a central Midlands
house). For a further possible connection, see the discussion of Richard of Bury and n. 38
below.
35 Guillaume (1180/ 1191-1238) was from Normandy but was employed by the Augustin-
ian prior of Kenilworth on commissions and seems to have worked in the diocese of Coven-
try and Lichfield (M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature in the Cloisters [Edinburgh,
1950], 120), whose bishop, Alexander Stavensby (1224-38), responded to one of his poems in
the 1230s.
36 Blanton-Whetsall suggests that Hugh de Northwold, bishop of Ely and formerly
abbot of Bury, encouraged Marie in the composition of Audree in connection with his trans-
lation of the saint's shrine in 1252 (Virginia Blanton-Whetsall, "St JEthelthryth's Cult," 311,
n. 16).

84 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
 0
Escoce
•• Ell Site mentioned in Osith
Escoz 0 Site mentioned in Modwenne
• Site mentioned in Audn!e

•
•
•
--- Bretaigne Ia majur
Bretaine

lrlande
• I
- { Duuvelin
Mt Focard
Cel/esclive • Hombre
Cunnouth

• •

Gwales
Wales • 0
• Ell

•
• • • Ell
• • Ell
lo/,S(';I)t

West Saxoine
('st~i 1>0/
ll'st(',.
Ell
•
• •
• • ••
Normandie
Brie --....
Rume
Rome"""

Fig. 2. Sites associated with Osith, Modwenna, and Audree.

 puted election to the abbacy of Bury in 1214-15 were some of the region's
major lay noblemen (Isabella of Arundel's father's generation of Bigods,
Marshals, Fitzwalters, and Warennes for example) 37 and also monks subse-
quently connected with communities represented in the manuscript. Simon
of Walsingham, author of the Campsey life of Faith, served on Hugh de
Northwold's deputation to the pope as did Richard, the precentor of Bury
who unsuccessfully contested the election and who became abbot of St.
Modwenna's abbey of Burton on Trent in 1222; Bury's Nicholas of Dunsta-
ble is another Bury monk who subsequently went to Ely (as archdeacon)
and then became bishop of Worcester, then of Winchester, and then chancel-
lor to Henry 111.38 But there are also all the intrafamilial connections between
these East Anglian houses and those who found, patronize, and staff them:
de Veres, de Valoignes, de Cainetos, Bigods, Warennes, and Clares.39 Bury is
another node in the manuscript's networks to add to those of Barking,
Campsey, and Isabella of Arundel and her ecclesiastic courtier-saints.
In so far as it charts and historicizes British identities and networks for
its audiences, the Campsey manuscript can be seen in the traditions of
women's historiographical as well as their hagiographical patronage.
These traditions are relatively well known for early Latin patronage by
women in Britain, but little explored for the huge riches of Anglo-Norman
historiography other than for the queens of England.4D One might think
here of the royal and seigneurial genealogies carefully given for the Anglo-

37 See The Chronicle of the Election of Hugh, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds and Later Bishop of Ely,

ed. R. M. Thomson (Oxford, 1974), 83 n. 5, 168.

38 Thomson, Chronicle of the Election, xvi, 193-94. A book from Bury's medieval library
contains a letter from the niece of Hugh de Northwold, "Lucy of St Edmund's," to her
brother Nicholas the archdeacon (ibid., 193, n. 5).
39 A full study of the interconnections cannot be made here; I mention a few to give a

sense of the possibilities. Joan de Valoignes (mentioned in 1211, 1220 x 1221) and Agnes de
Valoignes (1234), probably sisters of the founder, Theobald de Valoignes, were first abbesses
of Campsey (VCH Suffolk ii, 112, and Sally Thompson, Women Religious: The Founding of Eng-
lish Nunneries after the Norman Conquest [Oxford, 1991], app. A, 235); Christiania de Val-
oignes was abbess of Barking, 1200-13, and Anne de Vere abbess from 1295-1318 (Loftus
and Chettle, History of Barking, 34, 36-38; VCH Essex ii, 121). For Lucy de Vere, prioress of
Castle Hedingham, see Thompson, Women Religious, 220. Bishop William de Vere (seen. 33
above) was the son of Aubrey de Vere of Hedingham Castle, d. 1141 (whose son Aubrey be-
came earl of Oxford, d. 1194) and Alice, daughter of Gilbert de Clare; she died c. 1163.
William de Vere's sister Juliana married Hugh Bigod, first Earl of Norfolk. Alice de Vere's
daughter Alice (sister of William de Vere) married Roger (d. 1177), son of Richard, Lord of
Warkworth and nephew of Earl Hugh Bigod of Norfolk (Bethell, "The Lives of St Osyth," 97
and app. III, 122-23). Their son Henry of Essex forfeited his lands in 1163. Joan de Stutville
may be the Joanna of the Bigod child's miracle in the life of Isabella of Arundel's saint,
Richard of Chichester (W. Blaauw, The Barons' War, 181, n. 47). Joanna married Roger, Hugh
Bigod's son, who inherited as Earl of Norfolk after his uncle Roger (d. 1297). For the de
Caineto's (de Cheneys) see n. 30 above: Gunnora de Valoignes (d. before 1220) married into
the Fitzwalters, as did Sibyl de Cheney.
40 See Elisabeth M. C. van Houts, Memory and Gender in Early Medieval Europe 90G-12oo
(Basingstoke, 1999). For a survey of francophone historiographical patronage, see Diana B.

86 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Saxon princess saints in the Campsey manuscript, as well as of all the
French and Middle English Brut and Estoire manuscripts yet to be fully
studied as texts of women's as well as of men's historiography. There is
need to do still more with women's history and lineage genres, whether the
genealogies of Christ and the Virgin or regal, family, and household ge-
nealogies, or combinations of the two (such as the fifteenth-century Anglo-
Norman Adam and Eve roll recently commented on by Diana Tyson in
which Isabella of Arundel's mother and aunts and other women of the
Marshal family are specially commemorated).41 Not only lineages, but for-
mer elite female communities are imaged in the Campsey manuscript's ac-
count of Etheldreda's Ely, Modwenna's Burton, and Osith's Chich. Female
holy kinships and families provide pedigrees, validations, and links with
subsidiary communities and daughter houses as well as with the central
cult sites, so that the history of women's collectivities and a collectively
arrived-at history for women are both thinkable in the manuscript.
Both in the texts themselves and in the provenances and associations at
work in the collection, then, a thickening sense of context for the Campsey
manuscript accretes, even if we currently know nothing more definite
about its compilation than we do of the Guide and the Katherine Group's.
The desideratum of "thick" study of hagiography in its contexts has been
persuasively put by Patrick Geary.42 Hagiography, as he stresses, is "al-
ways occasional literature," not the single unvarying, apolitical "life" of
the saints that often featured in earlier twentieth-century reception of
saints' lives. We have to heed the variety of hagiographic collections and
their associated texts, and the range of their occasions.43
But we need manuscript networks as well, for the Campsey manuscript
defies any kind of compositional, hagiological, or other order and (partly
because of its very richness and variousness) is resistant to thematic read-
ings across the texts that would elucidate an ideal target reader, as the
Katherine Group can be argued to do. Nor does there seem any monastic
genre or occasion to which the Campsey collection conforms, or evidence
of any clear formal principle for the inclusion and arrangement of texts,
other than that the book, as per its inscription earlier referred to, provides
mealtime reading at Campsey (which it does by no calendrical or other

Tyson, "Patronage of French Vernacular History Writers in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Cen-
turies," Romania 100 (1979): 180-222; on Latin traditions, see Joan M. Ferrante, To the Glory of
Her Sex: Women's Roles in the Composition of Medieval Texts (Bloomington, 1997), chap. 3, and
idem, " 'Licet longinquis regionibus corpore separati': Letters as a Link in and to the Middle
Ages," Speculum 76 (2001): 880-81.
41 Diana B. Tyson, "The Adam and Eve Roll: Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 98,"

Scriptorium 52 (1998): 301-16, esp. 305,315-6.

42 Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1994), intro.
43 Geary, Living with the Dead, 23, citing a vita written to defend the rights of nuns to draw

water (rights claimed by the monks of the Welf monastery of Wingarten, 24-25).

Hagiography and Women's History 87

 conventional legendary scheme; see table 2, above, for the feasts of
Campsey's saints). Nor can the collection be accounted for as the interests
of an individual patron. The book could, rather, be seen as a contingent,
specific expression of the interests not of one individual emblematizing her
own position, but of a collectivity of elite women, combining monastic, ec-
clesiastic, and family threads.44 This is geographically focused in the cen-
tral eastern coast of England, but has networks stretching beyond, social
networks moving through the barony, touching the court, passing through
monastic family foundations and family networks up and down the An-
glian coast. Isabella of Arundel, seductive though she is as a patroness, is
presented in the manuscript as the patroness of the Edmund life (see table
1, no. 7 above), not of the collection. If the ten late-thirteenth-century texts
were put together for her, it seems odd that she should be mentioned in the
fourth of these, but not elsewhere. The placing of Isabella's name suggests
more strongly that whoever was responsible for the manuscript knew her
as the patron of the Edmund life than it suggests that she was the patron of
the collection of ten lives.
The manuscript's concluding inscription should perhaps, then, be read in
a collective sense. "Ce livre deviseie a la priorie de Kanpseie de lire a
mengier" (This book given to I at the priory of Campsey for reading at
meals) inscribed in a fourteenth-century hand at the end of the manuscript's
final text might then mean "deviseie" not in the more common sense of
"gifted [divided, shared out, bequeathed]" (i.e., donated in some way to/ at
the priory) but in the alternative sense of "designed," "devised," so that the
book may have been "designed" (though not necessarily copied) at the pri-
ory of Campsey.4s Monastic copyists were being replaced by professional
scriveners in towns and universities in the thirteenth century,46 and
women's houses were experienced in getting their materials made out-of-
house. (A good example is the elegant copy of Peter Comestor's Historia
44 Network theory has been used in modern social sciences for some decades (see, e.g.,

Samuel Leinhardt, Social Networks: A Developing Paradigm (New York, 1977]), and for an in-
fluential account of women's relations and networks, see Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice:
Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). Applications to me-
dieval prosopography are rendered difficult, particularly in the case of medieval women, by
absences of record and occlusions in the records that do exist. As a model, however, the par-
adigm of the network may allow us to envisage structures of relationship and modes of ac-
tion even where we cannot fill in all the details (in Campsey's case, a complete trawl and re-
constitution of networks passing through and centered in East Anglia would hardly be too
much, and yet might not yield more than convergent, rather than conclusive information).
45 The prospect that the manuscript was made by the clerics of the small chantry college
established at Campsey in 1347 by Countess Maud de Ufford is tantalizing, but too late for
the thirteenth-century section of the manuscript and late for the early fourteenth-century
additions at the beginning of the manuscript, which must predate the inscription of owner-
ship on the first leaf. (This, like the concluding inscription of function, is dated to the early
fourteenth century.)
46 As Andrew Taylor points out, even male monasteries were no longer major centers for
copying in the thirteenth century. Professional scriveners were established in towns and

88 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
scholastica and Richard of St. Victor's Allegories on the Old Testament commis-
sioned, according to the manuscript's inscription, for the wealthy, aristo-
cratic, Benedictine nunnery of Elstow in Bedfordshire, by Cecily de
Chanville, abbess from 1170-80, "in eruditionem et profectum conuentus
sui." A further inscription at the end of the manuscript says that she died
before it was completed [in 1191-2?] and that Robert of Bedford made it for
her).47 The Campsey canonesses could readily have had their manuscript
made in Oxford, London, or perhaps Cambridge, and doubtless knew peo-
ple in or going to these centers. 4s
We might therefore envision one of several scenarios of collective action.
The one requiring least discussion at Campsey would involve the acquisition
of the original late-thirteenth-century manuscript of ten lives (whether
through Isabella of Arundel or someone who knew of her Anglo-Norman
saints' lives), and the addition of the three early fourteenth-century lives. The
more interesting prospect, and one that perhaps makes most sense of the na-
ture of the manuscript's collection, is that the late thirteenth-century section
of the manuscript was evolved at Campsey. Saints of the universal church of
particular relevance to a prestigious community and a community including
vowesses and lay corrodians were chosen (Catherine of Alexandria suggests,
especially in the version of her life by Clemence of Barking in the Campsey
collection, the learning and eloquence of elite female communities; the Mag-
dalen is a high-status saint of special significance, as a repentant harlot, to bi-
ological mothers unable to produce children and remain virgin, yet desirous
of a religious life).49 But also chosen were saints who combined exemplary
demonstrations of foundresshood, patronage, asceticism, leadership, and
self-sacrifice (and, not least, getting their own way about their disposition in
marriage) with being a part, geographically and institutionally, of the very
topography and fabric of eastern England.

universities ("Authors, Scribes, Patrons and Books," in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthol-
ogy of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Wat-
son, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans [University Park, Penn., 1999], 354). The situation de-
scribed by Doyle for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (where "competent monastic
scribes" were supplemented by "domestic employees and occasional outsiders") must have
been anticipated among the nunneries, even fewer of whom had anything like an institu-
tional scriptorium (A. I. Doyle, "Book Production by the Monastic Orders in England (c.
1375-1530): Assessing the Evidence," in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence, ed.
Linda Brownrigg [Los Altos Hills, Calif., 1990], 1-19, esp. 15).
47 David N. Bell, What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries (Kala-
mazoo, Mich., 1995), s.v. Elstow, p.137. The complete inscription (not given in Bell), contin-
ues on f. 196v of London, BL Royal 7· F iii.
48 The illustrated initials, with their distinctive full figures of the saints, may help narrow
down the possibilities, but this point may be covered in the forthcoming study by Russell (n.
12 above).
49 For the case that the Magdalen has as much to do with elite mothers, widows, and

vowesses in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England as with prostitutes, see my Saints'

Lives and Women's Literary Culture, chap. 4·

Hagiography and Women's History 8g

 The leading saint of the region, Bury's St. Edmund, Anglo-Saxon king
and martyr to the Danes, was not included. It may simply be that Campsey
had a separate manuscript of his life, or it may be a deliberate omission.
One of the Campsey manuscript's abbess saints, Osith, is an Anglo-Saxon
princess saint who was reinvented over the eleventh and twelfth centuries
by the Augustinian canons at their new foundation of Chich as against the
local Benedictines of Bury and the prestige of Edmund.so It may thus be
that the manuscript maintains in regard to this choice a consciously Au-
gustinian and female saintly profile (contrasting with the male Benedictine
cult at Bury). Campsey's most authoritative native saint is certainly female:
Audree, the leading Benedictine Anglo-Saxon princess saint of eastern, and
indeed of all, England. The Audree life included in Campsey was written
by a woman who was probably either in one of the East Anglian or Essex
houses or known there, but it is also a life in which the unknown Marie re-
shapes institutional Benedictinism into a queenly figure whose powers and
interests look remarkably like those of thirteenth-century elite women. 51
If we read the manuscript as an expression of a collective interest, then, it
seems that the women who owned and used it were interested (though not
exclusively so) in their own region and topographies and in a range of reli-
gious and para-religious lives as well as in court, court styles, baronial fam-
ilies and ecclesiastical politics and influence, and a number of devotional
and theological concerns.s2 They assembled the lives because they knew of
or inquired for them among their networks, from abbess to abbess or pri-
oress to prioress perhaps, or more probably with intermediate clerics,
monks, and ecclesiastics, or their family connections (these two, of course,
often being the same thing). They specially wanted both lives relevant to
their region and lives of other women and communities like themselves,
but were interested also in prestigious contemporary courtier churchmen
(and such churchmen's role model, Becket), who were figures familiar in
their own lives. They did not choose the unrelieved concentration on virgin
martyrs compiled for women in the Katherine Group. Campsey's spectrum
of exemplary biographies stresses a much wider age and role range in the
lives of religious and para-religious women.
I think there are riches for the history of women in England here (all the
more so for the embedding of Campsey texts in male as well as female ec-

so Wogan-Browne, Saints' Lives, chap. 2; on a London focus in the politics of the vernacu-
lar life, see Zatta, "Vie Seinte Osith," n. 33 above. In the vernacular life, a shrine client finds
no relief at Bury St. Edmunds and is redirected to Chich ("Osith," ed. Baker, vv. 1152-58).
51 See further Wogan-Browne, Saints' Lives, chap. 6; Blanton-Whetsall, "St JEthelthryth's
Cult."
52 I have not addressed devotional and theological aspects of the manuscript's texts here,
but for Clemence of Barking's Anselmian union of faith and reason in her late twelfth-cen-
tury Catherine life, see my Saints' Lives, chap. 7· Jane Zatta has a study forthcoming on the
theological claims of Campsey's life of Modwenna for (essentialized) female nature's special
redemptive capacities.

90 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
clesiastical and family networks). All the Campsey lives need study by
many more people, and more translations than the ones currently available
or underway.s3 But they cannot be worked on in the grand, nationalizing
way in which the Guide began its successful career in modern scholarship.
Women's literary history, it still needs saying, can't be studied as part of
grand narratives. The Campsey collection doesn't enter the nationalizing
narrative of English scholarship at any stage of postmedieval antiquarian
or scholarly inquiry. As a glance at what can be gleaned of the continuing
literacies and audition of these communities suggests, these texts are texts
of micro-literacies. Thus in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
Campsey has well-kept French cellaresses' accounts and French-English
psalters, Barking has English accounts, but theological manuscript collec-
tions in continental French as well as in English, while Isabella of Arundel's
Marham has an elegant, fourteenth-century Latin list of the abbess's ten-
ants (perhaps, one could speculate, prepared for the occasion of Eleanor of
Castile's interest in Marham's being confirmed by Edward I after Isabella's
death). 54 Women in England not only acquired French manuscripts in nun-
neries and elsewhere but continued to use Anglo-Norman texts into the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.ss Perhaps the best-known fifteenth-cen-

53 The lives of Osith, Modwenna, and Audree are forthcoming in a volume by Jane Zatta
for the Boydell and Brewer Library of Medieval Women; the life of Audree is translated by
Christine Wille Garrison, "The Lives of St JEtheldreda: Representation of Female Sanctity
from 700-1300" (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1990). For a translation of the Becket
life in the manuscript, see Janet Shirley, Guarnier's Becket (London and Chichester, 1975); for
St Catherine, see J. Wogan-Browne and Glyn S. Burgess in Virgin Lives and Holy Deaths: Two
Exemplary Biographies for Anglo-Norman Women (London, 1996). Some extracts from the life
of St. Faith are included in Brigitte Cazelles, The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagio-
graphic Romances of the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1991).
54 Campsey's fifteenth-century French accounts are Ipswich, Suffolk County Record Of-
fice HD 1538/174; see Marilyn Oliva, ed., Charters and Household Accounts of the Female
Monasteries in the County of Suffolk (Woodbridge, forthcoming). For the Barking cellaress's
"Charthe" (BL, MS Cotton Julius D. viii) see Dugdale, Monasticon I, 442-45, and Eileen
Power, Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275-1535 (Cambridge, 1922), 563-68; for French theo-
logical collections acquired by Barking in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Paris, BN
fr. 1038; Oxford, Magdalen College, Lat. 41), see Bell, s.v. Barking, nos. 13, 15. Marham's
flourished and decorated list of properties is Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, Hare 2213 (a
later set of Latin accounts, mostly from the reign of Henry VI, is now NRO Hare 2201,
194x5-2212, 194x5; see Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval En-
gland: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350-1540 [Woodbridge, 1998], 78, wo).
Eleanor of Castile gave a gift of advowson to Marham in 1290, which Edward I confirmed to
Marham for his soul and Eleanor's memory in February 1292 (John A. Nichols, ed., "The
History and Cartulary of the Cistercian Nuns of Marham Abbey, 1249-1536" [Ph.D. diss.,
Kent State University, 1974], 28-29).
55 The nunnery of Crabhouse in Norfolk, for instance, has its foundation story in French

in the fourteenth century (Mary Bateson, ed., "The Register of Crab house Nunnery," Norfolk
Archaeology 11 [1892]: 1-71); in 1535, the Augustinian canonesses at Lacock Abbey still had
their Rule and other fundamental documents in French (VCH Wilts, val. 3 [1956], 309). For a
list of French texts in manuscripts securely provenanced to nunneries in England see Bell,
What Nuns Read, Index II, Works in French.

Hagiography and Women's History 91

 tury book at Campsey is the sub-prioress Katherine Babington's copy of
Capgrave's late Middle English life of Katherine, but Campsey's psalters
continued to contain French prayers, and Reginald Rous and Anne Wing-
field gave French book donations to the priory. 56
As the obverse to hagiography's occasional nature, Patrick Geary
laments what he sees as the loss of a master narrative for European hagiog-
raphy entailed by the present necessity for detailed contextualization ("the
broader meaning of medieval hagiography cannot be answered until we
have dozens of ... microstudies").S 7 But Campsey's combination of speci-
ficity and exemplarity challenges the value of master narratives. The col-
lection's ungeneralizability, its located and contingent nature, is a measure
of its success as a record of and reflection on their personal and collective
histories by a female community (a community, given the Barking texts of
the manuscript, perhaps working in cooperation with other female
houses). In this light, the relatively informal nature of so many conventual
records starts to go with rather than against the grain of the genre, suggest-
ing that a hagiography perceived as occasional may have much to offer for
women's texts and histories.
The Campsey manuscript also suggests that rather than mapping liter-
ary history in conventional and institutionalized divisions of modern
nation-states and of medieval political history, medieval literary territory
should be defined on a more ad hoc basis and use family networks in es-
tablishing its parameters. The Campsey world is focused mainly in East
Anglia, but with significant awareness of and contributions from the Con-
tinent, and the afterlife of some of its texts can be traced across the Channel
(most notably the prose remaniement of the Barking life of Edward the Con-
fessor for the Counts of St. Pol, a family that contributed Marie de St. Pol
back across the Channel to become foundress of a Cambridge college).SS Is-
lands are less insular in an era where water-borne transport is swifter than
road. There is a case for seeing not the English nation but East Anglia,
northwest France, and the Flandrian coast as the topography of an impor-
tant stretch of largely unwritten women's literary history in which the in-
terchange of manuscripts in French and Latin through family as well as

56 For Rous, see Oliva, The Convent and the Community, 69; Anne Wingfield, better known
as the reader for whom BL, Harley 4012 was compiled, had affiliations with Syon, but her
second husband, Sir Robert Wingfield (d. 1494), was from a local Suffolk family (see further
Jacqueline Jenkins, "Lay Devotion and Women Readers of the Middle English Prose Life of
St Katherine" in The Cult of St Katherine in Medieval Europe, ed. idem and Katherine J. Lewis
[Brepols, forthcoming]).
57 Geary, Living with the Dead, 28.
58 For details of the manuscripts of the prose remaniement, see Ruth J. Dean and Maureen
B. M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, ANTS OP 3 (Lon-
don, 1999), 291, no. 523. The manuscript of Guernes' Becket life which cites Barking patron-
age (seen. 13 above) is itself a Picard manuscript and thus a further indication of such cross-
channel connection.

92 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
ecclesiastical networks (and in the later Middle Ages in the importation of
continental books) is as important as books in English.
Above all, the manuscript is a reminder that, even in England, even be-
fore Julian and Kempe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, women are
always there. The elision of the continuities of women's history has often
been a feature of the very historiography making women visible, at least
when it purports to be charting the sudden or spontaneous visibility of fe-
male communities (as in the perception of a twelfth- and thirteenth-cen-
tury women's renaissance referred to at the beginning of this chapter). In
registering the informal, quotidian, underrecognized, significant, and con-
tinuous presence of women in their own and others' religious and cultural
history, thick and occasional hagiographic histories can play a part. But, as
the English-French Campsey manuscript illustrates, this involves an inter-
disciplinarity of scholarship that still, even in medieval studies, can remain
difficult to achieve in institutional forms, at least in the structures of uni-
versity departments and careers. Medieval and modern grand narratives
have to be simultaneously challenged and rewritten.

Hagiography and Women's History 93

 CHAPTER FIVE

Who Is the Master of This Narrative?

Maternal Patronage of the
Cult of St. Margaret

Wendy R. Larson

The fifteenth-century physician Anthonius Guainerius of Pavia offered the

following advice for dealing with a woman in labor: "At the time of birth,
it is good that the legend of blessed Margaret be read, that she have relics of
the saints on her, and that you carry out briefly some familiar ceremonies
in order to please your patient and the old women." 1 Guainerius's recom-
mendation demonstrates St. Margaret of Antioch's role as the patroness of
parturient women in the later middle ages. St. Margaret's protection for
mother and child during birth might be invoked through prayers on an
amulet or relics or belts for the mother to touch or wear. 2 As in the example
of Guainerius, the saint's life might be read aloud or the text itself placed
on the mother's belly in order to invoke St. Margaret's aid. Guainerius is
clearly aware of the expectations of his patients and their female friends;
they will want St. Margaret to be invoked as part of the childbirth ritual.
This physician shows great sympathy for the suffering of women in the
course of childbirth, as he refers to his patient as the "poor parturient

1 " . . . et in presentis bonum est ut legenda beate margarite legatur sanctorum reliquias

super se habeat et breviter quas sciveris cerimonias ut infirme tue ac vetulis applaudas fac-
ito." Tractatus de matricibus, fols. 2.3r-2.3v., cited with translation in Helen Lemay, "Women
and the Literature of Obstetrics and Gynecology," in Medieval Women and the Sources of Me-
dieval History, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal (Athens, Ga., 1990), 197.
2 For examples of French parchment amulets, see Jean-Pierre Albert, "La legende de
Sainte Marguerite un mythe maieutique?" Razo 8 (1988): 19-33, plate on 33; and M. Louis
Carolus-Barre, "Un nouveau parchemin amulette et Ia legende de Sainte Marguerite pa-
tronne des femmes en couches," Academic des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Comptes Rendus
(1979): 256-75, plates on 260, 272. For belts, see Jane Schulenburg, Forgetful of Their Sex: Fe-
male Sanctity and Society ca. 500-1100 (Chicago, 1998), 230.

94
woman" (pauperculam partentem) and recognizes the comfort that calling on
St. Margaret may bring to his patients. Although the physician himself
may be less convinced of the efficacy of this practice-he does seem to be
advocating the devotions to St. Margaret strictly as an emotional balm-his
instructions make clear that St. Margaret is an integral part of the process
of childbirth, and he makes no effort to eliminate her.
St. Margaret's association with childbirth was so ubiquitous in the late
middle ages that we tend not to think about how the connection was estab-
lished or maintained. In this chapter, I will explain briefly how I believe
this connection developed, but I will concentrate primarily on how it was
perpetuated. I will do this by tracing the use of the image of St. Margaret
emerging from the belly of the dragon, the element of her iconography that
was most firmly linked with childbirth. This image plays a significant part
in the saint's cult, yet it was challenged and even excised by some medieval
authors. The ways in which this image was handled in both texts and arti-
facts offers a thread with which to trace the role of patronage in the cult of
St. Margaret. This chapter examines how the relationship between St. Mar-
garet and mothers, embodied through the mothers' patronage, played a
primary role in maintaining the image of the saint and the dragon despite
clerical disapproval.
During the course of the middle ages, there were different opinions
about what was properly part of the narrative content of the life of St. Mar-
garet. These differences focused on the saint's battles with a dragon and
demon. My argument that the patronage of women kept the dragon scene
part of both the saint's life and her iconography means that the power of
women explored in this essay is of a specific, limited sort. It is not a formal
type of power, that is, one that makes overt claims to institutional author-
ity, but is informal, in this case asserted by means of individual actions that
ultimately had the effect of a collective force. The practices, or patronage, of
women associated with the cult of St. Margaret, specifically with the saint
as the protector of mothers during childbirth, affected the way St. Margaret
was portrayed and venerated.
In this chapter, I define patronage in a saint's cult as the full range of
practices and the artifacts those practices produced that were associated
with promoting or drawing on the subject's sanctity and efficacy as an in-
tercessor. This definition weighs equally artifacts such as the parchment
amulets created to invoke the assistance of St. Margaret during childbirth
and those texts of the saint's life in a martyrology or calendar. One conse-
quence of labeling all artifacts, texts, and practices associated with a saint
as types of patronage is that it places members of the ecclesiastical hierar-
chy and other religious and secular patrons on the same level. Thus pa-
trons may be anchoresses who view St. Margaret as a model of chastity
and read her life, parish priests who preach about her on her feast day, or
laywomen of every social class who invoke the saint for protection during

Maternal Patronage of the Cult of St. Margaret 95

 childbirth. 3 Enlarging the definition of patronage to include all partici-
pants in cultic activity uncovers ways in which laypeople, and particu-
larly women, helped shape the content of medieval religious spirituality.
This definition of patronage challenges models of medieval Christianity
that portray male experience as dominant, while female concerns are mar-
ginal and forced to operate subversively. Recognizing patronage in a vari-
ety of artifacts and practices also breaks down other familiar binaries of
sacred and secular or popular and elite accompanying theories that con-
struct a top-down model of how religious concepts and values are trans-
mitted. The cult of St. Margaret shows how a broad definition of patron-
age can help provide a better understanding of how saints' cults operated
and were meaningful to those who participated in them.
The life of St. Margaret follows the familiar structure of a virgin martyr
legend. Margaret, the daughter of a pagan priest in Antioch, is sent to a nurse
outside the city after the death of her mother; there she is converted to Chris-
tianity. She catches the eye of Olibrius, a local Roman administrator, who
makes her an offer of marriage which she refuses, declaring herself a bride of
Christ. Margaret is tortured and imprisoned; a dragon appears in her cell
and swallows her; when she makes the sign of the cross, he splits open and
disappears. Another demon appears in her cell; she binds him and forces
him to confess to his evil schemes against people. Following more refusals
and torments, Margaret is finally beheaded. Her final prayer before her
death requests that those who invoke her name and memory may receive a
variety of benefits; among these are the protection for mothers and children.
The earliest extant vitae for St. Margaret come from the ninth century, in
both Greek and Latin. 4 The saint's primary efficacy was originally against
demons; in the Greek text she offers protection for cattle as well as against
lawsuits. In an early Latin text, she includes in her final prayer the petition
that "whoever builds a basilica in my name or from his labor furnishes a
manuscript of my passion, fill him with your Holy Spirit, the spirit of truth,
and in his home let there not be born an infant lame or blind or dumb."S A

3 For a life of St. Margaret written for anchoresses, see Seinte Marherete, ed. Frances M.

Mack, EETS o.s., 193 (1934; reprint, 1958). For an example of St. Margaret in a medieval ser-
mon, see John Mirk, Mirk's Festial, ed. Theodor Erbe, EETS extra ser., 96 (1905; reprint, 1987),
199-202.
4 The Greek life is known as the Passio a Theotimo, ed. Hermann Usener, Acta S. Marinae et

Christophori, Festschrift zur Fiinften Sacularfeier der Cari-Ruprechts Universitat zu Heidel-

berg (Bonn, 1886), 15-47. This life is listed as number 1165 in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica
Graeca, ed. Francois Halkin, 3d ed. (Brussels, Societe des Bollandists, 1957), 84-85. The Latin
life, written before 846, is listed as number 5303 in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina, 2 vols.
(Brussels, Bollandist Society, 1900-1901), II, 787-88.
s "Et qui basilicam in nomine meo fecerit, uel qui de suo Iabore comparauit codicem pas-
sionis mee, reple ilium Spiritu Sancto tuo, spiritu ueritatis, et in domo illius non nascatur in-
fans claudus aut cecus neque mutus." Latin text and translation in Mary Clayton and Hugh
Magennis, eds., The Old English Lives of St. Margaret (Cambridge, 1994), 214-15.

g6 Wendy R. Larson
similar formula is repeated in the two Old English accounts of her passio in
which the saint also promises that children will be protected from demon-
possession or madness.6
The first mention of protection for mothers occurs in the twelfth-century
(c. 1153) French legend by Wace, and this becomes a standard element.? A
thirteenth-century Middle English life of Margaret shows the concern for
mothers and children in its most fully developed form. 8 In this account, the
demon confesses to harming mothers and their children during childbirth:
'There indeed I would come, during childbirth to do her harm. If the child
were unblessed, I'd break its foot or arm, or the woman herself in some
way I would harm."9
The mother's welfare finally pushes aside concern for the child in John
Lydgate's fifteenth-century Middle English life of the saint, which stresses
St. Margaret's protection for mothers but does not mention the child at all.l 0
The association of St. Margaret with childbirth was not evident from the
beginning, nor necessarily derived from her iconography, but rather
stemmed from her efficacy against demons.ll The maladies against which
she promises protection-blindness, dumbness, lameness, and madness-
are all associated with demonic activity. Margaret was an active deliverer,
not a passive object to be delivered. As the legend was modified and the
connection with childbirth made more explicit, the image of the saint being
delivered whole from the belly of the beast came to represent a mother's
hope for a similar fate for her child. Once established, the connection be-
tween the image of St. Margaret's delivery from the dragon and her patron-
age of mothers became a ubiquitous combination. A prayer to St. Margaret
illustrates the way in which a mother might turn to the saint for assistance:

Madame, Saint Margaret ... when a woman I big with child who turns her
devout heart towards you I and humbly begs you I that God may save her
from peril, I and may not delay His help to her, I this is when I pray to you

6 BL Cotton Tiberius A iii and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 303, both in Clayton

and Magennis, Old English Lives.

7 La vie de sainte MargueriteiWace; edition, avec introduction et glossaire par Hans-Erich Keller,
commentaire des enluminures du ms. Troyes 1905 par Margaret Alison Stones, ed. Hans-Erich
Keller, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fiir romanische Philologie, Band 229 (Tiibingen, 1990).
8 Cambridge University Library Additional 4122. The manuscript is from the fifteenth

century, although the anonymous text dates to about 1250, a contemporary to the South Eng-
lish Legendary. The text is cited from Middle English Legends of Women Saints, ed. Sherry
Reames, assisted by Martha Blalock and Wendy R. Larson (Kalamazoo, 2002).
9 'Thedyr wolde I come belyve, in childyng to do her harme. I If it were unblessed, I
brake it foote or arme, I Or the woman herselfe in some wyse I dydde harme" (220-22).
10 John Lydgate, "The Legend of Seynt Margarete," from The Minor Poems of John Lydgate,

ed. Henry Noble McCracken, EETS o.s., 107 (1910), 173-92.

11 "Margaret's miraculous escape out of the dragon's belly had long since earned her the

role of patron saint of childbirth." Eamon Duffy, "Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes: The Cult of
Women Saints in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century England," Studies in Church History 27
(1990): 196.

Maternal Patronage of the Cult of St. Margaret 97

 honored virgin I noble and blessed martyr I through your blessed passion,
I through your saintly petition I may you pray to God for me I and sweetly
ask Him I that He may comfort me through His pity I in the pain which I
have to undergo I and that He-without danger to soul or body-make my
child come out I safe and sound, so I can see him I baptized joyously.1 2

While mothers and those concerned for their welfare (in fact, in the early
Latin and Old English lives, the beneficiaries of St. Margaret's promises are
grammatically male) were interested in the saint's ingestion and emer-
gence from the dragon, scholars raised questions about the dragon and
demon scenes in the saint's life.
The ninth-century Old English Martyrology simply left out both these
scenes, although they are the most distinctive elements of her legend. In
the tenth century, the Greek hagiographer Simeon Metaphrastes com-
plained about accounts of the life of St. Marina (as St. Margaret is known in
the eastern church) that featured her encounter with both the dragon and a
demon, calling them "malicious interpolations." 13
A similar interest in removing what one writer called "superstitious"
material from the lives of the saints caused Jacopo da Voragine in his col-
lection The Golden Legend (1260) to suggest that when Margaret saw the
dragon in her cell, she simply made the sign of the cross and the dragon
disappeared. Then he offers the more popular version: that the saint was
swallowed by the dragon, made the sign of the cross inside him, and then
burst out unharmed. However, Voragine declares this account "apoc-
ryphal" and "frivolous."14 Voragine's rhetorical strategy is intriguing; he
denies the veracity of the dragon ingestion account, yet does not drop it
from his text altogether. (He also notes St. Margaret's efficacy for women in
childbirth.) In comparison, in the Casinensis recension of the Latin passio
and the Old English Martyrology, the swallowing is simply excised. 15
Clearly this was an option for Voragine too, yet he leaves the scene in de-
spite his obvious disapproval.

12 "Madame saincte Marguerite ... que femme I grosse d'enfant qui a toy, dame, I de

cuer devot retourneroit, I et humblement te requerroit, I que Dieu de perilla gardast I et

luy aider point ne tardast, I si te prie, vierge honoree, I noble martire et bieneuree, I par ta
benoiste passion, I par ta sainte peticion, I que Dieu vueilles pour moy prier I et doul-
cement luy supplier que par pith' il me conforte I es douleurs qu'i fault que je porte, I et
sans peril d' arne et de corps I face mon enfant yssir hors I sain et sauf, si que je le voye I
baptize a bien et a joye." In Pierre Rezeau, Les Prieres aux saints aIa fin du moyen fige, 2 vols.
(Geneva, 1982), 2:323-25. Text and translation in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman
Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Ithaca, 1990), 7-8.
B Metaphrastes's writing has only been preserved in an early modern translation by
Lawrence Surius, Vitae Sanctorum ex probatis auctoribus et mss. codicibus prima quidem per R. P.
Fr. Laurentium Surium Carthusianum editae, nunc vera multis sanctorum vitiis auctae, emendatae
et notis marginalibus illustratae, 4 vols. (Cologne, 1617-18), 3:248.
14 Jacobi de Voragine, Legenda Aurea vulgo Historia Lombardica Dicta, ed. Theodor Graesse
(Lipsiae, 1850), 401.
15 Clayton and Magennis, Old English Lives, 34·

98 Wendy R. Larson
 An illustration from a tenth-century manuscript of the life of St. Mar-
garet portrays the scenario that Voragine favors. The saint confronts the
dragon and raises her hand to make the sign of the cross, driving the beast
away.16 It is interesting therefore to note an illumination from a manuscript
of The Golden Legend that shows the dragon with Margaret's dress hanging
out of his mouth.17 This popular motif may be seen as a visual argument
against the noningestion theorists. It is, of course, possible that a medieval
illuminator might not be aware of the exact content of the text being illu-
minated and thus might use an ingestion image in a text that argues
against this idea. However, the gap between text and image reminds us
again of the variety of patrons and needs composing the cult. That Prince-
ton University Press used the image for the cover of a 1993 translation of
The Golden Legend underlines the futility of attempting to dispose of such a
dramatic and well-loved image.
In the thirteenth-century South English Legendary, the narrator also ex-
hibits concern about the veracity of the swallowing of the saint. He nimbly
skirts the issue by giving the standard account of Margaret's ingestion and
deliverance and then commenting: "But I cannot say if this is true for it is
not written as truth; but whether it is true or not, no man knows"
(165-66).!8 He goes on to explain that it is problematic to believe that a
demon could be destroyed even by a very powerful saint. At the end of the
text the narrator recommends that women read the life of Margaret when
they are going to give birth: "When women bear a child, in the company of
other women, it is good that they read her life, for certainly it is the
truth"(317-18).l 9 The text claims to be concerned with "truth," even as it
seems to struggle with what that truth is. The technical demonological
issue forces a questioning of the tale's veracity, yet the story must also be
true for the women who hear the story as part of the ritual of childbirth.
Despite a lack of endorsement or even denunciation from patrons whom
we might conventionally label as "dominant," the account of St. Margaret's
swallowing and the image of her emergence from the dragon's belly per-
sisted. The definitions of "truth" for different audiences of this text are not
the same, yet they are simultaneously, if not seamlessly, present. The hege-

16 Known as the Fulda manuscript, Hannover Library, I 189, fol. 2or. For a facsimile and
thorough commentary see Passio Kiliani, ed. Hans Immel, commentary by Cynthia J. Hahn
(on this image, see 111-14) (Graz, Austria, 1988).
17 The illumination is in Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., HM 3027, fol. 19v. It ap-

pears on the cover of vol. 2 of The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William
Granger Ryan (Princeton, 1993). The publisher's choice of illustration is even more odd be-
cause St. Margaret's vita appears in vol. 1.
1s Ac pis ne telle ich no~t to sope for it nis no~t to sope iwrite I Ac we per it is sop oper it
nis inot noman pat wite," The South English Legendary, vol. I, ed. Charlotte D'Evelyn and
Anna J. Mill, EETS o.s., 235 (1956), 297.
19 "Wymmen pat wip oper were wanne hi child bere I Hit were god pat hi radde hure lyf
pe sikerore ~e seop it were," ibid., 302.

Maternal Patronage of the Cult of St. Margaret 99

 monic control often claimed for one group, the writers of texts, was medi-
ated or modified by others who held onto the ingestion story and image. In
other words, the question of who is the master of this narrative is not easily
answered.
While the dragon scene was debated and even excised from textual ac-
counts, its popularity as an image continued. One obvious explanation for
this discrepancy between the textual and visual traditions is simply that
the saint emerging from the dragon is such a wonderfully dramatic image
that no artist could bear to lose the opportunity to re-create it. Recalling the
audience and patrons for this image, however, also reminds us that it was
sponsored by women interested in this image for its efficacy in childbirth.
Whether she sponsored a window, statue, or manuscript, or simply offered
a few pennies for some candle wax, for a woman who turned to St. Mar-
garet for protection during childbirth, the loss of the image of the saint
with the dragon would be unthinkable.
Earlier, in the illumination from The Golden Legend, we saw how Mar-
garet's dress hanging from the dragon's mouth was a sign of Margaret's in-
gestion and might be understood as a visual assertion that she was swal-
lowed. The motif of Margaret's protruding dress is common, and may
represent the interests of a patron for whom Margaret's emergence from
within the dragon gave a sign of the saint's power and efficacy in connec-
tion with childbirth. The image's proliferation on an enormous variety of
objects underlines its popularity and persistence, and testifies to the con-
cerns of the mostly female patrons who sponsored these artifacts. Let's
look at a series of these items.
The image of St. Margaret emerging from the dragon appears on a four-
teenth-century French parchment amulet with prayers for use in child-
bed.20 An amulet like it might have been kept in a small hinged metal box
with loops to be hung at the waist or neck, much like an example from the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts (fig. 1). Its use is not specifically indicated, al-
though the combination of St. Margaret and St. Catherine, patroness of
nurses, may link it to childbirth as well.21 The text around Margaret says
"Hail, Holy Face of Christ," which refers to an image that would have been
in the frame inside the box; the names of the Three Kings (who are fre-
quently invoked in charms) are placed around St. Catherine on the other
side.
Jacopo da Voragine might have pointed to an object like the late four-
teenth-century embossed leather casket now at the Metropolitan Museum

zo Plate in Albert, "La Legende de Sainte Marguerite," 33· The amulet was introduced in
A. Aymar, "Le sachet accoucher et ses mysteres" Annales du Midi 38 (1926): 273-347. For
more on the use of parchment amulets by royal French women, see Joly, La vie sainte Mar-
guerite, 29.
21 Box 46.1249, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Catalogue of Medieval Objects: Metalwork, ed.
Nancy Netzer (Boston, 1991), 107-8.

100 Wendy R. Larson

Fig. 1. The hem of St. Margaret's dress clearly protrudes from the dragon's mouth in this
image on a metal amulet holder. Silver box. Northern Europe, mid-fourteenth century. Ac-
cession number 46.1249. Arthur Mason Knapp Fund. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. Reproduced with permission. © 2002 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights re-
served.

of Art as an example of the problems brought about by fantastic or super-

stitious associations with St. Margaret. An image of St. Margaret emerging
from the dragon with her dress hem dangling from his mouth appears on
the upper-left corner of the lid. The remaining panels include two scenes
from the romance Chatelaine de Vergi and others described by the museum's
catalogue as "scenes of gallantry and grotesque monsters."22 It is a peculiar
combination of images: human heads appear on beastly bodies in some
panels, while embracing couples may be discerned on others. The casket's
decorative program may have been considered appropriate for a woman,
possibly as a wedding gift, because it portrays lovers and the presence of
St. Margaret implies the safe arrival of future children. The context of St.
Margaret's appearance on the casket is similar to her image in Jan van
Eyck's "Arnolfini Betrothal" (1434), where she functions as one sign of a

n Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 23.229.1.

Maternal Patronage of the Cult of St. Margaret 101

 fruitful marriage. 23 While such a combination of sacred and secular might
be distasteful or even blasphemous to someone like Voragine, for those
who regarded the image of St. Margaret and the dragon as an emblem of
safety along with fecundity, a gift like the leather casket would be received
gratefully.
A fourteenth-century Italian illuminated life of Margaret was also de-
signed to suit the specific needs of a mother.24 The series of illuminations
includes her encounter with the dragon (she is definitely swallowed ac-
cording to both the image and the text), the demon (whom she binds and
beats), and a scene of pilgrims coming to her shrine for cures. At the end of
the passio appears an image of a midwife bringing out an infant to the
mother in bed, which functions as an emblem of the safe childbirth for both
mother and child that St. Margaret has just promised in the text (fig. 2). 25
Above the childbed scene is written a prayer that invokes the Trinity as
well as the miraculous mothers of the New Testament and Apocrypha:
Elizabeth, Anna, and Mary. The manuscript ends with the texts of the
seven penitential psalms. Clearly this example reflects the needs of the
women who were sponsoring text production, following the promise of St.
Margaret who pledged to intercede on behalf of those who owned a copy
of her life or had it read aloud to them. This example, however, goes be-
yond mere reflection by incorporating an image of the audience into the
text itself.
The image of the new mother and her healthy infant acts as a useful re-
minder that ultimately the version of St. Margaret's legend that served the
needs of a larger and apparently more influential set of patrons prevailed.
The overwhelming number of extant artifacts produced for a wide range of
patrons, including manuscripts, amulets, wall paintings, icons, reliquaries,
and embroideries, all focus on the very scene that a smaller, although more
institutionally powerful group, attempted to excise from the legend. The
case of St. Margaret offers a counter-example to the more common model
of the dominant clergy exercising hegemonic control over lay believers, es-
pecially women. However, instead of simply reversing that model and
claiming a subversive role for women, this essay has sought to portray
women's patronage of St. Margaret as actively and openly promoting those
aspects of the cult that best addressed their needs and concerns.
Unfortunately, much evidence of women's activities has been lost or ob-
scured because of its ephemeral nature. Books that were laid on a woman's

23 St. Margaret appears on the left finial of the bed in the painting. National Gallery, Lon-
don.
24 The manuscript is BL, Egerton 877. The childbed scene is on f.12 verso.
zs In a late thirteenth-century French wall painting, St. Margaret herself appears at a
woman's bedside, although there is no clear sign that the woman is an expectant mother.
Church of St. Cerneuf de Billom (Puy-de-D6me). See Paul Deschamps and Marc Thibout, La
peinture murale en France au debut de l'epoque gothique (Paris, 1963), 144-5, plate LXXVI-1.

102 Wendy R. Larson

 .t me. ~UEo omi~tme ollmpl.
non~.ttrcitf cao-o.m~tur .lito.
a:-~r. ur ttm:a~ lU~ ubu~ ("'"'·
nomit.~tn('.~tnt"·"'~ ~ttt~.
~ mfln0. ~~ t¢ tt«at.1tt ununc-filtJ etc
mf.tn~.w-~ rtl'uac. \ttnonu~f\ftrancn
m mmn~ ~f t'e'rc91r. ct _u, batarnu lnuc,
mr.qm pto ~ v~«u~ ctl-. et~ bl~ fato .1'1
nam blttfmt p:otmmr. ct' ~ptl(mum (no
Clntnunt rutmcauttt. .fhtl~ p:pmt ~1
nlncm. a!lnl ~ m~nam. ~Mia ""11
~~. r~maum:m mmnn.
crrt.1\. ~p~rtu ctmtottlme.cut~. aman.
"'"«II&?
~t ~. mafcnlu~. ul'fmunl. umu~:urmo:tu
ne. nmt fol~&. quu ~ ~tl«'at. 1n t!Oi¢.
t'lm!-. ~ ntu. crfp'frC.. ~mtm. 1)4~~..
~upba. ~·"· ~ttufo.Cflo nata. ep~ruu~rce. ·
~ ~··

,
Fig. 2. A newborn is presented to his mother by the midwife. Above, the text of a prayer for
mothers follows the story of the life of St. Margaret. Italian, fifteenth century. By permis-
sion of the British Library, Egerton MSS 877, fol. 12v.
 belly during labor (instead of carefully tended in a library) were worn out
with use, candles burned away, and only a few parchment amulets have
survived out of the assuredly countless numbers that were made. Writing
about childbirth practices involving the life of St. Margaret as a site of text
dissemination, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has noted, "It is a sobering thought
that, apart from a few chance remains, an entire world of hagiographic tex-
tual practice centered on an important audience constituted by pregnant
women has virtually disappeared, in part because of that audience's need
for transmission of the saint's life in a particularly perishable form."2 6 The
types of patronage with which women may be most typically associated,
particularly if we consider women of all economic levels, are thus more
vulnerable to passing without formal record or adequate attention from
historians.
This examination of women's role as patrons in the cult of St. Margaret
has focused on a very narrow aspect of women's influence in this particu-
lar cult as well as women's work in the development and maintenance of
saints' cults generally. The differing readings and presentations of St. Mar-
garet's life and iconography indicate the need for a broad, interdisciplinary
approach to understanding how cults function, particularly in the case of a
cult in which women played such a critical part. Simply reading texts or
viewing images of this saint would have failed to convey how the two pri-
mary means of presenting the saint to her medieval audience were at vari-
ance in some important respects. In the adoption of St. Margaret as a pro-
tector in childbirth, some of the texts condemn, while the surviving
material objects endorse-and it is the objects that testify to women's inter-
est. The texts that warn against this devotion are the product of male cleri-
cal culture; they contrast with the elements of material culture such as the
metal or leather boxes described above. Of course material culture is not
exclusively female, yet since women participated rarely in male learned
culture, it is often such physical remains that speak to us of female needs
and desires. Bringing together these two elements has permitted an oppor-
tunity to reconsider who was the master of this narrative of St. Margaret
and the dragon, and thus, in part, has helped us to reconfigure the shape of
the larger master narrative regarding the nature of the relationship be-
tween women and power in the middle ages.
26 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, "The Apple's Message: Some Post-Conquest Hagiographic

Accounts of Textual Transmission," in Late-Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission,

ed. A. J. Minnis (London, 1994), 53·

104 Wendy R. Larson

 CHAPTER SIX

"The Wise Mother": The Image of St. Anne

Teaching the Virgin Mary

Pamela Sheingorn

In her Book of the Three Virtues, Christine de Pizan wrote, "the wise mother
will give great attention to the upbringing and instruction of her daugh-
ters," and she clearly included literacy among the areas of instruction. 1 This
chapter argues that although in the late middle ages Christine's statement
was virtually a truism, modern scholarship, by focusing on the education of
male children, has neglected this aspect of medieval culture.2 Yet there is
significant evidence for female literacy, especially visual evidence, in the

This chapter was presented at the conference, "Parents and Children in the Middle Ages,"
sponsored by the Medieval Club of New York, on March 2, 1990. It first appeared inGesta
32, 1 (1993): 69-llo. The author is grateful to the journal's editor for permission to reprint. My
research was facilitated both by the files and by the knowledgeable and generous staff of the
Index of Christian Art, Princeton University.
I In this passage, Christine is specifically concerned with the responsibilities of a princess
for the education of her daughters. For a critical edition see Christine de Pizan: Le Livre des
Trois Vertus, ed. Charity Cannon Willard (Paris, 1989). For an English translation see Chris-
tine de Pisan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies or the Book of the Three Virtues, trans. Sarah Law-
son (London, 1985). For a biography of Christine see Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de
Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York, 1984). For a discussion of her attitudes toward educa-
tion, see Astrik L. Gabriel, "The Educational Ideas of Christine de Pisan," Journal of the His-
tory of Ideas 16 (January 1955): 3-22.
2 For example, in the widely cited collection of essays The Flowering of the Middle Ages ed-

ited by Joan Evans (London, 1966; reprint 1985), the chapter on education, "The Sum of
Knowledge," by Richard Hunt, subtitled "Universities and Learning," does not mention
women. They were, of course, excluded from the universities. Among the extensive illustra-
tions to the chapter, the only women to appear are personifications, objects of charity, and
Heloise taught by Abelard, an implicitly negative example. Current scholarship has begun
to address questions of female literacy.

105
 scene of St. Anne teaching her daughter from a book, a scene quite popular
in the art of northern Europe from the early fourteenth century to theRefor-
mation, and in Catholic countries until modern times. I explore several
readings of the scene, and in particular I argue that it promulgated the no-
tion of mothers as teachers and daughters as apt and willing pupils, just as
it celebrated literacy, especially among upper- and middle-class women.
Though well-known in the middle ages, St. Anne's story does not appear
in the canonical Gospels. She is, however, an important figure in the apoc-
ryphal Protevangelium of James and texts deriving from it, for example, the
Pseudo-Matthew. 3 Written in about 150 C.E., the Protevangelium tells the
story, familiar from Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel, of Joachim's sac-
rifice, rejected because he and his wife Anne had no children, of their sor-
row turned to joy by angelic visitation, and of the angel's message that they
would become parents. 4 Anne responded at once to the angel, saying, "As
the Lord my God lives, if I bear a child, whether a male or female, I will
bring it as a gift to the Lord my God, and it shall serve him all the days of
its life" (4.1). Of course Anne did bear a child, a female child. According to
the Protevangelium, when Mary was two years of age, Joachim wanted to
"bring her up to the temple of the Lord, that we may fulfill the promise
which we made" (7.1), but Anne persuaded him to wait until her daughter
was three. The scene of the tiny child ascending the steep, formidable steps
of the Temple while the anxious parents look on became a favorite in the
pictorial arts. 5 According to later versions of the story-for example, The
Mary Play from the N.town Manuscript-Mary recited a psalm for each of the
fifteen steps. 6
After the Presentation in the Temple, the Protevangelium shifts to Mary's
twelfth year, the year of her marriage to Joseph. The only mention of her
accomplishments is a comment that she could spin and weave. She was oc-
cupied with these activities when the angel of the Annunciation appeared
to her, and was so represented in art until the eleventh century. At about

3 For a discussion of the vita of Saint Anne, along with further bibliography, see "Intro-

duction," in Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Kathleen
Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (Athens, Ga., I990), I-68.
4 For the portion of the Protevangelium that tells Anne's story (sees. I.I-8.I), see Edgar
Hennecke, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. I, Gospels and Related Writings, ed. William
Schneemelcher; English trans. J. B. Higgins et al., ed. R. MeL. Wilson (Philadelphia, I963),
374-78; reprinted as Appendix to Ashley and Sheingorn, "Introduction," Interpreting Cul-
tural Symbols, 53-57.
5 See Gertrud Schiller, Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst (Giitersloh, I98o), 4.2, 67-72. For

the impact on liturgy in the West, see William E. Coleman, Philippe de Mezieres' Campaign for
the Feast of Mary's Presentation (Toronto, I98I).
6 The Mary Play from the N.town Manuscript, ed. Peter Meredith (London, I987). See also

TheN-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian 0.8, ed. Stephen Spector, vol. I, Introduction and Text,
EETS, supplementary ser., 11 (I99I), 8I-94·

106 Pamela Sheingorn

this time, concomitant with the growth of Mary's cult, the idea developed
that because she was mother of God, Mary must have been both spiritually
and intellectually gifted. Byzantine sermons from the eighth to tenth cen-
turies described her as possessing the wisdom of Athena, and one version
of the Pseudo-Matthew claims: "No one could be found who was better in-
structed than she (Mary) in wisdom and in the law of God, who was more
skilled in singing the songs of David (Psalms)." 7 In the thirteenth century
Albert the Great taught that Mary had been a master in the seven liberal
arts.s It is not surprising, therefore, to find that in Annunciation scenes
Mary's spindle was replaced by a book.9 In some renditions the book is
open to Isaiah T14-"Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son." The
idea that Mary was reading this especially appropriate text was spread, for
example, by Nicholas Love's translation into English of the popular devo-
tional text, the Meditationes vitae Christi. Love wrote that Gabriel appeared
"before pe virgine Marie, pat was in hire pryue chaumbure pat tyme closed
& in hir prayeres, or in hire meditaciones perauentur redyng pe prophecie
of ysaie, touchyng pe Incarnacion."IO
It was, of course, possible that Mary was literate when she was born, but
a natural assumption in the middle ages was that she was taught in the
Temple, just as children were taught in contemporary monastic schools.
Thus stained glass from the beginning of the thirteenth century in Chartres
Cathedral shows a schoolroom scene in which Mary and four other pupils
sit before their teacher, and fourteenth-century glass in the Frauenkirche at
Esslingen depicts Mary after her Presentation as a solitary student in the
Temple, beginning to learn her Psalter with verse one of the First Psalm. A

7 Quoted in Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman (Green-
wich, Conn., 1971), 1:42. It should be noted that the idea of Mary as a book in which God
wrote the Incarnation was articulated as early as the fourth century and employed fre-
quently thereafter. See Klaus Schreiner, "'... wie Maria geleicht einem puch': Beitrage zur
Buchmetaphorik des hohen und spa ten Mittelalters," Archiv for Geschichte des Buchwesens 11
(1971): cols. 1437-64.
s Wolfgang Braunfels, Die Verkundigung (Dusseldorf, 1949), xiv-xv. For assertions by
writers beginning as early as the ninth century that Mary was reading the Psalter when
Gabriel appeared to her, see Schreiner,"' ... wie Maria," 1443.
9 David M. Robb, "The Iconography of the Annunciation in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth

Century," Art Bulletin 18 (1936): 480-526. For a thorough discussion of Mary as reader at the
Annunciation see Klaus Schreiner, "Marienverehrung, Lesekultur, Schriftlichkeit: Bildungs-
und fri:immigkeitsgeschichtliche Studien zur Auslegung und Darstellung von 'Maria
Verkiindigung,' "Fruhmittelalterliche Studien 24 (1990): 314-68.
10 Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Critical Edition, ed. Michael Sar-

gent, Garland Medieval Texts 18 (New York, 1992), 21-22. Sargent indicates that the specifi-
cation of the content of Mary's reading is an addition by Love to the text that he was trans-
lating. See his extensive note to this passage. I am grateful to Professor Sargent for allowing
me to see relevant portions of his book before its publication. Schreiner, "Marienverehung,"
traces the association of Mary with Isaiah from the early Christian period into the late mid-
dle ages.

The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary 107

 historiated initial showing Mary as a member of a class of girls taught by a
schoolmaster decorates a book of sermons made for a house of Cistercian
nuns in the diocese of Constance between 1325 and 1350 (fig. 1). The choice
of subject suggests the possibility that the designer of the book saw some
parallel between Mary's experience and that of the nuns.
In the face of expansion of the Marian narrative consistent with the apoc-
ryphal accounts, it is particularly striking to find development in another
direction, namely that of Mary's mother Anne as her teacher. Such scenes
occur first in England, early in the fourteenth century, in wall paintings,
stained glass, sculpture, embroidery, and manuscript illumination.l1 An
embroidered altar frontal of about 1320 to 1340 presents one typical format
with both figures standing (fig. 2). The directed gazes, open book, and
Anne's gesture all indicate that here the mother acts as teacher. In the se-
quence of scenes on the frontal, the Virgin's presentation in the Temple
comes before her education by her mother, an inconsistency that seems not
to have troubled the embroiderers. The same illogical sequence can be
found in the early fourteenth-century English wall paintings at Croughton,
which implies that Anne continued to teach her daughter up to the mo-
ment that her father Joachim led her off to be married.12 In an apparently
unique solution, fourteenth-century stained glass from the choir of Orvieto

n Christopher Norton, David Park, and Paul Binski, Dominican Painting in East Anglia:
The Thornton Parva Retable and the Musee de Cluny Frontal (Woodbridge, 1987). See the
roughly chronological list of examples compiled by David Park on pp. 51-52. Veronica
Sekules suggests that the earliest example may be in a manuscript: "A new illustration of
the Virgin's life appears in England in the early fourteenth century in the Alphonso Psalter,
the education of the Virgin by her mother, St Anne." See Veronica Sekules, "Women in Art in
England in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries," in Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet
England 1200-1400, ed. Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London, 1987), 43· The
Alphonso Psalter, BL MS Add. 24686, is catalogue no. 357 in that volume. For an illustration
of the scene of Anne teaching the Virgin see fol. 2v, illustrated in Lucy Freeman Sandler,
Gothic Manuscripts 1285-1385,2 vols., A Survey of the Manuscripts Illuminated in the British
Isles 5 (London, 1986), I, fig. 2.
12 On Croughton see E. W. Tristram and M. R. James, "Wall-paintings in Croughton
Church, Northamptonshire," Archaeologia 76 (1927): 179-204. M.D. Anderson points out a
similar inconsistency in the Marian section of the Middle English dramatic cycle she calls
Ludus Coventriae, now usually referred to as theN-Town cycle. This cycle includes the Pre-
sentation of the Virgin (see note 6 above for references). Anderson observes,
in the Ludus the play of the "Betrothment of Mary" opens with the Bishop's command
that all maidens of thirteen years old shall come to the Temple to be betrothed. Joseph
then consults Anna, apparently in their own home, and they take Mary once more to the
Temple. At Croughton the painting of the presentation is followed by a scene in which
Joachim takes Mary by the hand and leads her away from Anna who is shown sitting
with an open book in her hand (Plate 5a). There is no stage direction in the Ludus that
Anna shall be teaching her daughter to read when the play opens, but such a grouping
would have been suggested to any medieval producer by the popularity of this subject in
church imagery.
M.D. Anderson, Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches (Cambridge, 1963), 113.

108 Pamela Sheingorn

Fig. 1. Nativity and Virgin Mary at School, c. 1325-50. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, Uni-
versity of Oxford, MS Douce 185, fol. 35v.
 Fig. 2. St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary
from an opus anglicanum altar frontal, c.
1 320- 40, Victoria and Albert Museum,
8128--63. Courtesy of the Board of
Trustees of the V&A.

Cathedral places the scene of Anne's teaching Mary inside the Temple; as a
result its position after the Presentation is not so jarring.
There are not many other attempts to integrate the scene of Anne's teach-
ing into pictorial treatments of the Marian narrative, which usually move
directly from the Presentation in the Temple to the events surrounding the
Wedding of Mary and Joseph. But in devotional contexts the scene not only
survives but flourishes (fig. 3). In fact, it serves as the major devotional
image of Anne, who is virtually never represented alone, but rather with
her daughter and her book. This grouping implies that Anne's act of teach-
ing carries singular importance, as does the fact that the book is virtually
always open. Though a book appears with great frequency as an attribute
of sacred figures, it is more often closed.
The devotional image of Anne teaching the Virgin Mary flourishes in
spite of a virtual if not total absence of textual sources. In medieval iconog-
raphy this is quite unusual, for it is common practice to trace an image to
authorized sources and to explain its details through references to exegesis
and commentary. The very existence of such a scene, floating free of a tex-
tual anchor and surfacing in a variety of contexts, suggests that it per-
formed important symbolic functions in late medieval cultural practices. It
is these contexts and functions that we need to understand.
One such context is Incarnation history. In his book on the garb and at-
tributes of saints in German art, Joseph Braun explains that St. Anne's book

110 Pamela Sheingorn

Fig. 3· St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary. Westminster Abbey, Chapel of Henry VII, c.
1502- 12. Courtesy of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England.
 "is to be understood here as the book of the Old Testament, in which the
Messiah was promised to humankind."13 E. W. Tristram observes that, "In
wall-painting, the subject of St. Anne teaching the Virgin may sometimes
form part of a 'history', but more frequently appears either singly or beside
an Annunciation." 14 The Annunciation and Education of the Virgin scenes
are paired on a rare surviving English panel painting of about 1335 now in
the Cluny Museum. David Park comments: "Iconographically, these sub-
jects form a perfect foil, both emphasising the special role of the Virgin in
God's design." 15 On the altar frontal, the book is open to the passage: "Audi
filia et vide et inclina aurem tuam, quia concupuit rex speciem tuam" (Listen,
daughter, and see, and incline your ear, for the king desires your beauty), a
variant of the Vulgate text of Psalm 44:11-12. Christian exegesis has placed
these words in the mouth of Christ as bridegroom and has understood
them as addressed most generally to the Christian soul, more specifically
to virgins, and most specifically, as here, to Mary. As David Park observes,
"the Vulgate text has been altered so as to place the emphasis directly on
the divine choice of Mary to be the bride of Christ. St Anne points deliber-
ately at the word rex . ... The text thus prefigures the moment of the An-
nunciation which was depicted at the other end of the panel, when Mary,
through her submission to the divine word, enabled God's redemptive
plan to be brought to fulfilment."16
The specific understanding of the scene of Anne teaching the Virgin
Mary in terms of Incarnation history can also be generalized, as Gertrud
Schiller suggests. She sees the book in these scenes as a symbol for Christ,
the Logos, the WordY And this reading is substantiated by the rise of an-
other subject in the late middle ages, that of the St. Anne Trinity; that is, the
grouping of Anne, her daughter Mary, and her grandson, Jesus, as an in-
fant (fig. 4). The two subjects, Anne teaching the Virgin Mary and the St.
Anne Trinity, can be seen as two somewhat different embodiments of the
same idea-that of the Incarnation. I have argued elsewhere that, whereas
the traditional Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost emphasizes Christ's
divinity and immortality, the St. Anne Trinity, especially in the composi-

13 Joseph Braun, Tracht und Attribute der Heiligen in der deutschen Kunst (Stuttgart, 1943),

col. 79, my translation. Frank Olaf Buttner makes a more general argument that representa-
tions of reading in late medieval manuscripts refer to salvation history: "An verschiedenen
Inhalten kehrt ein Motiv denselben Gehalt hervor. Fiir das Motiv des Lesens hiess dieser
Gehalt: Erwartung und Vergegenwartigung des giittlichen Heilsplans";" 'Mens divina liber
grandis est': Zu einigen Darstellungen des Lesens in spatmittelalterlichen Handschriften,"
Philobiblion 16 (1972): 99·
14 E. W. Tristram, English Wall Painting of the Fourteenth Century (London, 1955), 23.
15 Park in Dominican Painting in East Anglia, ed. Norton, Park, and Binski, 44; see plate 2
for a color reproduction of the frontal in its present state, plate 11 for a color reproduction of
St. Anne Teaching the Virgin, and plate 44 for a detail of the book.
16 Park in Dominican Painting in East Anglia, ed. Norton, Park, and Binski, 50.
17 Schiller, Ikonographie der christ lichen Kunst (Giitersloh, 1980), 4.2, 76.

112 Pamela Sheingorn

tional arrangement where it replicates a popular way of representing the
traditional Trinity (fig. 5), emphasizes the lineage of Christ's physical
body.ls The matrilineal Trinity is the Trinity of the Incarnation.
But St. Anne and the Virgin Mary had roles in contemporary medieval
society in addition to their places in Incarnation history, a fact that some
scholars have tended to ignore or misunderstand. Stephan Beissel, for ex-
ample, states that when the group of Anne teaching the Virgin does not in-
clude the Christ Child, it "reveals in this omission a sharp decline from the
older and deeper meaning, in which Jesus was always the purpose and
goal."19 According to Beissel, with the exclusion of the Child Jesus, the
group comes very close to a genre scene. By setting up a false dichotomy be-
tween high theological meaning and genre scene, Beissel suppresses the
cultural functions of hagiography in the late middle ages. From the per-
spective of Incarnation history as understood by the twentieth-century
scholar, Anne's role may be limited to grandmother of Christ, mother of the
Virgin, and she may have existed only to fill a place in a genealogical chart,
the end goal of which was the Incarnation. But in late medieval culture,
Anne was not confined to the historical past-she was a powerful presence.
As Kathleen Ashley and I wrote in the introduction to Interpreting Cultural
Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, the essays gathered in that book

show that the figure of Saint Anne functioned symbolically for a wide range
of social groups in their cultural practices. She represented the cult of the
family to gentry and aristocracy. She was called on by individual women as
a sympathetic intercessor in childbearing. She bore a metaphorical relation
to a number of crafts, such as woodworking, and was therefore their appro-
priate patron. She exemplified affective behaviors to nuns in a convent.20

Nor does this exhaust the list of her functions, for we need to add the cul-
tural function of the grouping of Anne, Mary, and book.
First I will demonstrate the hitherto unrecognized function of this
grouping as the core around which other scenes were built. Though I have
organized this material in terms of increasingly complex composition, this
is for the sake of convenience and is not meant to be an implicit argument
for a specific line of development.
The question of Anne's attributes is a good place to begin. Joseph Braun,
who categorizes St. Anne's attributes in terms of her postures, lists four

1s Pamela Sheingorn, "Appropriating the Holy Kinship: Gender and Family History," in
Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Ashley and Sheingorn,
169-98. On the painting by the Master of Frankfurt see John Oliver Hand, "Saint Anne with
the Virgin and the Christ Child by the Master of Frankfurt," Studies in the History of Art 12
(1982): 43-52.
19 Stephan Beissel, Geschichte der Verehrung Marias in Deutschland wiihrend des Mittelalter

(Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1909), 582; my translation.

20 Ashley and Sheingorn, eds., Interpreting Cultural Symbols, 2.

The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary

113
Fig. 4· St. Anne, Virgin, and Child, South German, late fifteenth to early sixteenth century.
Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1964-140-1. Given by Mrs. Hedy V. Fishman.
Fig. 5· Master of Frankfurt, St. Anne with the Virgin and the Christ Child. Photograph© 2002
Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney
K. Lafoon, 1976.67.1 (2071).
 possibilities. 21 The first is a book, although I know of no examples in which
Anne is shown alone with a book. Second, according to Braun, Anne may
have a figure of the child Mary on her arm. The earliest known image of
Anne in the West, that painted on the west wall of the presbytery in the
Roman church of Santa Maria Antiqua in about 650, presents Anne in this
way, as does the early thirteenth-century trumeau at Chartres. But these
are among the rare examples of Anne and Mary without a book. Third,
says Braun, Anne may be accompanied by Mary holding Jesus on her lap,
and fourth, Anne may hold Mary on one arm and Jesus on the other. Braun
is firmly convinced that "The third and fourth attributes, which ruled the
field at that time, rendered the book superfluous." 22 If the interpretation of
the scene is restricted to a statement about the Incarnation, then, strictly
speaking, Braun is correct; the book and the Christ Child both refer to the
Word, the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, and the presence of both
creates a redundancy. But the numerous examples of St. Anne with Mary
who holds her child Jesus in which one or more books feature prominently
(fig. 6) suggest that the book had another function in the minds of artists
and their patrons. More recent scholars than Braun have found the cate-
gory of St. Anne Trinity sufficient for such works of art and have tended
not to explore, or even mention, the presence of a book. Yet the book itself
often seems a focal point in the composition. In one type, Anne appears to
neglect her grandson in order to pursue her reading, as in an English man-
uscript of about 1400 (fig. 7), and in another, Mary is engrossed enough in
her reading lesson to ignore her son's bid for her attention (fig. 8).23 Braun
is so little attuned to the significance of the book in the St. Anne Trinity that
he goes on to argue that in the type of composition in which Anne holds
Mary on one arm and Jesus on the other, a book could not possibly appear
since both of Anne's hands are already engaged. Again his logical argu-
ment is contradicted by surviving evidence, for both Veit Stoss and Tilman
Riemenschneider found satisfying solutions to this compositional conun-
drum (fig. g). 24 As Hanswernfried Muth notes, in Riemenschneider's sculp-
ture Mary is "ganz in das Studium ihres Buches versunken" (entirely en-
grossed in studying her book).25 Of course there are examples of the St.

21 Braun, Tracht und Attribute, cols. 79-82.

22 Braun, Tracht und Attribute, col. So, my translation.
23 MS Metz B. M. 620 is catalogue no. 24 in Metz enluminee: Au tour de Ia Bible de Charles le

Chauve; Tresors manuscrits des eglises messines (Metz, 1989), 164. It is a composite fourteenth-
century manuscript from the convent of the Celestines in Metz. I wish to thank Adelaide
Bennett for bringing this manuscript to my attention.
24 For an illustration of Veit Stoss's sculpture for Saint Anne's Church in Vienna see Beda

Kleinschmidt, Die heilige Anna: Ihre Verehrung in Geschichte, Kunst und Volkstum (Dusseldorf,
1930), fig. 171.
2s Hanswernfried Muth, Tilman Riemenschneider. Die Werke des Bildschnitzers und Bild-
hauers, seiner Werkstatt und seines Umkreises im Mainfriinkischen Museum, Wurzburg
(Wiirzburg, 1982), 82.

116 Pamela Sheingorn

Fig. 6. St. Anne Trinity, Lower Rhine, early sixteenth century. Courtesy of Suermondt-
Ludwig-Museum, Aachen.
Fig. 7· St. Anne Trinity, c. 1400. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS
Aubrey 31, fol. 31r.
Fig. 8. St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary in the Presence of the Christ Child. Courtesy of Biblio-
theque municipale, Metz, MS B.M. 620, fol. 1v.
Fig. 9· Tilman Riemenschneider, St. Anne Trinity, after 1510, Mainfrankischen Museum,
Wiirzburg. Courtesy of Foto Zwicker Berberich Atelierbetriebe.
Anne Trinity that do not include a book, but scholarly emphasis has fallen
on one extreme to such an extent that it has not adequately dealt with the
kind of image in the painting of the St. Anne Trinity by Cornelisz van Oost-
sanen, in which the figures of Mary and Christ shrink in significance beside
the book to which Anne directs her gaze (fig. 10).
The Holy Kinship, the grouping of Anne with her three daughters, their
fathers, husbands, and sons, is usually described as deriving composition-
ally from the subject of the St. Anne Trinity.26 Thus it is no surprise that fre-
quently, though not always, books are present, not only as attributes of
Anne and/ or Mary but also in the hands of many members of this appar-
ently scholarly clan.
Two further examples indicate the variety of contexts in which the combi-
nation of Anne, Mary, and book can appear. The first is a late fifteenth-cen-
tury plague broadsheet, showing the St. Anne Trinity and a kneeling man
who seeks Anne's help against the plague.27 The other is a complex compo-
sition that combines the core scene of Anne teaching the Virgin with the St.
Anne Trinity, the Holy Kinship, and a woman with her patron saint-the
Duchess of Bedford, Anne of Burgundy-kneeling before an opened book
in the presence of her patron saint Anne (fig. u). Marcel Thomas's commen-
tary on this page from the Bedford Hours mentions neither St. Anne's book
nor that of Anne of Burgundy, and finds that the imagery "stress[es] the no-
tion of marriage."28 Although Janet Backhouse gives a fuller, more balanced
description, she also does not note Anne of Burgundy's book and uses the
marginal figures from the Holy Kinship to argue for a "stress on family re-
lationships ... peculiarly appropriate to Anne [of Burgundy] given the long
catalogue of diplomatically significant marriages within her immediate
family circle." 29 Yet the main stress is surely on Anne of Burgundy's rela-
tionship with the grouping Anne/Mary /book, and it is time to investigate
the meaning of that grouping.
First, in manuscripts, of which the Bedford Hours is a good example,
there seems to be some connection between the presence of this image and
patronage or ownership by women, a connection first observed by Nigel
Morgan. Although the fact that Anne is the duchess's name saint is suffi-
cient to explain her presence here, it is surely significant that the duchess
mirrors not only St. Anne's name but also her activity-both have open
books before them.

26 Pamela Sheingorn, "The Holy Kinship: The Ascendancy of Matriliny in Sacred Geneal-
ogy of the Fifteenth Century," Thought: A Review of Culture and Idea 64, no. 254 (September
1989): 268-86.
27 For illustration see Kleinschmidt, fig. 399·
2s Marcel Thomas, The Golden Age: Manuscript Painting at the Time of Jean, Duke of Berry
(New York, 1979), 83.
29 Janet Backhouse, The Bedford Hours (New York, 1990), 37· Buttner ("Mens divina,"
101-2) discusses the acts of reading in this miniature.

The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary 121

 Fig. 10. Cornelisz van Oostsanen, St. Anne Trinity, 1525. Courtesy of Gemiildegalerie,
Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

A similar relationship occurs in the first of sixteen full-page miniatures fol-

lowing the calendar in the Fitzwarin Psalter, an English manuscript of the
mid-1340s. As Veronica Sekules comments, "the female donor of the manu-
script is included in the scene kneeling before St Anne as she teaches the Vir-
gin to read, as if she too is anxious to benefit from [Anne's] instruction."30
30 Sekules, "Women in Art," 43· For an illustration of this miniature (fol. 7 in MS. lat. 765,

Paris, Bibliotheque nationale), see Age of Chivalry, ed. Alexander and Binski, 501. For a dis-
cussion of the manuscript see Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts, II, catalogue no. 120.

122 Pamela Sheingorn

Fig. 11. Duchess of Bedford before St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary, Bedford Hours. By per-
mission of the British Library, MS Add. 18850, fol. 257", c. 1423.
 Nicholas Rogers has identified the patroness and owner of the manuscript as
Amice de Haddon.31 In a fifteenth-century Book of Hours of Sarum Use
made in France (fig. 12), both St. Anne and the Virgin carry books, and some
of the prayers in the manuscript suggest that it had a female owner.
Certainly the evidence of the image itself, as well as the limited informa-
tion regarding specifically female patronage, should be considered part of
the growing body of knowledge about female literacy in the later middle
ages. 32 Works of art in which women hold open books strongly suggest a cul-
ture in which women read. Rather than interpret the presence of a book as a
general indication of female piety, as is often done, we should take it as evi-
dence of a literate woman, an owner of books, and possibly even a patroness,
for there is extensive evidence that women owned books and commissioned
vernacular literature or translations from Latin into a vernacular.33 Among
these is the only known illustrated example of the Manuel des peches, whose
opening initial shows Joan Tateshal, its patroness "stand[ing] imperiously"
and "appear[ing] to command her scribe to begin writing the text." 34
But the scene of Anne teaching the Virgin Mary to read, which appeared
in the fourteenth century and became so popular throughout western Eu-
rope, surely does more than record evidence of historical circumstances,
for its originating purpose can scarcely have been to illustrate the fact that
women in a particular time and place could read. That is, rather than sim-
ply mirroring the society of which it is a part, art functions to shape that
society; it plays an active role. It is no accident or coincidence that the
image of Anne teaching the Virgin Mary appeared when it did. At the be-
ginning of the fourteenth century there was a new urgency regarding liter-
acy. M. T. Clanchy argues for a "shift from sacred script to practical liter-
acy" in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. "Practical business was the
foundation of the new literacy."35 He speaks of "the growth of a literate
mentality," 36 which was a cultural fact by the beginning of the fourteenth

31 Nicholas Rogers, 'The Original Owner of the Fitzwarin Psalter," Antiquaries' Journal 69
(1989): 257-60.
32 For examples of recent studies on literacy see Rosamond McKitterick, The Uses of Liter-
acy in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1990), and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Visible
Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 4
(Cambridge, 1990). There is also a recent interest in medieval female literacy; for examples,
see Susan-Marie Harrington, Women, Literacy, and Intellectual Culture in Anglo-Saxon England
(Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1990), and Margaret P. Hannay, ed., Silent But for the
Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, Ohio, 1985).
33 Susan Groag Bell, "Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambas-
sadors of Culture," Signs 7 (1982): 742-68.
34 Adelaide Bennett, "A Book Designed for a Noblewoman: An Illustrated Manuel des
Peches of the Thirteenth Century," in Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence, ed.
Linda L. Brownrigg (Los Altos Hills, Calif., 1990), 173. For a color illustration of fol. 1 of this
manuscript (Princeton University Library, Taylor Medieval MS 1), see ibid., color plate E.
35 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England w66-1307 (London, 1979), 263.
36 Ibid., 2.

124 Pamela Sheingorn

Fig. 12. St. Anne and the Virgin Mary with Books, c. 1430-40. Courtesy of the Bodleian Li-
brary, University of Oxford, MS Auct. D. inf. 2.11, fol. 51v.
 century, the time when the image of Anne teaching the Virgin begins to ap-
pear. In other words, in order to function in their own "modern world,"
people found it increasingly necessary to be literate. And, in regard to the
broad geographical area in which our image can be found, it is important
to note Clanchy's words: "The shift from memory to written record ... was
not restricted to England although it is most evident there. It was a western
European phenomenon."37
Nor was this new literacy restricted to the vernacular. In a French vocab-
ulary written by an Essex knight for a Lady Denise de Montchensy to use
as a tool in improving her children's French, the knight, Walter of
Bibbesworth, assumes that she has already taught them from the Latin
primer.3B As Clanchy argues, "A little clergie [i.e., the knowledge found in a
primer] had the advantage of keeping children's options open. From incli-
nation or necessity, boys or girls could subsequently join the 'religious',
provided they had a grounding in Latin and some local influence."39 And
in England there was an even more compelling reason for teaching chil-
dren some Latin for, "[f]rom the fourteenth century, ... a little Latin, 'bene-
fit of clergy', was also an insurance against being hanged. Thus by 1300
parents of all social classes had strong motives for seeing that their children
were clerici and literati in the new minimal sense of being capable of read-
ing a verse from the Bible." 40 One reading, then, of the new scene of St.
Anne teaching the Virgin would find it to be an advertisement for a life in-
surance policy that parents, specifically mothers, could "purchase" for
their children.
Some or all of these functions may inform a full-page miniature in a
Sarum Book of Hours of about 1325-30, in which the Virgin, sheltered in
Anne's fur-lined cloak, holds an alphabet book (fig. 13). 41 The book con-
tains six capital letters, separated by ruled lines, which spell the word
"Domine." In a similar vein, a fourteenth-century wall painting at Ment-
more, Buckinghamshire, now destroyed, showed the Virgin in the Educa-
tion scene holding a scroll with the letters A B C. 42
Only slightly earlier Walter of Bibbesworth had written a rhyming vo-
cabulary in French with some interlineations in English for the Lady
Denise de Montchensey to use in teaching her children not elementary

37 Ibid., 5·
38 A. Owen, ed., Le Traite de Walter de Bibbesworth sur Ia langue franraise (Paris, 1929).
39 Clanchy, From Memory, 196.
40 Ibid., 196. Ralph V. Turner notes the irony that "[t]he possibility of gaining benefit of
clergy in late medieval England by reading a verse of Scripture has doubtless contributed to
the modern myth of the illiteracy of the laity throughout the middle ages." See "The Miles
Literatus in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England: How Rare a Phenomenon?" American
Historical Review 83 (1978): 930.
41 For a description of this manuscript see Age of Chivalry, ed. Alexander and Binski, 151,

1 54-55·
42 Park in Dominican Painting in East Anglia, ed. Norton, Park, and Binski, 53·

126 Pamela Sheingorn

Fig. 13. St. Anne and the Virgin Mary, c. 1325-30. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, Univer-
sity of Oxford, MS Douce 231, fol. 3r.
 French, which, Walter says, everyone knew how to speak, but the special-
ized vocabulary that would allow them to function in the adult world of
estate management and of the court. Denise was widowed and her chil-
dren might well have been in danger of losing their social status if they
could not function in educated French.
A late example of a child's first book, a primer, reinforces the conclusion
that children's literacy was a mother's responsibility, and that the imagery
of St. Anne and her daughter served as the vehicle for communicating that
responsibility. The key images are on pages one and fourteen, the first and
last pages of the Primer of Claude of France, made around 1505-10 (figs. 14
and 15). On the first page, St. Anne presents the Virgin Mary and Claude of
France to Claude's name saint, Claude of Besan~on. Claude holds a closed
book and seems to seek St. Claude's support and assistance as she begins
her reading lessons. On the last page Claude kneels before her own open
book, following along as St. Anne teaches the Virgin. Having reached the
last page of her primer, she can now read. But the primer insists more di-
rectly that Claude's literacy is her mother's responsibility, for Claude's
mother was named Anne.
It is perhaps the concern for the early education of children by their
mothers that explains why even in scenes where the Infant Jesus is present,
the Virgin Mary is shown as a girl learning her letters from her mother.
And of course one purpose of literacy that cannot go unmentioned was to
provide the ability to read a Book of Hours. That is surely one reason that
often on the books in these scenes we find the words, Domine labia mea
aperies, the opening versicle of Matins in the Hours of the Virgin.
Once we approach this image in terms of its cultural functions, it can
open for us aspects of medieval culture that have resisted traditional ap-
proaches. For example, with few exceptions, such as the excellent work of
Judith M. Bennett and Barbara Hanawalt, 43 we have no studies that illumi-
nate domestic life in general and specifically that of any but the upper
class. Thus, although we have a variety of sources attesting to widespread
literacy among upper-class women, it is much more difficult to say any-
thing about the middle class, other than to note that apparently Margery
Kempe could not write. But St. Anne's popularity was not confined to the
upper classes. In seeking to understand "the importance of St. Anne plays
and altars and guilds in late medieval East Anglia,"44 Gail McMurray Gib-
son examines a poem about Anne in the fifteenth-century commonplace
book compiled by a Norfolk man named Robert Reynes. She finds that the
poem presents Anne as "a model East Anglian matron, tending to her

43 Judith M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in
Brigstock Before the Plague (Oxford, 1987); Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant
Families in Medieval England (Oxford, 1986).
44 Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the

Late Middle Ages (Chicago, 1989), 83.

128 Pamela Sheingorn

Fig. 14. Primer of Claude of France, 1505-10. Courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cam-
bridge, MS 159, p. 1.
Fig. 15. Primer of Claude of France, 1505-10. Courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cam-
bridge, MS 159, p. 14.
tithes, her almsbasket, and her prayerbook. She lives a busy, comfortable,
and pious life." "It is difficult," Gibson concludes, "to imagine a saint with
more obvious bourgeois appeal." 45 And women modeling themselves on
Anne found her image-a mother teaching her daughter-readily avail-
able, for she appeared not only on manuscripts whose expensive illumina-
tions largely restricted ownership to the upper class but also painted on the
walls of parish churches and standing near their altars. Relatively inexpen-
sive alabaster figures and panels were distributed not only throughout
England but, as products of an export industry, reached many churches in
western Europe.46
This image also gives us access to the neglected area of domestic life in
the middle ages and, in particular, forces us to see that this culture consid-
ered the mother's role as her children's first teacher to be important, even
crucial. 47 This message may also be encoded in the personification of
Grammatica as a woman teaching boys their ABCs, as in a fifteenth-cen-
tury German manuscript now in Vienna, though the common medieval
practice of using female figures to personify abstractions, such as the
Virtues and Vices, complicates this reading. 4S Nevertheless, studies of me-
dieval education generally neglect even to mention the mother as teacher.
In a particularly egregious example, an article on the education of women
in the middle ages offers the following conclusion: "Aristocratic women re-
ceived some education at court or castle. Upper-class women learned at the
manor, from private clergy. In the later middle ages poor university stu-
dents may have acted as tutors. But girls had to learn at home from fathers,
brothers, clergy." 49 Yet surely "girls who learned at home" became mothers
who could teach their daughters at home. In fact a group of treatises in the
voice of a mother addressed to her daughter, written in the same centuries
in which our image flourished, indicate that mothers did exactly that. A
Middle English poem found in a number of fourteenth- and fifteenth-cen-
tury manuscripts and entitled "How the Good Wife Taught her Daughter"
celebrates the continuity of this private, domestic education when, near the

45 Ibid., 84.
46 On English alabasters see Francis W. Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters (Oxford,
1984).
47 This aspect of the mother's role is not explored in Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vo-
cation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1991). In Atkinson's view, late me-
dieval motherhood "was comprehended in terms of physical suffering and service" (167).
48 The image is on folio 1 of a composite manuscript of texts in Middle High German, Vi-
enna, Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2975. See Martin Luther und die Reformation
in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), no. 86. For an analysis of female personifications
see Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York,
1985).
49 Sara Lehrman, "The Education of Women in the Middle Ages," in The Roles and Images

of Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Douglas Radcliff-Umstead (Pittsburgh,
1975), 141.

The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary 131

 end of the poem the mother says, "Now have I taught thee, daughter, as
did my mother me."so
Finally, if the image of Anne teaching the Virgin is so widespread in the
late middle ages, how have we failed to notice its importance? Among a
number of possible reasons, I would like to point to three. First, we have in-
terpreted late medieval culture as dominated by affective piety, an affective
piety focused on the relationship of Mary and Jesus, mother and son, emo-
tionally heightened by the tension between its absolute uniqueness and its
human qualities. I think it would probably be fair to say that we are at-
tracted by the extreme emotional tones that characterize this relationship
as well as by the erotic undercurrents always present in Christ's dual role
as son and bridegroom. In our interpretations of the late middle ages, we
have allowed this extraordinary, multidimensional parent-child relation-
ship to overshadow another that speaks to a more balanced though less
dramatic medieval understanding of parenting, namely that of Anne and
Mary, mother and daughter, a domestic, human relationship.
This image has also been neglected because, despite some protestations
to the contrary, we have not sufficiently recognized that the middle ages
was a visual culture. 51 We have not developed ways of integrating into our
understanding images that stand outside of the textual matrix, although
the recent development of pictorial hagiography by such scholars as Cyn-
thia Hahn, Barbara Abou-el-Haj, and Magdalena Carrasco heralds a wel-
come change.
And third, as with so many other aspects of women's history, the iconog-
raphy of this image was willfully distorted by Victorian ideologies of fem-
ininity in the nineteenth century, and we have not entirely succeeded in
discarding that pernicious legacy. In her feminist study of embroidery,
Rozsika Parker offers a telling juxtaposition of two images. The earlier is a
medieval embroidery of St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary, a typical exam-
ple in which both females gesture toward the pages of an open book. The
later is a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti dated 1848-49 and entitled The
Girlhood of Mary Virgin. The arrangement of figures is similar, but in this vi-
sualization of "the concept of femininity as purity and submissiveness,"
Mary bends over an embroidery frame as Anne instructs her in the fine
points of rendering a lily in split-stitch. 52
Finally, we must recognize that in promoting literacy this image could

50 Tauno F. Mustanoja, ed., The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter. The Good Wyfe Wold a Pyl-
gremage. The Thewis ofGoud Women (Helsinki, 1948).
st For important exceptions see the first two chapters of V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Im-
agery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, 1984), and Susan K. Hagen, Alle-
gorical Remembrance: A Study of the "Pilgrimage of the Life of Man" as a Medieval Treatise on See-
ing and Remembering (Athens, Ga., 1990).
52 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (New
York, 1984), figs. 18, p. 30, and 19, p. 31; the quotation is from the caption to fig. 18.

132 Pamela Sheingorn

suggest, but not control, the uses to which female literacy would be put.
The position of one of the leading scholars of the theory of literacy, Jack
Goody, has evolved significantly on this point. R. W. Niezen summarizes
Goody's position in the 1970s: "Alphabetic literacy, he suggests, is respon-
sible for the growth of knowledge because it makes permanent the rela-
tionship between the word and its referent, making it possible to scrutinize
language and subject the ideas it communicates to criticism and revi-
sion."53 But Goody refined this position in stating "two opposed conse-
quences of the permanency of ideas that writing brings about: 'criticism
and commentary on the one hand and the orthodoxy of the book on the
other.' "54 And more recently Goody has moved to the consideration of "a
wide range of social implications of literacy."ss We are left with a situation
in which "[t]he link between literacy and the development of a critical ap-
proach to ideological messages is therefore more problematic." 56
Some scholars would see no possibility at all of "a critical approach to
ideological messages" in the material we have been examining. Surely me-
dieval women put literacy to a wide range of social uses. Many, undoubt-
edly most, used it to articulate orthodox ideologies more clearly. Nikki
Stiller argues that the relationship between Anne and the Virgin as pre-
sented in medieval literature, specifically in the N-Town cycle, serves the
dominant ideology by inculcating passivity in women. She points specifi-
cally to Anne's willingness to give up her three-year-old daughter and
Mary's acquiescence in entering the Temple as paradigms of proper behav-
ior for medieval women. "What better model for mothers and daughters
than Our Lady and Her mother, Anne?" Stiller asks in her despair at their
willing passivity.57 It is undoubtedly true that most of what women were
urged to read in the late middle ages reinforced the ideology of patriarchy
and instructed women as to their proper place within it. Reading may most
frequently have been part of an image of submissive behavior, as in the
N-Town play of the Marriage of Mary and Joseph. When Joseph leaves,
Mary indicates that she will simply wait and read until he returns:

And I xal here abyde your agencomynge

And on my Sawtere-book I xal rede. (10/423-4) 58

And though Mary's reading is mentioned several times in the cycle, it

seems always confined to the Psalter. In fact, Martin Stevens suggests that

53 R. W. Niezen, "Hot Literacy in Cold Societies: A Comparative Study of the Sacred

Value of Writing," Comparative Studies in Society and History 33.2 (April1991): 226.
54 Ibid., 226.
55 Ibid., 227.
56 Ibid., 251.
57 Nikki Stiller, Eve's Orphans: Mothers and Daughters in Medieval English Literature (West-
port, Conn., 1980), 52.
58 Spector, N-Town, 109.

The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary 133

 the cycle contrasts the knowledge of the "Doctors" in the play-"all the sci-
ence of their day as taught in the trivium and the quadrivium"59_with
Mary's "true learning" -"what man learns from the Psalms, Mary tells us,
is how to be virtuous and how to love. As the paradigmatic human being
committed to a life of learning, that is what she has gathered from her own
assiduous reading of the Psalter." 60 How could we expect that one of the
most central constructions of medieval culture, the Virgin Mary, would not
forward the dominant ideologies of that culture?
Yet we should not forget that another possible consequence of literacy is
to foster criticism and commentary, and that there were literate women in
the late middle ages, most notably Christine de Pizan, who employed her
literacy to construct a devastating critique of the ideology of patriarchy. Al-
though we cannot predict the end to which it will be used, we can agree
that literacy is power. Through the pictorial arts, Anne empowers her
daughter and encourages other mothers to follow her example. 61

59 Martin Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual, and Critical In-

terpretations (Princeton, 1987), 216.

60 Ibid., 217. Schreiner is convinced that reading, as encouraged by Mary's example,
served primarily to deepen feelings of piety: "Im Auge zu behalten ist allerdings dies:
Lesen, das durch mariologische Bild- und Textzeugnisse veranlasst und gestiitzt wurde, di-
ente weder der Unterhaltung noch der beruflichen Ausbildung oder geistigen Selbstvervol-
lkommnung. Lektiire war auch nicht eine Form des Gliicks, sondern ein Mittel moralischer
Besserung und vertiefter Religiositat. Nur als QueUe einer personlichen und verinnerlichten
Frommigkeit starkte Lesen das Selbstgefiihl und die Subjektivitat mittelalterlicher Frauen"
("Marienverehrung," 318).
61 I was not able to consult a forthcoming essay by Wendy Sease, "St Anne and the Edu-
cation of the Virgin: Literary and Artistic Traditions and Their Implications," in England in
the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Nicholas Rogers,
Harlaxton Medieval Studies 3 (Stamford, 1994), 81-96.

134 Pamela Sheingorn

 CHAPTER SEVEN

Did Goddesses Empower Women?

The Case of Dame Nature

Barbara Newman

Around 1975, when the number of feminists studying medieval literature

could be counted on the fingers of both hands, textbook accounts routinely
linked the vogue for idealized female figures, such as romance heroines
and allegorical goddesses, with a supposed rise in the status of women. By
1990, feminists were legion and this consensus had largely reversed itself.
More exacting studies of change in women's social and economic status
had failed to demonstrate any clear gains and, in fact, were more likely to
show a decline. In literature, with the increasing popularity of the
"madonna-whore complex" as an interpretive construct, idealized and de-
monized female figures came to be seen as two inseparable poles in a broad
strategy to objectify and dehumanize women. But this picture in turn has
been challenged. Intensive studies of women writers, especially mystics,
have shown that many of them did find goddess figures empowering and
frequently spoke in the name of such divine alter egos as Sapientia and
Dame Amour. In my book, God and the Goddesses, I examined selected me-
dieval goddesses in a wide range of texts by male and female writers both
religious and secular, exploring the cultural and theological work that such
figures do.l In many instances, I have found, gender ideology seems only
tangential to a writer's investment in a particular goddess. But this is em-
phatically not the case with texts that feature Natura, the "daughter of
God" whose sphere of influence concerned sex, gender, and procreation.
Lady Nature, a goddess invented by Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille

1 Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages

(Philadelphia, 2003). This chapter is condensed and adapted from chap. 3·

1 35
 in the twelfth century, is among the bugbears of contemporary theorists,
who have devoted considerable energy to deconstructing the whole con-
cept of "nature" along with the gendered dichotomy of nature and cul-
ture.2 So, prima facie, we might expect the writings where this goddess fig-
ures prominently to enforce the most repressive available gender norms. In
this essay I will test that hypothesis through readings of three medieval
French writers: Jean de Meun, Heldris of Cornwall, and Christine de Pizan.
Nature's allegiances do not remain stable from one text to another, and the
values she represents are not always the same. In the Roman de la Rose, for
example, Nature stands for active heterosexuality as opposed to sodomy
on the one hand and chastity on the other, while in the Roman de Silence and
Le Livre de la mutacion de Fortune, she signifies anatomical vis-a-vis cultural
gender. But Nature's is not the sole authoritative voice in these texts. In
fact, her very presence signals her participation in a debate whose conclu-
sion is not foregone. For Christine de Pizan as for the mysterious Heldris of
Cornwall, that debate concerns the still-controversial question as to
whether, or under what circumstances, "becoming male" is a viable and
empowering strategy for women.
The immensely popular Romance of the Rose must be our starting point
for any investigation of Dame Nature in French literature. When Jean de
Meun took up the unfinished romance of Guillaume de Lorris circa 1275,
he made its delicate plot the foundation of a vast, sprawling edifice that
both dwarfs and deconstructs the original. Dame Nature and her side-
kick, the so-called priest Genius, are the last of six prolix authority figures
introduced by Jean to vie for the allegiance of his protagonist, the callow
Amant, who is seeking by fair means and foul to lure his Rose into bed.
When Nature first appears, we see her as a blacksmith hard at work in
her forge, hammering out new individuals to replace those killed by
Death.

Touz jors martele, touz jors forge,

Touz jors ses pieces renovele
Par generacion novele.3

[She is always hammering and forging,

Always renewing her creation
By new acts of generation.]

2 See, e.g., Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revo-

lution (San Francisco, 1980); Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, eds., Nature, Culture
and Gender (Cambridge, 1980); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (New York, 1990); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (New York, 1991).
3 Jean de Meun, Roman de Ia Rose, lines 16,010-12. I cite the edition of Daniel Poirion, Le
Roman de Ia Rose (Paris, 1974).

136 Barbara Newman

 Jean borrowed this figure from Alan of Lille's De planctu Naturae, where
the unlikely smith is Nature's protegee Venus, and her hammer and anvil
are transparent metaphors for sexual organs. 4 In keeping with this image,
most illuminated Rose manuscripts include a standard miniature of "Nature
at her forge." Standing before her anvil with hammer in hand, the goddess
uplifts her mighty arm to forge a bird, a beast, or most often, a baby. 5 This
symbolic portrayal of lovemaking also provides a sinister object lesson in
hermeneutics, since anyone foolish enough to neglect the allegory and read
the image "literally" would see in Nature the most unnatural of mothers, a
veritable Medea, poised to smash the vulnerable infant lying on her anvil.
Like Alan of Lille's Natura, Jean de Meun's goddess is deputized by God
to oversee all procreation, and she can discourse impressively on natural sci-
ence and philosophy. But Jean radically departs from Alan in positing a
breach between Nature and God's other daughter, Lady Reason, since in his
view, only Reason enables humans to contemplate the divine order which,
by definition, transcends Nature. Thus Dame Raison, the first of Jean's au-
thoritative speakers, upholds Christian sexual ethics. She is an implacable
foe of the God of Love and deploys all her arguments, in vain, to dissuade
Amant from his quest of the Rose. Dame Nature, on the other hand, supports
the cause of Cupid and Venus because her own interest in procreation dove-
tails with their pursuit of sexual pleasure. Compared with Alan's Natura,
Jean's Nature is logically more consistent, though rhetorically even more sly.
De planctu Naturae famously ends with a solemn anathema in which
Natura's priest, Genius, excommunicates all sodomites. Jean de Meun
adapts this motif with a cunning and controversial twist, which has dis-
mayed readers from Christine de Pizan through the mid-twentieth century.
Acting on Nature's authority, his Genius anathematizes not only homosexu-
als but also celibates and virgins: for if same-sex love is contra naturam, that is
to say nonprocreative, so too is lifelong abstinence. Nor do Genius and Na-
ture have any vested interest in marriage; heterosexual promiscuity suits
their interest-and the Lover's-as well as or better than wedlock. In his
preaching to Love's barons, Genius tells them exactly what they wish to hear:
Ares, por Dieu, baron, ares,
Et vos linages repares.
Se ne penses forment d' arer,
N' est rienz qui les puist reparer.
4 Natura speaks: "To assure that faithful instruments would preclude the corruption of

shoddy workmanship, I assigned [Venus] two prescription hammers with which to undo
the snares of the Fates and prepare many kinds of things for existence. I also gave her noble
workshops with anvils suited for this craft, instructing her to apply the same hammers to
the anvils and devote herself faithfully to the formation of creatures. By no means should
she let the hammers stray from the anvils in any deviation." Alan of Lille, De planctu Natu-
rae 10, ed. N. M. Haring, Studi Medievali, terza serie, 19.2 (1978), 845.
s Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton,
1966), 324-

The Case of Dame Nature 137

 Rescorcies vous bien par devant,
Aussi cum por coillir le vent,
Ou, s'il vous plaist, tuit nu soies,
Mes trop froit ne trop chaut n'aies.

[Plow, for God's sake, barons, plow,

And renew your lineages!
If you don't think of plowing vigorously,
Nothing can restore them.
Tuck up your clothes in front,
As if to wanton with the wind,
Or if you wish, go completely naked,
But don't get chilled or overheated.]
(19,701-8)

Ne vous lessies pas desconfire,

Grefes aves, penses d'escrire.
N' aies pas les bras emmoufles:
Marteles, forgies et soufles.

[Don't let yourselves be vanquished!

You have a stylus; think of writing.
Don't let your arms be muffled:
Hammer away, use forge and bellows!]
(19,793-96)

In the event, Nature proves to be on the "winning" side of the Rose, inso-
far as the Lover follows her counsel rather than Reason's. This does not, of
course, make her an authorial mouthpiece. 6 Chaucer, I believe, read the
Roman de la Rose correctly in the prologue to his Legend of Good Women,
where he presents himself as the object of Cupid's wrath for having trans-
lated the Rose into English. The God of Love comically accuses the poet of
sacrilege because the Rose "is an heresye ayeins my lawe, I And [thou]
makest wise folk fro me withdrawe."7 In other words, Cupid-and pre-
sumably Chaucer-understood Jean de Meun to be a partisan of Lady Rea-
son, not Lady Nature. Chaucer's assigned penance for his poetic sin
against Love is to compile a new martyrology, whose alternate title is The
Seintes Legende of Cupide. But if this new text at least theoretically refur-
bishes the reputations of women, it certainly does not empower them, for
what the poet presents is a long litany of victims and suicides.

6 For Jean de Meun as a partisan of Nature, see the massive work of Alan Gunn, The Mir-

ror of Love: A Reinterpretation of "The Romance of the Rose" (Lubbock, 1952). For the partisans
of Reason see D. W. Robertson Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives
(Princeton, 1962), 196-203 et passim; John Fleming, The "Roman de Ia Rose": A Study in Alle-
gory and Iconography (Princeton, 1969); and idem, Reason and the Lover (Princeton, 1984). My
own reading is in substantial agreement with Fleming's.
7 Geoffrey Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, F prologue, lines 330-31. In The Riverside

Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson eta!. (Boston, 1987), 597·

138 Barbara Newman

 Does Nature in the Rose empower women? Hardly. If Chaucer well un-
derstood Jean de Meun's irony, Christine de Pizan well understood his mi-
sogyny. Jean's characterization of Nature is antifeminist in two distinct but
compatible ways. First, she collaborates with the God of Love to enable
Amant's conquest of the Rose-and a conquest it most decidedly is. If the
Rose is "the first important pregnant heroine in European literature," as a
critic once quipped,s she is hardly the first to be seduced and abandoned,
nor the last to be objectified. After Amant has overridden the protests of
Fair Welcome, opened the petals of the Rose, and scattered his bit of seed,
he goes on to wonder idly whether others have since followed him into the
narrow passage-but that is no longer his concern, nor is it Nature's. Had
the Rose been an actual woman, or at least a speaking subject in the poem
that bears her name, she could easily have ended up with Chaucer's hap-
less martyrs of love in The Seintes Legende of Cupide.
Dame Nature also serves Jean de Meun's satirical ends in another respect
that has little to do with her role in the plot. The scene of her "confession"
to Genius provides the occasion for a vicious antifeminist rant by the
priest, culminating in his command to "flee, flee, flee, flee, flee" the dread-
ful beast called Woman. 9 Genius not only proves himself a hardened
misogynist but even persuades Nature to agree with his assertion that
"nothing swears or lies more boldly than a woman." Worse still, she calls
him "courteous and wise" for making such remarks,IO and admits that she
herself must reveal her mysteries because "a woman can keep nothing se-
cret."11 But the confession scene is not just antifeminist in a generic way. It
has a more precise target, for Jean's satire is aimed sharply and scathingly
at Beguine spirituality. Indeed, the situation has all the hallmarks of
"abuse" that opponents of the Beguine movement held up for ridicule.12 A
loquacious, high-minded woman with pretensions to learning summons
"her" priest for confession; he jumps at her bidding, yet does not trouble to
hide his contempt for her sex; she in turn uses confession as a pretext to in-
struct the priest, rambling interminably about high theological matters and
boasting of her intimate relationship with God.
8 Charles W. Dunn, intro. to The Romance of the Rose, trans. Harry Robbins (New York,

1962), xxv; cited polemically in Fleming, Roman de Ia Rose, 243-44.

9 "Biau seignor, gardes vous des fames, I Se vos cors ames et vos ames, I ... Fuies, fuies,

fuies, fuies I Fuies, enfant, fuies tel beste." Roman de Ia Rose, 16,577-83.
10 "Car riens ne jure ne ne ment I De fame plus hardiement." -"Certes, sire prestres, bien

dites I Comme preus et cortois et sages. I Trop ont fames en lor carage I Et soutillites et
malices." Roman de Ia Rose, 18,127-33.
11 "Fame sui, si ne me puis taire, I Ains vue! des ja tout reveler, I Car fame ne puet rienz

celer." Roman de Ia Rose, 19,218-20.

12 On this tradition see Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, "Satirical Views of the Beguines in
Northern French Literature," in New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women ofLiege
and Their Impact, ed. Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Turnhout,
1999), 237-49. Jean's satire is more explicit in his portrayal of Constrained Abstinence, a Be-
guine who accompanies the friar Fausemblant (False Seeming).

The Case of Dame Nature 139

 Nul autre droit je n'i reclaime,
Ains 1' en merci quant il tant m' aime
Que si tres povre damoisele
A si grant maison et si bele;
leis granz sires tant me prise
Qu'il m'i a por chambriere prise.
Por sa chambriere? Certes vere,
Por connestable et por viquere,
Dont je ne fusse mie digne,
Fors par sa volente benigne.

[I claim no other right from him,

But thank him that he loves me so much
That he has given me, such a poor damsel,
Such a great and beautiful mansion.
This great lord values me so much
That he has taken me to be his maid.
His chambermaid? Surely, in fact,
His vicar and his chatelaine-
A post which I by no means deserve
Except through his gracious will.]
(16,775-84)

For a moment Nature sounds like a mystical Beguine exulting that so great
a Sovereign has brought so lowly a maiden to his court.13 Genius for his
part absolves Nature and gives her a penance that is "good and pleasing,"
just as excessively lax friars were said to do.14 To crown the irony, her
penance consists in resuming her labors in the forge-the very activity she
has just confessed as sinful.
It is safe to say that this particular goddess, as Jean de Meun constructed
her, is no friend to women. But the Nature tradition she represents, which
we can trace in a straight line of development from Bernard Silvestris to
Alan to Jean de Meun to Chaucer,1s is not the only one. There is an alterna-
tive, less familiar version of the goddess who differs in her iconography as
well as her sphere of influence. If the Nature of Alan and Jean is "about"
sex, the Nature of Heldris of Cornwall and Christine de Pizan is "about"
gender. And if the phallic goddess of the Rose is a blacksmith, the more
womanly goddess of Silence and Lavision-Christine is a baker.
The Roman de Silence, written in the second half of the thirteenth century

13 Cf. Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead l.4, trans. Frank Tobin
(New York, 1998), 43· Of course Jean de Meun could not have known Mechthild's German
text, but such imagery was a commonplace of Beguine spirituality.
14 "Si tost cum ot este confesse I Dame Nature, Ia deesse, I Si cum Ia loy vuet et li us, I Li
vaillans prestres Genius I Tantost l'assot et si li donne I Penitance avenant et bonne."
Roman de Ia Rose, 19-411-16. On the inadequacies of Genius as a confessor see Tuve, Allegori-
cal Imagery, 268-69, and Fleming, Roman de Ia Rose, 207.
15 George Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1972).

140 Barbara Newman

but not published until the 1960s, was belatedly "discovered" by critics in
the 198os and now seems fetchingly postmodern.1 6 Its transvestite
hero/ine is called "Silence," and its authorship, fittingly enough, remains
shrouded in mystery. "Master Heldris of Cornwall," the self-identified
poet, is otherwise unknown. Linguistic features indicate that the text origi-
nated in Picardy, not Cornwall, and the poet's name is almost certainly a
pseudonym, possibly that of a woman.17 Silence can be read as an elabo-
rate, ambivalent gloss on a speech Jean de Meun puts in the mouth of la
Vieille:

Touz jors Nature retorra,

Ja por habit ne demorra.
Que vaut ce? Toute creature
Vuet retorner a sa nature,
Ja nou lera por violence
De force ne de convenance.

Trop est fors chose de Nature:

Nature passe norreture.

[Nature always comes running back:

No habit will ever chase her out.
What is that worth? Every creature
Wishes to return to its nature;
It will never forsake it through the violence
Of force, promise, or convenience.

Too mighty a force is Nature:

Nature surpasses Nurture.]

The maxim that "Nature passe norreture" was proverbial, 1S but no text
prior to Silence constructs "Noreture" as an allegorical character. In

16 Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East

Lansing, 1992). All citations are from this text. Translations designated "RM" are Roche-
Mahdi's; the rest are my own.
17 Kathleen Brahney, "When Silence Was Golden: Female Personae in the Roman de Si-
lence," in Glyn Burgess and Robert Taylor, eds., The Spirit of the Court (Cambridge, 1985), 61;
Roche-Mahdi, Silence, xi; Suzanne Akbari, "Nature's Forge Recast in the Roman de Silence,"
in Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Cam-
bridge, 1994), 46; Lorraine Stock, "The Importance of Being Gender 'Stable': Masculinity
and Feminine Empowerment in Le Roman de Silence," Arthuriana 7 (1997): 28-29. Akbari
notes that "the misogyny undoubtedly present in the work is no evidence against female
authorship, for misogyny was and is not unique to men."
18 Simon Gaunt, "The Significance of Silence," Paragraph 13 (1990): 203-4; Roche-Mahdi,
Silence, xviii-xix; Akbari, "Nature's Forge Recast," 41; Adolf Tobler and Erhard Lom-
matzsch, Altfranzosisches Worterbuch (rpt. Wiesbaden, 1965), VI, 8oS.

The Case of Dame Nature 141

 Heldris's romance, Nature and Nurture come onstage in person to argue
about the protagonist's gender.
But first the plot. Born a girl, the aptly named Silence is dressed and
raised as a boy because her parents are trying to circumvent the law of
King Ebain, who has impulsively disinherited all women. Silence receives
a chivalric education and soon demonstrates great skill in jousting and
other knightly sports. Upon reaching puberty, s/he ponders the wisdom of
remaining disguised, but quickly realizes that "a man's ways are worth
more than a woman's" (2637-38). Nevertheless, Silence runs away with a
pair of traveling minstrels in order to learn skills that will stand him in
good stead if he is ever unmasked.19 In minstrelsy he quickly surpasses his
masters and, fleeing from their murderous envy, strikes out on his own.
Our hero eventually makes his way to the court of Ebain, where he has the
misfortune to become the love-object of the king's wife, Eufeme. As Silence
does not reciprocate her passion but pleads feudal honor, the queen-un-
aware that she herself loves a woman-accuses Silence of being a homo-
sexual and even a male prostitute.2o Eufeme tries to avenge herself on the
unwilling boy by accusing him falsely of rape and, when this scheme fails,
sending him to the King of France with a forged letter demanding the
bearer's execution. But the canny French king defies the order and grants
Silence knighthood instead. Summoned back to England, the new knight
heroically saves the king's life in a battle against rebellious counts. Now in
high favor with Ebain, Silence is victimized once again by the wrathful Eu-
feme. This time she tries to get rid of him by sending him on a quest to cap-
ture Merlin, knowing that only a woman can succeed in that task. Silence
does catch the sly master of disguise, with Merlin's own help, but his suc-
cess inevitably leads to his exposure. In the final scene, a laughing Merlin
appears at court and unmasks not only Silence but also Euferne-who
turns out to have been keeping a male lover disguised as a nun for many
years. Enraged, Ebain has his queen and her lover put to death, repeals the
law against female inheritance, and marries the newly regendered heiress,
Silence.
This tantalizing tale has been diversely interpreted. Some critics read the
ending as a victory, others as a defeat for Silence, while Heldris has been
variously hailed as a proto-feminist, denounced as a misogynist, and post-

19 In my pronoun usage I follow the lead of the narrator, who collaborates with Silence's
gender masquerade by referring to the hero as "he" throughout the period of his disguise.
Surprisingly, even the most Butlerian critics tend to undercut their insistence on the perfor-
mative quality of gender by referring to the hero/ine as "she." See, e.g., Roberta Krueger,
"Women Readers and the Politics of Gender in Le Roman de Silence," in Women Readers and
the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge, 1993), 101-27; Peggy Mc-
Cracken," 'The Boy Who Was a Girl': Reading Gender in the Roman de Silence," Romanic Re-
view 85 (1994): 517-36.
2o On this theme see Kathleen Blumreich, "Lesbian Desire in the Old French Roman de Si-
lence," Arthuriana 7 (1997): 47-62.

142 Barbara Newman

modernized as a champion of ambiguity and indeterminacy. 21 More deeply
than any medieval poet except Alan of Lille, Heldris probes the dilemmas
posed by the goddess Nature: How far does her power extend and what
are its limits? How much that goes by the name of "nature" is actually due
to nurture, or to human choice, custom, or chance? If it is possible to
tamper with Nature's will, is it ever desirable? If indeed "Nature I Sig-
norist desor Noreture" ("Nature has lordship over Nurture," 2423-24), is
her sovereignty benign or despotic? The goddess's contested terrain in Si-
lence turns out to involve not only gender but also class, morality, and even
species.
Nature makes her first appearance in the scene of Silence's birth. Proud
of her art, she announces her intention to create a masterpiece (ouvre
forcible). She is tired of crude, vulgar work and resolves to use only her
finest white flour and her most exquisite mold. With her own hand she in-
scribes the girl's delicate features and paints her face with lilies and roses,
asserting that "once in a while I must show what I can do" (RM 1885). Hav-
ing invested so much in Silence, Nature sees the child as her own little girl
("sa puciele," 1868; "rna mescine," 1873; "rna fille," 1927). Thus she is furi-
ous when the parents deface her art by "changing her daughter into a son"
(RM 2263). What seems to irritate her most is that Silence's lovely complex-
ion will be damaged, for as a boy he must be tanned by the sun and hard-
ened by rough winds. This concern recurs throughout the text, most no-
tably at the end. After Silence is revealed to be a woman, Nature takes three
days to "repolish" her entire body, removing every trace of suntan, before
she can marry the king. The obsession with surfaces suggests that gender
itself is a superficial matter: Silence's core identity cannot or does not
change, but a new dress and a makeover suffice to restore her womanhood.
The scene set in Nature's bakery serves Heldris for an extended com-
mentary not on gender but on class. The narrator explains that Nature has
many grades of dough or flour: "She always makes quality folk from the
refined clay, and riff-raff from the coarse" (RM 1833-34). Deviations from
the expected norm-aristocrats aren't always noble, nor peasants base-
are explained by defects in the baking process. If a little coarse matter is
mixed in with the fine, it goes straight to the heart and sullies the whole
creation. Conversely, some men of low birth possess a noble character be-

21 For Silence as a proto-feminist romance see Brahney, "When Silence Was Golden";
Regina Psaki, trans., Le Roman de Silence (New York, 1991), intro.; Stock, "The Importance of
Being Gender 'Stable.' " For Heldris as a misogynist see Gaunt, "The Significance of Si-
lence"; Krueger, "Women Readers"; Blumreich, "Lesbian Desire." Deconstructive readings
that stress the indeterminacy of the text include Kate Mason Cooper, "Elle and L: Sexualized
Textuality in Le Roman de Silence," Romance Notes 25 (1985): 341-60; R. Howard Bloch, "Si-
lence and Holes: The Roman de Silence and the Art of the Trouvere," Yale French Studies 70
(1986): 81-99; and Peter Allen, "The Ambiguity of Silence: Gender, Writing, and Le Roman de
Silence," in Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature, ed. Julian
Wasserman and Lois Roney (Syracuse, 1989), 98-112.

The Case of Dame Nature 143

 cause they have, by accident as it were, a bit of fine clay in their makeup. In
Silence's case, character and status are perfectly congruent because she is
made from only the purest material. After Nature has sifted her flour and
kneaded her dough, she proceeds to mold, inscribe, and paint it. Heldris
seems here to be making a distinction analogous to the Aristotelian di-
chotomy of form and matter, though with antithetical meaning. Silence's
matter-the fine white flour-represents her noble character, while her
gender is signified by the inscription and coloring, or superficial form,
stamped on that matter. This unusual privileging of matter over form ex-
plains why gender is more mutable than character.
But Nature, a goddess scorned, does not like her work to be altered in ei-
ther respect. After Silence's fateful baptism as a boy, she vows to prove that
she is stronger than Nurture.

"Il ont en mon desdaing cho fait

Quanses que miols valt Noreture
Que face m'uevre!" dist Nature.
"Par Deu! par Deu! or monte bien!
Il n' a en tiere nule rien,
Ki par nature ait a durer,
Ki puist alloing desnaturer."

["They have done this to spite me,

As if the work of Nurture
Were worth more than mine!" said Nature.
"For God's sake! A fine state of affairs!
There is nothing on earth
Living in Nature's realm
That can be denatured for long."]
(2266-72)

The goddess stakes her all on her masterpiece, the child in whom she
means to show the full extent of her power, but she brooks a forceful chal-
lenge from her adversary and loses the first several rounds. The question at
stake in Nurture's challenge is indeed whether anyone can or should be
"denatured," temporarily or permanently. When Silence reaches puberty,
Nature reappears and visits the boy-girl with sharp reproaches. She is
wasting her fabulous beauty and deceiving the "thousand women" who
have allegedly fallen in love with her; she should abandon her freewheel-
ing forest life and "go to a chamber and learn to sew" (RM 2528) because,
after all, she is not really the boy "Scilentius"-it is all a fraud. But Silence
is puzzled by this charge: "Donques sui jo Scilentius, I Cho m' est avis, u jo
sui nus" (2537-38). It is a brilliantly punning line: "Either I am Scilentius, so
I think, or else I am no one I or else I am nude." Without his carefully nur-

144 Barbara Newman

tured masculine identity, Silence is either a social nobody or a naked fe-
male body-which may after all amount to the same thing. 22 This sober re-
flection enables Nurture to frame her counterargument: She commands
Nature to "leave [her] nursling alone" because Silence has been completely
"denatured" and will always resist her. Both ladies have become fiercely
possessive of the youth; as Nature had once called her "my daughter,"
Nurture now calls him "my foster-child" (nore~on, 2593). Punning in turn,
Nurture boasts that she can succeed perfectly in turning a noble enfant into
a malvais home (2602). The vaunt is both true and false: Silence may indeed
be a "defective male" buts/he is hardly a "bad man." 23 Further slippage
arises from the context. Nurture claims that she can make "a thousand peo-
ple" work against Nature, just as Silence does, but since we do not know if
the natures they were born with are good or bad, we cannot decide
whether her power is beneficial or harmful. Nurture, like Nature, is a
morally ambiguous force.
When the two adversaries have argued to a standstill, the debate is re-
solved by Reason, who-here as in the Roman de Ia Rose-sides against Na-
ture. Heldris's Reason is no celestial daughter of God; she represents some-
thing more like shrewd pragmatism. Nevertheless, her victorious
arguments should preclude any simplistic reading of Nature as the poet's
mouthpiece. Reason's case reinforces Nurture's on three counts. First, Si-
lence at twelve already understands that in his society, a man's life is val-
ued far more than a woman's: "miols valt li us d'ome I Que l'us de feme,
c'est la some" (2637-38). Since he is now on top, why should he willingly
step down? "Deseure sui, s'irai desos?" (2641). In addition, he remembers
the law that initially prompted his disguise: he does not want to lose his in-
heritance or prove his father a liar. Finally, as a youth governed by Reason,
Silence has no taste for the games of Cupid: his "mouth [is] too hard for
kisses, I and arms too rough for embraces" (RM 2646-47). This declaration
can be read as a rejection of female sexuality, for Silence insists that he is re-
ally a boy, not a girl ("valles sui et nient mescine," 2650). Yet Nature's
promptings never go so far as to awaken desire for any partner in the
young hero. The opposite of Jean de Meun's Amant, he heeds Reason and
resolves to renounce sexuality altogether: "C' onques ne fu tels abstinence"
("Never was there such abstinence," 2659).
The final Nature-Nurture debate concerns not Silence but Merlin, who
has challenged the "nature of man" even more fundamentally because he
straddles the boundary between human and animal. "Ne sai s'il est u hom

22 For more elaborate readings of this passage see Cooper, "Elle and L," 341-42; E. Jane

Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia, 1993), 243.
23 "Bad man" is Psaki's translation; "defective male" is Roche-Mahdi's. The latter recalls

the Aristotelian and Thomist definition of woman as mas occasionatus, a defective or misbe-
gotten male.

The Case of Dame Nature 145

 u bieste" (5908), says Silence. 24 Nature has made Merlin a man (human and
male), so he has the same carnivorous instincts as any other man. But Nur-
ture-that is, his own predilection-has taught him to live like a beast in
the forest, subsisting on a vegetarian diet. Silence, tutored by Merlin him-
self in the guise of an old graybeard, lures Merlin the Wild Man with roast
meat, which he cannot resist. But the salted meat induces a great thirst the
wizard tries to assuage with the honey, milk, and wine that Silence has laid
out in succession, until he collapses in a dyspeptic, drunken stupor. Seeing
Merlin thus turn away from the noreture (food/training) to which he had
long been accustomed, Nature gloats in triumph. But what we actually see
in the episode is not so much a one-sided victory for Nature as a Levi-
Straussian synthesis. The foods that Silence uses to ensnare the wizard are
coded both masculine and feminine: roast meat and wine evoke the war-
riors' banquet hall, milk and honey the female body. Likewise, cooked
meat and wine are processed foods, raw honey and milk unprocessed,
symbolizing the spheres of Culture and Nature respectively.2s But to con-
found any simple resolution, Heldris has tied Merlin's human "nature" to
culture-the world of the court, to which he must now return-and his
"nurture" to the wilderness of a self-imposed exile. In effect, Silence and
Merlin trap one another (6457-58), so it would not be amiss to read Mer-
lin's ending as a mirror image of Silence's. Nature humiliates both of them,
seizing Merlin by the scruff of his neck to thrust him toward the meat and
compelling Silence to bear the shame of a public disrobing. But the god-
dess, though vindicated, does not have the final word, for by dint of their
nurture and their wits, both Silence and Merlin manage to remain "on top"
despite their apparent undoing.
If, as many critics have noted, the romance retreats in the end from its
radical premise, it does not retreat nearly as far as some have claimed.
Much discussion of the text has been bedeviled by a confusion of the na-
ture/nurture question with the problem of misogyny. It is true that Silence
does not ultimately challenge the medieval gender hierarchy. Heldris and
most of her characters, including the protagonist, remain convinced that
men's lives, opportunities, and achievements are more valuable than
women's. Within that framework, however, Silence does demonstrate that
the best man for the job might be a woman, given sufficient scope-that is,

24 "I don't know whether he's man or beast." Merlin's role as wild man of the woods

overlaps with another tradition that makes him half human, half demonic. Eufeme de-
scribes Merlin to Ebain as "fil a! diable" (5792); Geoffrey of Monmouth, who invented the
character, makes him the son of an incubus and a royal nun.
2s "Not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture, but through it and
by means of it, the human state can be defined with all its attributes, even those that, like
mortality, might seem to be the most unquestionably natural." Claude Levi-Strauss, The
Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York, 1969), 164. See also Elis-
abeth Moltmann-Wendel, A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey: Perspectives on Feminist Theol-
ogy, trans. John Bowden (New York, 1986), 1-4.

146 Barbara Newman

nurture-to exercise her talents. In a problematic disclaimer at the end of
the poem, Heldris praises the woman who "works well against Nature,"
adding formulaically that no "good woman" should be offended by the
disgrace of bad women like Eufeme.

Maistre Heldris dist chi endroit

C' on doit plus bone feme amer
Que hai"r malvaise u blasmer.
Si mosterroie bien raison:
Car feme a menor oquoison,
Por que ele ait le liu ne l' aise,
De l' estre bone que malvaise.
S'ele ouevre bien contre nature,
Bien mosterroie par droiture
C' on en doit faire gregnor plait
Que de celi qui le mal fait.

[Master Heldris says right here

That one should love a good woman more
Than one hates or blames a bad one.
I will show you exactly why:
For a woman has less occasion
(If she has the opportunity at all)
To be good than to be wicked.
If she works well against Nature,
I will show as a matter of right
That one should take more account of her
Than of the one who does evil.]
(6684-94)

Freed from the confusion created by an early editorial mistake, 26 this oft-
reviled passage actually softens and nuances the apparent triumph of Na-
ture. Silence, Heldris suggests, qualifies as a "good woman" precisely be-
cause she "works well against Nature," that is, against the devalued us de
feme that Nurture and Reason had taught her to reject. This is necessary not
because "female nature" is intrinsically evil, but rather because female nur-
ture-misinterpreted as nature-gives women like Eufeme so many occa-
sions to do harm and so few to perform acts of conspicuous valor and
virtue. Thus Silence finds that ''becoming male" allows her to reveal the
sterling stuff of her human nature in the public sphere, the only space that
counts. If in the end she reverts to her "natural" womanhood, it is only
after her gender masquerade has deconstructed the forced reduction of a
noble and aspiring nature to a limited and constricting nurture. So, even

26 The editions of Lewis Thorpe, Le Roman de Silence (Cambridge, 1972), and Sarah Roche-
Mahdi both have a comma after v. 6690 and a period at the end of 6691. I have adopted the
valuable emendation of Simon Gaunt, "Significance of Silence," 211. This reading makes
good sense out of a passage that is garbled in both the Psaki and Roche-Mahdi translations.

The Case of Dame Nature 147

 though Nature claims the victory over her foe, mollifying any conserva-
tives in the audience, the romance as a whole embodies a more ambivalent
version of the medieval proverb: "Nature passe nourriture I Et nourriture
survainc nature" ("Nature surpasses Nurture, and Nurture vanquishes
Nature")P
To the best of our knowledge, the Roman de Silence itself soon fell silent; it
seems to have left no trace on subsequent texts. Yet it is hard not to wonder
whether Christine de Pizan could have known Heldris's offbeat romance,
for she was keenly interested in its themes. The sole surviving manuscript
of Silence was still in France during her lifetime, and presumably others
once existed. 28 The fact that Christine never cites Silence need not imply
that she was unfamiliar with the tale because, like most scholarly authors,
she did not choose to mention "popular" writings but only learned author-
ities (preferably Greek or Latin) who would bolster her own reputation. In
any case, though we can find no conclusive evidence for Christine's knowl-
edge of Silence, it is curious that both the works in which she herself de-
ploys the goddess Nature should bear such significant affinities with the
romance. In The Book of the Mutation of Fortune, Christine represents herself
as a transgender heroine like Silence: born a woman, but transformed by
circumstance into a man. And in Lavision-Christine (Christine's Vision), she
depicts Nature as a bakerwoman in an allegory of gestation and birth. This
image was far from conventional, although one or both writers might have
derived it from a folk tradition: to this day a pregnant woman is said to
"have a bun in the oven."
But Christine certainly did know the Rose, and she attacked it both
frontally and obliquely throughout her career. 29 The obverse of her famous
assault in the Querelle de la Rose was a strategy of writing her own alle-
gories to undo the damage she believed Jean de Meun had done in his. In
particular, she took pains to reinvent his allegorical figures so as to make
them serve feminist ends. Thus, in her Epistle of the God of Love (1399), she
turns the tables by making Cupid himself "excommunicate" misogynists
such as Jean de Meun and seducers such as Amant; in The City of Ladies
(1405) she rehabilitates Jean's Lady Reason, whom she found all too irra-
tional in her defense of obscenity; and in The Mutation of Fortune (1403) and
Christine's Vision (1405), she takes up the cause of Nature. Much like

27 Le Livre des Proverbes Fran(ais, ed. M. LeRoux de Lincy, 2d ed. (Paris, 1859), 2:352; cited

in Akbari, "Nature's Forge Recast," 41.

28 On the history of the manuscript (now University of Nottingham, MS. Mi.LM.6), see

Thorpe, ed., Le Roman de Silence, 1-12.

29 See Eric Hicks, ed., Le Debat sur le Roman de Ia Rose (Paris, 1977); Joseph Baird and John

Kane, ed. and trans., La Querelle de Ia Rose: Letters and Documents (Chapel Hill, 1978); Kevin
Brownlee, "Discourses of the Self: Christine de Pizan and the Romance of the Rose," in Re-
thinking the Romance of the Rose: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot
(Philadelphia, 1992), 234-61.

148 Barbara Newman

Heldris of Cornwall, Christine feminizes the iconography of the goddess
and repositions her as a means to discuss gender and culture rather than
sexuality.
In The Mutation of Fortune the author presents her own life as a tug of war
between two goddesses. Lady Nature is introduced as a potent maternal
figure; supplanting Christine's biological mother, she surpasses even her
beloved father in knowledge and power.

My mother who was great and grand and more valorous than Penthesilea
(God had made her well!) surpassed my father in knowledge, power, and
value, despite the fact that he had learned so much. She was a crowned
queen from the moment that she was born. Everyone knows of her power
and strength. It is clear that she is never idle, and, without being overbear-
ing, she is always occupied with many, diverse tasks: her impressive works
are found everywhere; every day she creates many beautiful ones. Whoever
wanted to count all that she has done and continues to do would never fin-
ish. She is old without being aged, and her life cannot end before Judgment
Day. God gave her the task of maintaining and increasing the world as He
had made it, in order to sustain human life: she is called Lady Nature. She is
the mother of every person: God thus calls us all brothers and sisters.30

The goddess is described as an awesome virago, more valiant than the

Amazon queen whom Christine would extol in The City of Ladies (Llg),
while still playing her traditional role as God's partner in creation. In reac-
tion against Jean de Meun, however, Christine desexualizes Nature's work,
suppressing the blacksmith image, and she cites Scripture (Mark 3:35) to
invest the goddess's universal motherhood with a moral rather than
merely biological character. Thomas de Pizan, writes his daughter, strongly
desired a son who could inherit his wealth (that is, his learning), but it was
not to be:

He failed in his intention, for my mother [Nature], who had much more
power than he, wanted to have for herself a female child resembling her,
thus I was in fact born a girl; but my mother did so much for him that I fully
resembled my father in all things, only excepting my gender.... But be-
cause I was born a girl, it was not at all ordained that I should benefit in any
way from my father's wealth, and I could not inherit, more because of cus-
tom than justice, the possessions that are found in the very worthy fountain
[of the Muses].31

It is Nature who shapes Christine to be her father's daughter in mind and

spirit, but Nature too who creates her a woman in her own image and like-

30 Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de Ia mutacion de Fortune 1.5, lines 339-68, ed. Suzanne So-
lente (Paris, 1959), 1:18-19. Trans. Kevin Brownlee in Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan,
ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (New York, 1997), 93-94.
31 Mutacion de Fortune !.6, lines 388-96,413-19, ed. Solente, 1:20-21. Trans. Brownlee, Se-

lected Writings, 94·

The Case of Dame Nature 149

 ness. Thus the writer carefully avoids blaming the goddess for her gender
or suggesting that femaleness is a defect. Instead, she vigorously de-
nounces the injustice that bars women from the learned professions.
While Christine clearly viewed sexism as unnatural, just what she con-
sidered to be "natural" is no easy question. Alan of Lille's Natura had ac-
knowledged her ignorance of theology, while Jean de Meun's Nature not
only opposed the counsel of Reason but explained that rationality was a di-
vine gift beyond her purview.3 2 Christine seems at first to oppose Jean's po-
sition outright. She recounts that her mother Nature gave her a golden
crown set with four precious jewels-not as precious as her father's
learned arts, yet more freely available. These gems are Discretion, Consid-
eration, Recollection, and Memory, all endowments pertaining to reason.
As if anticipating objections, however, Christine corrects herself with a
more theologically precise explanation. Such qualities in fact belong to the
soul, which is God's direct creation, for Nature fashions only bodies. Yet
they are indeed her gifts insofar as the body's composition gives some peo-
ple a greater receptiveness to intellectual gifts, while others have a dimin-
ished capacity for them. Thus, Christine concludes, "Nature allows or de-
nies to us the opening of the body to the goods of the soul, according to the
diverse capacities of the body to receive them, although God sends the soul
into the body."33 In this way she accounts for the natural inequality of
human endowments while denying that gender is responsible for it, except
insofar as "custom" or Culture distorts the intentions of Nature.
Yet Fortune giveth what Custom taketh away. When Christine reaches
marriageable age, her "beautiful mother Nature" places her "in the service
of a lady of high birth, who was slightly related to her, although they did
not look at all like each other, and they were not cut from the same cloth."34
This lady is Fortune, a goddess of dubious provenance. Christine's master
Boethius had thoroughly deconstructed her, as had Alan of Lille in the An-
ticlaudianus, in a passage echoed by Jean de Meun's Reason and later by
Christine herself. By pointing out the distant kinship and lack of affinity
between the two queens, Christine could only be disparaging Lady For-
tune. Nevertheless, it is Fortune who comes to Christine's rescue when she

32 "Sanz faille, de l'entendement I Connois je bien que voirement I Celi ne li donnai je

mie. I Lane s'estent pas rna baillie, I Ne sui pas sage ne poissant I De faire riens si con-
noissant. I Je ne fis one riens pardurables; I Quant que je fais est corrumpable." Roman de Ia
Rose, 19,055-62.
33 "Si ay bien rna cause prouvee I Que Nature octroye ou nous vee I Les biens de !'arne
ouvrer ou corps, I Selon que les divers accors I De !'instrument si les avoye, I Combien que
Dieu ou corps I' envoye." Mutacion de Fortune I.9, lines 703-8, ed. Solente, 1:31. Trans. Brown-
lee, Selected Writings, 98.
34 "Ma mere Nature Ia belle I ... me volt mettre servir I Une dame de hault parage, I

Qui. I. poy lui tient de lignage, I Mais ne s'entre ressemblent pas, I Ne sont pas faites d'un
compas." Mutacion de Fortune I.7, lines 469, 476-8o, ed. Solente, 1:23. Trans. Brownlee, Se-
lected Writings, 95·

150 Barbara Newman

sinks into paralyzing grief after the shipwreck of her husband's death. A
physical sex change at the hands of Fortune supplies the metaphor for a
change of vocation and gender roles, as through the vicissitudes of fate-
emotional loss and financial need-Christine gains what her sex had ini-
tially denied her, the right and obligation to chart the course of her own
voyage.

Wearied by long crying, I remained, on one particular occasion, com-

pletely overcome; as if unconscious, I fell asleep early one evening. Then
my mistress came to me, she who gives joy to many, and she touched me
all over my body; she palpated and took in her hands each bodily part, I
remember it well; then she departed ... I awakened and things were such
that, immediately and with certainty, I felt myself completely transformed.
I felt my limbs to be stronger than before, and the great pain and lamenta-
tion which had earlier dominated me, I felt to be somewhat lessened. Then
I touched myself all over my body, like one completely bewildered. For-
tune had thus not hated me, she who had transformed me, for she had in-
stantly changed the great fear and doubt in which I had been completely
lost. Then I felt myself much lighter than usual and I felt that my flesh was
changed and strengthened, and my voice much lowered, and my body
harder and faster. However, the ring that Hymen had given me had fallen
from my finger, which troubled me, as well it should have, for I loved it
dearly.35

In ascribing her mythic transformation to Lady Fortune, Christine opposes

a powerful counterforce to Lady Nature. Like Heldris in Silence, she
demonstrates that identity is shaped not only by birth but just as much by
random chance and political circumstance.
In her own case, the trope of "becoming a man" means much the same
as it did in early Christian hagiography. The martyr Perpetua dreamed
that she had become a man on the eve of her battle with wild beasts in the
arena, while the transvestite monks Marina and Euphrosyna (commemo-
rated in The City of Ladies) lived out their entire religious lives in male
garb.36 In this context the virile woman is one who possesses the intelli-
gence, courage, and integrity that cultural norms denied to women as
such.37 Yet why would Christine, with her insistence on the natural worth
and equality of women, have felt the need to describe her transformation

35 Mutacion de Fortune L12, lines 1321-55, ed. Solente, 1:51-52. Trans. Brownlee, Selected

Writings, 106.
36 Book of the City of Ladies III.12-13. E. J. Richards, ed., in La Cittii delle Dame (Milan, 1997);

trans. E. J. Richards, The Book of the City of Ladies (New York, 1982), 241-45. Perpetua is not
mentioned in The City of Ladies, but Christine may have been familiar with her story. See
Lori Walters, "Fortune's Double Face: Gender and the Transformations of Christine de
Pizan, Augustine, and Perpetua," Fifteenth-Century Studies 25 (1999): 97-114-
37 On this tradition see Kerstin Aspegren, The Male Woman: A Feminine Ideal in the Early
Church (Uppsala, 1990); Gillian Cloke, This Female Man of God: Women and Spiritual Power in
the Patristic Age, AD 350-450 (London, 1995), especially 212-21.

The Case of Dame Nature 151

 in such terms? The answer seems to be twofold. First, she had represented
her period of mourning as a near-suicidal depression, curable only by rad-
ical surgery; only by ceasing to be a woman at all could she cease to be a
helpless widow and thus acquire control of her life. She needed to be re-
leased not from womanhood as such, but from what contemporary moral-
ists stigmatized as "womanish grief." Second and more obviously, the
new social roles she would undertake-as poet, scholar, political adviser,
and primary wage-earner for her family-were in all eyes the roles proper
to a man.
But Christine ends her account on a wistful note:

As you have heard, I am still a man and I have been for a total of more than
thirteen full years, but it would please me much more to be a woman, as I
used to be when I used to talk with Hymen, but since Fortune has trans-
formed me so that I shall never again be lodged in a woman's body, I shall
remain a man, and with my Lady Fortune I shall stay. 38

Does the lady protest too much? Even though she notes that the jewels in
her mother Nature's crown (i.e., her rational faculties) "grew much bigger"
when she became a man, the protagonist Christine feels nostalgia for her
original gender and still uses feminine adjectives (estrangiee, logiee) to mod-
ify her "virile" persona. Meanwhile, the author Christine is still casting
about for a feminine-and feminist-poetics. In her two great works of
1405, The City of Ladies and Christine's Vision, she will find one.39 So her
metamorphosis, like that of Silence, proves to be transient after all: Lady
Fortune will be cast out as Lady Nature returns triumphant.
Lavision-Christine deals primarily with French politics, but it begins with
an original and puzzling allegory of Nature. Midway through the pilgrim-
age of life, Christine writes in homage to Dante, she has a marvelous
dream, in which she beholds a Cosmic Man whose head pierces the clouds,
while his feet span the abyss and his belly is wide as the earth. His eyes ra-
diate brightness and his mighty breaths fill the world with freshness. With
his insatiable mouth he takes in "material and corruptible bodies" as nour-
ishment, and from his lower orifice he purges himself. The Cosmic Man is
dressed in a beautiful, subtly colored robe of silk and on his forehead are
stamped five letters spelling the name C*H*A*O*Z. Beside him stands "a
great crowned shade in the form of a woman" who resembles a powerful

38 "Com vous ouez, encor suis homme I Et ay este ja bien !a somme I De plus de .XIII.

ans tous entiers, I Mais mieulx me plairoit plus du tiers I Estre femme, com je souloie, I
Quant a Ymeneiis parloie, I Mais puisque Fortune estrangiee I M' en a, si jamais plus logiee
I N'y seray, homme remaindray I Et o rna dame me tendray." Mutacion de Fortune !.12, lines
1395-1404, ed. Solente, 1:53. Trans. Brownlee, Selected Writings, 107. Christine completed La
Mutacion in November 1403; her husband had died in 1390.
39 Sylvia Huot, "Seduction and Sublimation: Christine de Pizan, Jean de Meun, and
Dante," Romance Notes 25 (1985): 372-73.

152 Barbara Newman

queen. 40 Although this lady is never named, she is obviously Nature. Her
duty is to attend to the continual feeding of Chaos, and for that purpose
she is surrounded by cooking utensils, which Christine compares to the
waffle irons one sees in Parisian shops. In her cosmic kitchen she com-
pounds a "mortar" of bitter, sweet, heavy, and light ("fiel, miel, plomb, et
plume") and pours it ceaselessly into her molds, which she then bakes in
the enormous, furnacelike mouth of Chaos. As soon as she takes them out,
little bodies spring from the molds-but immediately Chaos swallows
them alive into his vast belly. Day and night the lady continues to feed him.
As Christine's spirit draws nearer to witness the marvel, it falls into the
hands of Nature, and she too is molded and baked like the others. At the
lady's express wish "and not because of the mold," Christine is given a fe-
male body. 41 After she has been swallowed up by Chaos, the lady's cham-
bermaid comes and gives her a sweet liqueur to drink. Nourished within
the body of Chaos, she matures and begins to learn about "the diversity
within the figure's belly," that is, the world.
Christine's new myth of Nature and Chaos may have been distantly influ-
enced by Plato's Timaeus, but it stands self-consciously aside from the tradi-
tion of Alan of Lille and Jean de Meun. The figure of Chaos is the first sur-
prise, for male mythic figures of this type are much rarer than goddesses in
medieval literature.42 Chaos is an insistently material deity; his ovenlike
mouth represents the womb and his belly the world. The male, not the fe-
male, is thus made to signify corporeality, insatiable appetite, and inex-
haustible plenitude. In a delightful inversion of the scatology such a myth
might lead us to expect, the "excrement" of Chaos is pure spirit, for only de-
parting souls can leave the world-system in which all matter is endlessly re-
cycled. Strangely, however, Nature herself has become incorporeal: Christine
calls her a "shade" (ombre) and emphasizes that she had "no visible or tangi-
ble body." The materiality of Chaos and the spirituality of Nature go some
distance toward reversing traditional gender stereotypes. But in other re-
spects, Nature seems more feminine than in the myth elaborated by Jean de
Meun. No longer a hammer-wielding smith, she is now charged with the
typically female tasks of cooking and feeding a man. As Sylvia Huot has per-
ceptively observed, the use of this metaphor for Nature's creative work sub-
ordinates the act of sexual intercourse to the gestation of the fetus in the
womb. "From the male perspective, procreation is centered on the moment
40 "Delez le dit ymage avoit assistant une grant ombre coronnee de fourme femmenine

comme se fust !a semblance dune tres poissant royne naturelment fourmee sanz corps visi-
ble ne palpable." Christine de Pizan, Lavision-Christine L2, ed. Mary Louis Towner (Wash-
ington, D.C., 1932), 74· A new edition by Christine Reno and Liliane Dulac is in preparation.
41 "Mais comme le voulsist ainsi celle qui !a destrempe avoit faitte a !a que! cause ce tient

et non au moulle iaportay sexe femenin." Lavision !.3, ed. Towner, 75·
42 The closest analogue to Christine's Chaos may be the Cosmic Man who dominates

Hildegard of Bingen's Liber vite meritorum. But Hildegard's figure signifies God, while Chris-
tine's emphatically does not.

The Case of Dame Nature 153

 of sexual conquest ... From the female perspective, however, procreation is a
process of growth which begins with fertilization ... and ends with fruition,
itself a new beginning." 43 In the Rose, the phallic Nature with her hammer
and anvil had informed a poetics of male desire; in Lavision-Christine, Nature
in her kitchen assimilates the work of reproduction to everyday female labor.
Once again Christine stresses the intentionality of Nature in assigning
gender to bodies. As in The Mutation of Fortune, she is born female because
Lady Nature wills it so, not because of any defect or irregularity in the
"mold." Here Christine implicitly rejects the Aristotelian view of women
as deficient males, an idea sanctioned by Thomas Aquinas and refuted by
Reason in The City of Ladies. 44 The unnamed "chambermaid" of Nature, a
"wise woman" who feeds the newborn babe with a "sweet and very mild
liquid," must be Christine's biological mother, now given a modest role to
complete the myth's validation of maternity above virile potency.4s
Much later in the text, Nature makes one more brief but telling appear-
ance. Christine is recounting the first stages of her career as a scholar and
writer, and as she begins to deepen her knowledge of poetry,

Nature rejoiced in me and said: "Daughter, be happy when you have ful-
filled the desire I have given you, continue to apply yourself to study, un-
derstanding the writings better and better." All this reading was not enough
to satisfy my thoughts and intelligence; rather, Nature wanted that new
books should be born from me, engendered by study and by the things I
had seen. Then she said to me: "Take your tools and hammer on the anvil
the matter I will give you, as durable as iron: neither fire nor anything else
can destroy it; from this you should forge delightful things. When you car-
ried your children in your womb, you felt great pain when giving birth.
Now I desire that new books should be born from you, which you will give
birth to from your memory in joy and delight; they will for all time to come
keep your memory alive before the princes and the whole world. Just [as] a
woman who has given birth forgets the pain and labor as soon as she hears
her child cry [John 16:21], you will forget the hard work when you hear the
voices of your books."46

This is Nature's first appearance as a literary muse. With remarkable econ-

omy Christine links a number of her central insights about vocation and

43 Huot, "Seduction and Sublimation," 367.

44 Book of the City of Ladies !.9.2. Cf. E. J. Richards, "Virile Woman and WomanChrist: The
Meaninj; of Gender Metamorphosis in ~hristine," in "Riens ne m'est seur que Ia chose incer-
taine": Etudes sur l' art d'ecrire au Moyen Age offertes aEric Hicks, ed. Jean-Claude Miihlethaler
and Denis Billotte (Geneva, 2001), 239-52.
45 "Adonc present vint Ia chamberiere de Ia ditte dame qui buretes tenoit pleines dune

liqueur doulce et tres souefve de laquelle a abruver doulcement me pris par que! vertu et
continuacion mon corps de plus en plus prenoit croissence force et vigueur. Et ycelle sage
croissoit et engroissoit Ia pasture au feur de rna force ... " Lavision !.3, ed. Towner, 75·
46 Lavision II1.1o, ed. Towner, 163-64; trans. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Selected Writings,

193-94·

154 Barbara Newman

gender. In the first place she stresses, as in The Mutation of Fortune, that it is
Nature herself who endowed her with an aptitude for learning: the god-
dess's old covenant with Reason, broken by Jean de Meun, is back in force.
By identifying her intellectual ability as Nature's gift, this time without qual-
ifications, Christine defuses the objection that scholarship and writing are
unnatural activities for a woman. No longer does she have to become a man
in order to write. What need is there to "father" books when she can mother
them? So, in the second place, she revises the ancient analogy between cre-
ation and procreation. Alan of Lille had used writing as a metaphor for sex;
Christine reverses tenor and vehicle to make childbirth a metaphor for writ-
ing. Even as she adapts the hammer-and-anvil image from the Rose, she de-
sexualizes it and strips away the salacious innuendoes with which Jean de
Meun had invested the writing process. Unlike Jean's goddess Nature at her
forge, forever toiling to produce ephemeral bodies, Christine as Nature's
protegee will forge something indestructible and "durable as iron"-
namely her books-to attain the same immortality sought by her male pre-
cursors. Her labor pangs as a writer are to issue in transcendence and eternal
memory, in a sublimation of maternity that proceeds from the same femi-
nine Nature who gave her a female body in the first place.
The will and power of goddesses, it seems, depend very much on the
dispositions of their votaries. If it is fair to say that Heldris of Cornwall
challenged the canonical "thealogy" of Nature, as it appears in the Rose,
then Christine de Pizan launched nothing less than a full-scale reforma-
tion. Nature in The Mutation of Fortune signifies biological as opposed to so-
cial gender, just as she does in Silence, and Christine's fictive sex change,
like that of Heldris's woman warrior, proves that anatomy does not have to
be destiny. By the time she wrote Lavision, however, Christine had changed
her strategy and turned Nature into an all-purpose figure of female cre-
ativity, whether expressed through motherhood, through domestic labor
(Nature's kitchen), or through intellectual work (her own writing). In this
highly atypical text, all opposition between Nature and Culture ceases. In-
stead, Nature becomes a promoter of culture and specifically of women's
cultural achievements-a role she shares with her old friend Reason in The
City of Ladies, a book completed in the same year. This revisionist view of
Nature was a vital plank in Christine's feminist platform and marks her as
the first thinker to understand how readily dichotomies between Nature
and Culture tend to marginalize Nature's "own" sex.47 While goddesses
did not empower women always and everywhere, Christine de Pizan
showed that she at least knew how to empower all goddesses.

47 See the classic anthropological study by Sherry Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is

to Culture?" in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere
(Stanford, 1974), 67-87, and Carol MacCormack, "Nature, Culture, and Gender: A Critique,"
in Nature, Culture, and Gender, ed. MacCormack and Strathern, 1-24.

The Case of Dame Nature 155

 CHAPTER EIGHT

Women in the Late Medieval English Parish

Katherine L. French

In medieval and early modern England, the basic unit of public worship
was the parish. Although women comprised half of the membership, their
activities, religious or secular, have not received much attention in the his-
torical literature. Scholars have focused on what they consider to be the
more visible activities of men and have thereby gendered the collective be-
havior of parishioners male or mostly male.l By adhering to this position,
scholars have overlooked the importance of the parish as an institution
that assisted female visibility. This visibility came to include collective ac-
tion taken in all-women's groups. Indeed the parish became a major
forum for women's group activities 2 that provided them with opportuni-

I would like to thank Sandy Bardsley, Gareth Bestor, Becky Krugg and the editors of this
volume for their help on this chapter.
I Andrew Brown states after two-hundred-some pages of discussion of "popular piety"
that he could have discussed women, but that this was not a book about gender. Brown is
assuming that gender has no place in a discussion of collective action or lay religious be-
havior. Parish life and lay activity are gendered male, and gendering it male is taken as gen-
der-neutral. Andrew Brown, Popular Piety in Late Medieval England: The Diocese of Salisbury,
1250-1550 (Oxford, 1995), 256-58. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven,
1992), has a short discussion of women's parochial activities, but he does not believe that
gender made any difference in religious practice. He writes, "[W]ithin the diversity of me-
dieval religious options there was a remarkable degree of religious and imaginative homo-
geneity across the social spectrum" (p. 3; see also 131-54,265, esp. 153).
2 See Clive Burgess in " 'A Fond Thing Vainly Invented': An Essay on Purgatory and
Pious Motive in Late Medieval England," in Parish Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Re-
ligion, 1350-1750, ed. Susan Wright (London, 1988), 56-84. He argues that rather than seeing
the financial obligations to the parish as one more set of burdens placed on an already re-
sentful and overtaxed laity, there was an excess of voluntary support directed at the parish
ties unavailable outside the parish. Thus the expected limits of gender-re-
lated behavior expanded with respect to the parish. What was the signifi-
cance of women's greater visibility and activity within the parish, and
what did these expanded opportunities mean to women and their com-
munities?
Although scholars have largely ignored the issue of women's parochial
involvement, it did not go unnoticed by contemporaries, who were often
disturbed by it.3 Women's parish involvement and their increasing visibil-
ity created a tension in parish life that the clergy and the laity tried to re-
lieve by using this participation to affirm expected female behavior.
Women themselves, however, were also a part of the process; their inter-
ests, while different from men's, were not always distinct from the patriar-
chal norms that governed them. Although women's visibility made their
voices louder and their concerns more apparent to the parish, it did not
turn the late medieval English parish into a female utopia. 4 The mainte-
nance of approved models of behavior was not without its subversive com-
ponent, and women's participation in the parish both reinforced traditional
gender roles and challenged women's secondary status. In this chapter, I
will survey the range of women's participation in the parish, looking at
how it drew on expected behavior for women and also created new oppor-
tunities for action and self-expression.
Canon law made the laity responsible for their parish churches, particu-
larly the maintenance of the nave. To meet these needs, the laity appointed
churchwardens to oversee the process.s This obligation to maintain the
nave provided women of all classes with a variety of ways to support their
parishes. Women attended mass, provided labor and money for maintain-
ing and furnishing the nave, and contributed their organizational skills
and pious interests in support of the veneration of the saints. A woman's
social status and stage of life also shaped her parish involvement. Wealthy
women typically contributed more than less well-off women, and married

and its endowments, which was a manifestation of the laity's interest in their own salvation.
The collective needs of the parishioners combined with their responsibilities to the parish to
create a forum for salvation "self-help." Additionally R. A. Houlbrooke states "Yet certain
economic and social functions were largely reserved to them [women], and some of these
brought them together in sizeable groups, arguably facilitating the development of inde-
pendent common opinions." R. A. Houlbrooke, "Women's Social Life and Common Action
in England from the Fifteenth Century to the Eve of the Civil War," Continuity and Change 1
(1986): 171. The combination of these two approaches opens the way for a discussion both of
specific religious concerns for women and their active participation in the parish.
3 A good discussion of this concern can be found in Felicity Riddy, "Mother Knows Best:
Reading Social Change in a Courtesy Text," Speculum 71 (1996): 66-86, and Karen Winstead,
Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, 1997).
4 Judith M. Bennett, "Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide," in

Culture and History: 1350-16oo, ed. David Aers (Detroit, 1992), 147-75.
5 Charles Drew, Early Parochial Organisation in England: The Origins of the Office of Church-

warden, St. Anthony Hall Publications 7 (York, 1954).

Women in the Late Medieval English Parish 157

 women's participation differed from single women's. We must also under-
stand women's parish participation as taking place under the legal and
economic systems of late medieval England because the parish owned
property and hired workers.
The work women performed for the parish was similar to the work they
did for their households or in the larger community. The connection be-
tween domestic and familial concerns was a theme that ran through
women's parish participation. Outside the parish, a married woman usu-
ally worked part time at many different jobs; in addition to helping her
husband with his work, whether it was agriculture, manufacturing, or
lordship, she also provisioned the house, arranged the meals, oversaw the
kitchen garden, and attended to children and servants if there were any.6
Some women also ran their own businesses, although these tended to be
small and temporary.? Although there are examples of women artisans
supplying parishes with goods and services, women generally played a
subordinate role in maintaining the parish. 8 Laundry and mending were
predominantly women's jobs.9 John Mirk tried to valorize this work in his
Instructions for Parish Priests by explaining that the altar cloths and the sur-
plices must be clean for mass, but it was nevertheless still low paying and

6 This is a huge field; for more on women, work, and legal status see Kay E. Lacey,

"Women and Work in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century London," in Women and Work in
Pre-Industrial England, ed. Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin (London, 1985), 24-82;
Maryanne Kowaleski, "Women's Work in a Market Town: Exeter in the Late Fourteenth
Century," in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Bloomington,
1986), 145-64; Judith Bennett, "The Village Ale-Wife: Women and Brewing in Fourteenth-
Century England," in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, 20-36; Barbara Hanawalt, The
Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (Oxford, 1986); P. J.P. Goldberg, Women,
Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300-1520 (Oxford,
1992); Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing
World, 1300-16oo (Oxford, 1996).
7 Kowaleski, "Women's Work."
8 For example, the Salisbury parish of St. Edmund's hired goldsmith Margery Ingram to
mend (but not manufacture) liturgical items. Churchwardens' Accounts of St. Edmund's and St.
Thomas, Sarum: 1443-1702, ed. Henry James Fowle Swayne, Wiltshire Record Society 1
(1896), 13. The churchwardens of Yatton in Somerset hired "a silk woman" to make them a
cope. Somerset Record Office, DIP /yat 4/1/1 (Yatton CWA), fol. 264.
9 For a sample of whom parishes hired to do their laundry and mending, see Somerset

Record Office, D /P /yat 4/1/1 (Yatton CWA), fols. 82, 86, 89, 92, 101, 104; D /P /ban 4/1/1
(Banwell CWA), fols. 11, 79; D/P/pilt 4/1/1 (Pilton CWA), fol. 53; Essex Record Office,
DIP 11/5/1 (Great Dunmow CWA), fols. 6v, nv, 19, 20, 21; London, Guildhall Library,
1239/1 part 2 (St. Mary at Hill CWA); 1279/1 (St. Andrew Hubbard CWA), fols. 19v, 51,
86; Suffolk Record Office, FC 185/E1/1 (Walberswick CWA). The Early Churchwarden's Ac-
counts of Bishops Stortford, ed. Stephen G. Doree, Hertfordshire Record Society 10 (1994),
79, 86; "Accounts of the Churchwardens of St. Dunstan's, Canterbury," ed. J. M. Cowper,
Archaeologia Cantiana 17 (1887): 82; "Churchwardens' Accounts of the Parish of St. An-
drew, Canterbury," ed. Charles Cotton, Archaeologia Cantiana: Transactions of the Kent Ar-
chaeological Society 33 (1920): 5, 18; The Transcript of the Churchwardens' Accounts of the Parish
ofTilney, All Saints, Norfolk: 1443-1589, ed. A. D. Stallard (London, 1922), 18, 45, 47, 51, 97,
99·

158 Katherine L. French

menial.lo When a parish brought in artisans to work on the church, women
tended to look after them. When the parish of All Saints, Tilney in Norfolk
needed to repair the church windows, Robert Nobile's wife lodged and fed
the workers. 11 Although women did most of the mending without overt
male supervision, far fewer oversaw new sewing for copes, chasubles, altar
clothes, and hangings that required embroidery or expensive, colored
cloth. As with other occupations involving women, they worked under the
supervision of men.12 In 1524, the small market town of Stogursey in Som-
erset employed a vestment maker and his wife to make new vestments for
the church. The parish fed both of them in partial payment for their workJ3
Like the rest of the medieval economy, the church did not place the same
value on women's work as men's, considering it to be less important and
valuable. In the thirteenth-century diocesan statutes for Worcester, the
bishop identified four saints' days-the feasts of Agnes, Margaret, Lucy,
and Agatha-when men were to work but women were not.14 In the
anonymous fifteenth-century collection of sermons called the Speculum
Sacerdotale, the author states that for three days after Easter, no one was to
work. "But in the iiij daye it is lawefull to men for to tyle and use werkys of
the erpe, but wymmen owep for to cese fro here werkys. And why? Rurale
workis ben more nedeful pen other."Is Although the assumption that all
men were rural workers is anachronistic by the fifteenth century, this ser-
mon articulated a commonly held belief about the relative worth of men's
and women's economic contributions. These values would have translated
to women's work for the parish, and the jobs that parishes hired women to
do reflected their larger socioeconomic roles. Even though women's level
of involvement inside the parish was the same as outside the parish, it in-
corporated their concerns for the maintenance of the nave and provided
the parish with needed labor.
Parishes depended on a variety of fund-raising strategies to hire artisans
and to furnish the nave.1 6 Urban parishes tended to rely on rents from parish-
owned property, whereas rural parishes hosted a variety of ales, festivals, and
revels to raise money. All parishes relied on bequests and gifts. In these cir-

10 John Mirk, Instructions for a Parish Priest, ed. Edward Peacock, EETS o.s., 31 (London,

1902), 58, 6o.

u Churchwardens' Accounts ofTilney, 134.
12 Kay Staniland, Embroiderers (Toronto, 1991).
13 Somerset Record Office, D/P /stogs 4/1/1 (Stogursey CWA), fol. 26v.
14 Christopher Cheney, "Rules for the Observance of Feast Days in Medieval England,"

Bulletin for the Institute of Historical Research 34, no. 90 (1961): 137. This mandate also served
further to associate women with these particular virgin martyrs. See also Barbara Harvey,
"Work and Festa Ferianda in Medieval England," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 23, no. 4
(1972): 291.
15 Speculum Sacerdotale, ed. Edward Weatherly, EETS o.s., 200 (London, 1936), 128.
16 Katherine L. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English

Diocese (Philadelphia, 2001), 99-141.

Women in the Late Medieval English Parish 159

 cumstances women's specific contributions are difficult to identify and as-
sess. We know women attended ales and festivals and occasionally even or-
ganized them. For example, in 1537, Elizabeth Whochyng was one of the ale
wardens for the midsummer ale in the parish of Trull in Bath and WellsP
Women also frequently rented property from the parish, but overall their fi-
nancial support was less than that of men because they typically earned less.
Gifts and testamentary bequests constituted the most common means of
supporting the parish. Although wealth and personal interest could affect
the level of parish support, there were also differences between men's and
women's giving practices that reveal how legal and economic constraints
further defined women's involvement.ls When we consider the material
goods testators left to parishes in their wills, we can also see how both men
and women demonstrated their pious concerns. The differences between
men's and women's giving practices suggest that women used their no-
tions of home economy and domesticity to act out their piety. Women's
gifts to the parish reflected the relationships they had to their material
goods and household possessions. For much of their lives, they could not
count on being able to liquidate their material assets, and, consequently,
their identification with objects-both as signs of their domestic skills and
their gender-seems stronger than men's.
Because of the law of coverture, a married woman could not make a will
without her husband's permission. As a result the majority of women's wills
were written by widows. Some of the differences in the items left as bequests
by men and women can be explained by the fact that widows were usually
breaking up households, whereas men often had a family that still needed
provisioning, which meant leaving the household intact. Women also gave
what they controlled, usually items from their dowry, which often included
household items. Despite these circumstances surrounding will making, we
find that both women and men gave those items that had the most meaning to
them and reflected a lifetime of interaction with their beneficiaries, such as the
parish. In a survey of wills from Bath and Wells and Lincoln, the most com-
mon categories of gifts to parishes in men's wills were vestments; liturgical
items, such as chalices, paxes, and candlesticks; and household items, such as
tools and furniture. The three most common types of gifts that women gave to
the parish were household items, such as sheets, table clothes, and dishes;
clothing, such as dresses or kerchiefs; and jewelry, usually wedding rings, but
also beaded necklaces.1 9 Men also gave more books than women.

17 Somerset Record Office DD/CT 77 (CWA Trull), fol. 44·

18 Katherine L. French," 'I Leave My Best Gown as a Vestment': Women's Spiritual Inter-
ests in the Late Medieval English Parish," Magistra 4 (1998): 57-77.
19 Data for this finding come from Somerset Medieval Wills: 1383-1500, vols. 1-3, ed. F. W.

Weaver, Somerset Record Society, 16, 19, 21 (1901, 1903, 1905); Medieval Wills from Wells, ed.
Dorothy 0. Shilton and Richard Holworthy, Somerset Record Society 40 (1925), 1-87; Lincoln
Wills: 1427-1532, vols. 1-3, ed. C. W. Foster, Lincoln Record Society, 5, 10, 24 (1914, 1918,

160 Katherine L. French

 The differences between men's and women's bequests reflect some of the
different concerns that they had for the parish. In particular, women were
more likely to specify exactly how the parish should use their gifts, whereas
men generally left this to the discretion of the churchwardens; they could use
the bequests for the church or sell them and use the money as they saw fit.
For example, when Henry Stephyns of Castle Cary in Bath and Wells made
out his will, he left everything to his parish and made the churchwardens his
executors. His will states that his goods were to be "fully spent about such
necessary building as shall be thought most convenient by the most honest
men of the parish for the maintenance of the church."20 Women, however,
were less likely to leave this decision in the hands of parish administrators.
The work in the household or the economy often required them to piece to-
gether limited resources, and their wills often explained how the goods
should be adapted for parish needs. Avice de Crosseby of St. Cuthbert's
parish in Lincoln left a wooden board to the parish clerk "suitable for mak-
ing wax tapers," "j carpet ... to cover the bodies of the dead," and "j very lit-
tle leaden vessel to mend the eaves or gutter of the church."21 Lifelong habits
of frugality and adaptability became expressions of piety and a means of in-
fluencing in small ways local religious observances.
Although adapting household goods to parish use was a pious act, it
could also be construed as bossy and controlling. Women may have had
less to give, but their directions as to how the parish should use their gifts
required churchwardens to address their concerns. By offering sugges-
tions, women became posthumously involved in parish administrative de-
cision making-from which they had generally been excluded during their
lives. Some women could be quite inventive in how they expected the
parish to use their goods. Agnes Bruton, a well-to-do woman in Taunton in
the diocese of Bath and Wells, left her "red damaske mantell and [her]
mantelllyned with silk" to become costumes for the parish's Mary Magda-
lene play.ZZ Agnes Cakson of Addlethorpe in the same diocese asked that
"a basyn, a laver, and a towell" be given to the font "to weshe folkes han-
des with when they crysten chylder." 23 Denise Marlere, a brewster in
Bridgwater in Bath and Wells, gave vats from her brewing business to the
vicar, the parish chaplain, the parish, the chapel of St. Katherine, and the
local hospital and Franciscan friary. She explained that they would be use-
ful for wax making. 24 More common, however, were women's instructions

1930); The Courts of the Archdeaconry of Buckingham: 1483-1523, ed. E. M. Elvey, Buckingham
Record Society 19 (1975).
zo Medieval Wills from Wells, 59-60.
21 Lincoln Wills, 1:5-7.
22 Somerset Medieval Wills, 2:52-57.
23 Lincoln Wills, 3:157.
24 Bridgwater Borough Archives, vol. 3, ed. Thomas Bruce Dilkes, Somerset Record Society

58 (1945), 9-11.

Women in the Late Medieval English Parish 161

 for how to turn their clothing and housewares into items of liturgical sig-
nificance. Sheets became altar cloths, gowns and dresses became copes and
vestments, and kerchiefs became corporaxes to cover the host. Agnes
Sygrave of Stowe in Lincoln left to "the high altare of Stowe my best shete
to be an altare clothe, and my best kyrchyff to be a corporax."25 Dame Mar-
garet Chocke of Ashton, in Bath and Wells went so far as to specify that
when her "gown of blew feluett, [her] kyrtll of blew damaske, ... and a
coverlet of tapstry werek with eglis [eagles]," which were to "ley before the
hyght auter in principal festes and other tymes," were not in use they were
to ''be occupied on a bedde in the chauntry house to kepe it from
mothes."26 Even towels of diaper cloth, plain white linen without any em-
broidery or other identifying marks, were able to be close to the host. The
donor's name might be forgotten, but this type of gift still elevated or
sacralized the mundane items of her everyday life. Other women in the
congregation would see the possibility that their own goods could be put
in touch with God.27 Adapting household items to the liturgy connected
women's work to the worship of God, but their instructions showed that
they were attempting to hold onto what little economic power they had
and not relinquish it completely to the men who ran the parish.
Another feature of women's bequests was that they left goods to indi-
vidual saints much more frequently than men did.28 Wedding rings and
kerchiefs were the most common items, but veils and girdles were also
popular. Joan Mudford of Glastonbury, Somerset, left to the image of St.
Mary one gold ring and a kerchief and to the statue of St. Katherine a gold
ring.29 The saints received items that had physically marked the donor as a
woman and were intended to adorn these female saints in similar ways:
kerchiefs on the head, decorative girdles around the waist, and necklaces
around the neck.
Parish fund-raising gave women further access to the liturgy and an op-
portunity to express their concerns through the sale of seats. With the in-
troduction of pews in the fifteenth century, some parish administrations
began to sell seats. Financing the parish by selling seats had the side effect
of sanctioning the relationships and priorities that grew out of the seating
arrangements. Women and men were expected to attend three services on
Sundays, and they could also attend the daily mass and other canonical

2s Lincoln Wills, 3:143.

26 Somerset Medieval Wills, 1:244-45.
27 This would be important, as the host played such a prominent role in late medieval re-
ligious observances. For more see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval
Culture (Cambridge, 1991).
zs In the two dioceses of Bath and Wells and Lincoln, no men left bequests to adorn a saint
statue. For more on this see French, " 'I Leave My Best Gown.' "
29 Somerset Medieval Wills, 1:250.

162 Katherine L. French

hours said by the parish and stipendiary priests. 30 During services, men
and women did not sit together. Women generally sat on the north side of
the nave and men on the south, although some churches placed women in
the back (or west) and men in the front (or east) of the nave.3 1 Once the laity
began to install permanent seats, seating arrangements began to play a role
in the social dynamics of the community because they visibly identified the
sex and status of the occupant. Seating men and women separately gave
women greater visibility. They became an identifiable group in a specific
part of the nave, not intermingled with men.
Purchasing a seat appears to have been predominantly a women's con-
cern'.32 For example, between 1460 and 1530 in the parish of St. Margaret's,
Westminster, 737 women bought seats compared to only 275 men. 33
Women in this parish also changed their seats more often then men; 22 per-
cent of women changed their seats compared to only 13 percent of men.
This suggests a range of concerns regarding seat location that interested
men less. A new seat might move one closer to the front to a better position
for seeing the priest elevate the host, or it might put one closer to an image
or chapel of special significance. Seating arrangements also marked rites of
passage. In many parishes, such as St. Mary's in Dover, there was a pew for
women to sit in while they were churched.34 Not only did the service mark
a woman's successful childbirth, but her special place in the nave empha-
sized this accomplishment as well. Some parishes had separate seats for
married and unmarried women.3s Similar arrangements occur in other
town parishes such as St. Edmund's in Salisbury or Ashton-Under-Lyne in
Cheshire, although the records are less detailed.36
Seating arrangements involved women in a host of social negotiations.

°
3 Christopher Wordsworth and Henry Littlehales, The Old Service-books of the English
Church (London, 1904), 15.
31 Margaret Aston, "Segregation in Church," in Women in the Church, ed. W. J. Sheils and
Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 27 (Oxford, 1990), 238-42.
32 J. Charles Cox also notes, with great unease, that women bought more seats. He sug-

gests this was so because more women attended mass, an observation others have made as
well. J. Charles Cox, Bench-ends in English Churches (Oxford, 1916), 20-25.
33 WCA, E1, E2 (St. Margaret's Westminster, CWA). In a parish of two thousand, this

meant that only a portion of the parish-the more financially well-off-was involved in
seating concerns in any given year. Most still brought their own stools or stood in the back.
34 BL, Egerton MS 1912 (St. Mary's, Dover CWA), fols. 6a, 10.
35 WCA, E2 (St. Margaret's Westminster, CWA) (1518), no folio numbers.
36 Although there are examples of rural churches selling seats, it seems to have been pri-

marily an urban practice. Churchwardens' Accounts of St. Edmund's and St. Thomas, Sarum;
"Rental and Custumal" quoted in full by Winifred M. Bowman, England in Ashton-Under-
Lyne (Cheshire, 1960), 167-8. Not all parishes sold seats, however. Some parishes installed
seats but left the negotiation over who sat where to oral culture and local custom. In rural
areas, the right to hold a seat was often based on land holding. See French, People of the
Parish, 162-70.

Women in the Late Medieval English Parish 163

 They bought seats near friends (as Alice Lucas did when she purchased a
seat with Margaret Eldersham in St. Margaret's Westminster) 37 or far from ri-
vals. Seating arrangements could also be a manifestation of self-aggrandize-
ment as is suggested by Agnes Tebbe's desire to move from a seat she had
used for ten years to a seat vacated by the death of Mistress Stevenson.3s Any
place where there was competition and self-promotion, there was risk of ten-
sion and sometimes even violence, as Margaret Dobell discovered when
Walter Soly claimed her and her husband Giles's seats in the parish church of
Minehead, Somerset. During mass one day, Walter and his associates pulled
Margaret out of her pew, beat her up, and destroyed the pew!39
Seating arrangements also allowed women to show off the material trap-
pings of devotion, such as prayer books and rosaries, and the fittings of sta-
tus and wealth, such as clothing, jewelry, and a pretty face. As signs of van-
ity, the clergy sought to eliminate this behavior. One fifteenth-century
confession manual assumes that vanity was a female vice and instructs the
cleric to ask women "have ye mayd youe more gayer in kerchufs or any
other rayment att any tyme ffore plesure of young men then off god?" and
"have ye weschett your face wt any maid waters off herrbs to make youe
fayr?"40 Mirk's Instructions for Parish Priests showed similar concerns when
explaining how a priest should administer confession to women--God
was to be their focus not the women's looks or social status. 41 Behavior
during mass was not just fodder for didactic literature, and clerical author-
ities in charge of enforcing morality paid close attention to the laity's be-
havior in the nave. In 1517, Johanna and Alice Marcrofte of Trawden parish
in Lancashire were charged with talking during divine office,42 and Mar-
garet Crosslie of another parish in the same region was accused of being "a
notorious chatterbox [who] impedes divine office." 43
Both men and women used seat location to display their own hierar-
chies, although their concerns were not the same. To be sure, women's sta-
tus was usually predicated on their husbands' or fathers' status, but that
does not lessen its importance to women, however acquired. Women could
act out concerns and priorities in the nave of the church, one of the few
places where they could legitimately gather in all-women's groups. The ex-

37 WCA, E2 (St. Margaret's, Westminster CWA) (1518), no folio numbers.

38 WCA, E2 (St. Margaret's, Westminster CWA) (1515), no folio numbers; E1 fol. 508 (pur-
chase of seat).
39 Public Record Office, STAC 2/12/224-226.
4D BL, Sloane MS 1584. These are the questions asked of a single woman; of a married
woman the cleric asks a variation: "Have you weschyd your face wt ony styllyd waters ore
owyntements to make youe fayrer in the syght off pepull?" "Have you schewyd your brests
open to tempt any to syne?" "Have you had any envy agayns any womane that sche has
bene fayrer then youe or better lovyd than youe?"
41 Mirk, Instructions for a Parish Priest, 27-28, 43·
42 Ecclesiastical Court Book of Walley, ed. Alice Cooke, Chetham Society 44 (1901), 54·
43 Ibid., 55·

164 Katherine L. French

istence of a women's subculture is something that most men seem to have
taken for granted, even if they found it threatening.44 Thus the requirement
of church attendance brought a great deal of anxiety to the clergy because
it gave women a chance to congregate, converse, compare, and compete
with each other.
Women also often organized on a temporary basis to help raise money
for large-scale renovations and major building projects. In so doing they
arranged themselves in groups, often according to age or marital status, to
collect money. During the three-year rebuilding of St. Petrock's Church in
Bodmin, Cornwall, the unmarried women raised over two pounds for con-
struction.4s Although the sum is not large, the women acted as a group to
express their interest in this particular project. In some communities this in-
terest found further expression in the formation of all-women's groups, ei-
ther the more formally constituted guilds or the less formal stores. However
permanent or elaborate the structure of these groups, they were organized
to support side altars, chapels, or lights dedicated to a variety of saints.46
Parish guilds and stores were a ubiquitous feature of medieval religious
life. They provided common forums for shared devotional interests, con-
viviality, and social and political networks.47 Membership in single-sex
groups was defined around a number of factors, the most common being
marital status. For women, there were guilds for maidens or wives and
Hocktide festivities for married women. For men, there were guilds for sin-
gle and married men, but also Plow Monday celebrations (the first Mon-
day after Epiphany when men celebrated the return of the growing season)
and haggling (a revel at Christmas, New Year, or the Feast of the Circumci-
sion).48 Membership could also be determined by residency or occupation.
In Wimborne Minster, Dorset, there was one guild for the "wives of the
town" and another for the "wives of the country or land." 49 In the parish of
St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Westminster, the midwives maintained a light. so

44 Steve Hindle, "The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experi-

ence of Authority in Early Modern England," Continuity and Change 9 (1994): 391-419.
45 "Accounts for the Building of Bodmin Church: 1469-1472," ed. John J. Wilkinson, Cam-
den Miscellany VII, Camden Society, old ser., 14 (London, 1874), 5, 10, 33·
46 I discussed this issue in "Maidens' Lights and Wives' Stores: Women's Parish Guilds in

Late Medieval England," Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 399-425.

47 Gervase Rosser, "Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in

Late Medieval England," Journal of British Studies 33 (1994): 430-46; Caroline M. Barron, "The
Parish Fraternities of Medieval London," in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society: Essays in
Honour of F. R. H. du Boulay, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill (Wood-
bridge, 1985), 13-37; H. F. Westlake, The Parish Gilds of Mediaeval England (London, 1919).
48 W. Carew Hazlitt, Faiths and Folklore of the British Isles, 2 (1905; reprint, New York, 1965),

495-96; Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700 (Ox-
ford,1994),12-13,16-17,87-89.
49 Dorset Record Office, PE/WM CW1/4o (Wimborne Minster CWA).
50 St. Martin-in-the-Fields: The Accounts of the Churchwardens, 1525-1603, ed. John V. Kitto
(London, 1901), 70. (The originals were destroyed in World War II.)

Women in the Late Medieval English Parish 165

 Often a woman's guild had a male counterpart. In Horley, Surrey, the
women ran the guild of St. Katherine and the men the guild of St.
Nicholas. 51 ·
Although all guilds and stores accepted gifts and legacies, women's
guilds raised money in other ways that drew on members' skills and inter-
ests. In St. Edmund's parish in Salisbury and St. Ewen's in Bristol, the
women held dances.s2 Women's guilds also raised money by hosting col-
lections. In St. Margaret's, Westminster, the maidens held their collection
on the feast of St. Margaret, and St. Thomas's in Salisbury and Holy Trinity
in Exeter had their Whitsun collections run by the women. 53 The women's
guilds in Woodland and Chagford in Devon had more sophisticated fi-
nances; they earned their income from rental property, brewing, and the
sale of wool. 54
Celebrations of Hocktide gave married women another opportunity to
participate in all-women groups to raise money for their parish. Hocktide
falls on the second Monday and Tuesday after Easter.ss Although Hocktide
was a recognized feature of the parish calendar, it was not celebrated in
every community. From its earliest appearances in the fifteenth century to
its abolition in the Reformation, Hocktide appears most often in parishes in
or near towns rather than in rural communities.s6 On Hock-Monday the
women set about capturing and tying up the men, releasing them upon
payment of a forfeit. On Tuesday the roles were reversed.
The money women raised in Hocktide celebrations and through their
guilds supported a variety of parish concerns that reflect some of the reli-
gious interests of late medieval women. The money usually went to main-
tain a light or an altar dedicated to a particular saint, although existing ac-
counts are often vague and simply refer to the light as "the wives' light,"
"the dames' light," or "the maidens' or virgins' light."5 7 When we examine
known dedications, however, the most common patron saints were the Vir-

51 BL, Additional MS 6173 (Horley CWA).

52 Churchwardens' Accounts of St. Edmund's, 73, 76, 79, 83, 85, 365; The Church Book of St.
Ewen's, Bristol: 1454-1485, ed. Betty Masters and Elizabeth Ralph, Bristol and Gloucester-
shire Archaeological Society 6 (1967), 30, 68, 77, 78, 261.
53 WCA, E1 (St. Margaret's, Westminster CWA), fol. 370; Churchwardens' Accounts of St.
Thomas, Sarum, 273-75; Devon Record Office 1718 ADD/PW3 (Holy Trinity, Exeter
CWA).
54 Devon Record Office 2260 A/PW1(Woodland CWA); 1429A/PW2 (Chagford CWA).
55 Katherine L. French," 'To Free Them from Binding': Women in the Late Medieval En-
glish Parish," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27 (1996): 387-412.
56 Ibid.; Hutton, Rise and Fall, 26, 56-6o.
57 Devon Record Office DD70914 & DD70915 (St. Mary Steps CWA); St. Edmund's, Salis-
bury, 79; St. Thomas', Salisbury, 274-75; "Croscombe Church-Wardens' Accounts," in Church-
Wardens' Accounts of Croscombe, Pilton, Yatton, Tintinhull, Morebath, and St. Michael's Bath, ed.
Edmund Hobhouse, Somerset Record Society 4 (1890), 6, 21.

166 Katherine L. French

gin Mary and the virgin martyrs.ss At St. Mary the Great in Cambridge,
part of the Hocktide money supported a light dedicated to the Virgin
Mary. 59 The women's interests in the Virgin were not confined to Hocktide;
in 1518, they held a separate collection to build a new tabernacle for the St.
Mary statue.60 In 1491, John Brigge of St. Edmund's in Salisbury asked to be
buried in the north altar, called the wives' altar, under the image of the
Blessed Virgin Mary. He left twenty shillings for the maintenance of this
altar.61 In Ashburton, Devon, the St. Mary's altar received support from
both the men's and women's guilds. In 1491, when the carved panel behind
the altar (the reredos) needed repainting and gilding, the women put out a
coffer before the altar to collect donations. 62 Income levels from both guilds
suggest that of the two groups, the wives' guild was more active; they con-
tributed comparatively more money and appear more regularly in the
churchwardens' accounts.
In addition to supporting the cult of the saints, both Hocktide and guild
money provided needed parish furnishings. In 1497 the women of St. Ed-
mund's, Salisbury, spent the Hocktide income on new windows for the
church.63 In 1532, the women of St. Martin in the Fields in Westminster
spent their Hocktide money on a satin altar cloth and two curtains.64 In the
parish of St. Margaret's in Westminster, the maidens' collection helped
support and renovate the parish's chapel of St. Margaret.65
Women's pious concerns reflected their domestic spheres of action.
Within their families, women spun wool, washed and mended the clothes,
and dressed the children. Buying altar clothes and banners for side altars
dedicated to women saints is a similar gesture. Furthermore, altars to
Mary, Margaret, or the other virgin martyrs comforted women facing the
uncertainty of childbirth or the fear of infertility.66 Activities conducted in
all-women's groups, whether at Hocktide, with its clear-cut gender roles
and its focus on male and female sexual contact, or in women's guilds, with
their emphasis on marital status, provided ways of incorporating women's
concerns about marriage and their interactions with men into local reli-
gious life and parish participation.
No membership rolls survive for any of the women's guilds-which
leaves unanswered the question of what sort of women joined these guilds

58 French, "Maidens' Lights and Wives' Stores," 421-2.

59 Churchwardens' Accounts of St. Mary the Great, Cambridge ,from 1504-1635, ed. J. E. Foster,
Cambridge Antiquarian Society 35 (1905), 34·
60 Ibid.
61 Public Record Office, PROBn/9 fols. 5r-5v.
62 Churchwardens' Accounts of Ashburton, 18, 49·
63 St. Edmund's, Salisbury, 365, 47·
64 St. Martin-in-the Fields, 31.

65 WCA, E1 (St. Margaret's, Westminster CWA), fol. 370.

66 Winstead, Virgin Martyrs.

Women in the Late Medieval English Parish 167

 and who ran them. Examining the lay subsidy records for 1524 in conjunc-
tion with a list of wardens for women's guilds in Chagford and Morebath
in Devon, Harley in Surrey, and St. Mary the Great in Cambridge indicates
that the leadership came from a relatively broad range of the upper-mid-
dling parish women. As with other voluntary associations of the time,
membership in these guilds was probably equally as broad.67 Although
women from the better-off families in the parish served as wardens, eco-
nomic status was not always the determining factor in attaining office;
women from the poorer families were also represented. In fact, the parish's
wealthiest women, the local gentry, do not appear to have been very inter-
ested in serving as wardens for these local guilds, nor did their husbands
or fathers generally serve as churchwardens.6s As with guild wardens, the
women in charge of Hocktide were typically members of prominent parish
families and often the wives of either current or past churchwardens.69 Al-
though England's economic and legal systems constrained women's finan-
cial and material contributions and reaffirmed their secondary status, the
foundation of guilds, stores, and the celebration of Hocktide moved
women out of their traditional roles into positions of both visibility and
leadership. Their leadership implied responsibility for organization, man-
agement of money, and the political acumen to spend it properly and al-
lowed them to draw on their domestic and economic experiences and their
influence within their family and social networks.
The social aspects of guilds are another area where women's visibility in
the parish affirmed traditional gender expectations. Women's guilds in
general provided women with support, affirmation, and probably sympa-
thy, but they also filled needs specific to the life stage of their members.
English women's later age of marriage in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies prolonged the time between childhood and marriage.7° During this
stage, many women worked as servants or with their families. Maidens'
guilds would have offered these women comfort and support and given
them visibility that would help them attract husbands. 71 Working with a
young men's guild allowed women to show off their piety and economic
sense and to meet a variety of eligible men. In 1534, the maidens' and
young men's guilds of Morebath joined together to replace a stolen chalice.

67 French, "Maidens' Lights and Wives' Stores," 413-18.

68 This would fit in with the findings of those who have argued that the gentry were re-
treating to their manor houses and private chapels, leaving parish maintenance and admin-
istration to the non-elites. There has been much debate on this subject. For a summary see
Beat Kiimin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c.
1400-1560 (Aldershot, Hants., 1996), 32-40.
69 French, " 'To Free Them From Binding,' " 408--9.
70 Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound, 188-204; Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle.
71 In 1480, the churchwardens' accounts for Croscombe specifically state that the female

warden for the maiden's guild was Roger Mor's servant. "Croscombe Church-Wardens Ac-
counts," 8.

168 Katherine L. French

The churchwardens' accounts explain that "a pon ys ye yong men & may-
dyns of ys parrysse dru themselffe to gethers & wt there geftis & provysyon
the bofthyn another challis wt out an chargis of ye parrysse." 72 The effort to
replace the chalice not only developed the organizational skills of both
groups but also put marriageable men and women into close proximity.
Wives' guilds also offered a venue for women to share common concerns.
Men had collective political, judicial, and economic associations. Women's
guilds offered an alternative to these exclusively male institutions. It is
likely that the members of wives' guilds attended each other's childbirths,
churchings, and funerals. Like the maiden's guilds, they provided a forum
for displaying piety and working for the parish.
Parish guilds and stores in England are unique in that they gave women
the opportunity to join single-sex organizations that were openly sanc-
tioned by the parish community. 73 These guilds allowed women to support
the parish in substantial, positive, and socially approved ways. In no other
medieval institution did women enjoy the opportunity to serve in leader-
ship positions. Guilds and stores also provided a guarded and religiously
sanctioned organization for what were probably large numbers of unmar-
ried young women, and wives' organizations assisted women through dif-
ferent stages of the life cycle, such as childbirth and perhaps widowhood
and remarriage. These opportunities created tension in parish life because
they empowered women on the one hand and enforced what was consid-
ered the "proper" behavior on the other. The collective nature of women's
guilds allowed members greater mobility. Women could go out and solicit
money for the parish without compromising their virtue and reputation;
on their own, such actions would have been unacceptable.
Perhaps the greatest source of anxiety about women's visibility came
from the Hocktide celebrations.74 Hocktide activities first playfully dis-
solved and then rebuilt the often invisible or assumed gender roles. This
holiday became important to parishes because it enabled them to address
the tension between affirming women's traditional roles and their growing
visibility. The controlled rituals of inversion allowed women to organize,
but only in ways that ultimately affirmed their secondary status within the
parish. The division of Hocktide into male and female halves need not be

72 "Accounts of the Wardens of the Parish of Morebath, Devon: 1520-1573,'' ed. Erskine

Binney, Devon Notes and Queries supp. vol., 1903-4 (1904): 64.
73 There do not seem to have been any all-women's confraternities in Italy, and women's

activities in confraternities of men and women were systematically restricted over the
course of the fifteenth century. James R. Banker, Death in the Community: Memorialization and
Confraternities in an Italian Commune in the Late Middle Ages (Athens, Ga., 1988), 68-71, 149;
Giovanna Casegrande, "Women in Confraternities between the Middle Ages and the Mod-
ern Age: Research in Umbria," Confraternities: The Newsletter of the Society for Confraternity
Studies 5 (1994): 8-9; Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance
Bologna (Cambridge, 1995), 116-31.
74 French, " 'To Free Them From Binding.' "

Women in the Late Medieval English Parish 169

 understood as simply conflict between the sexes. Parishes sponsored gen-
der-related activities for married couples because conviviality, gender
identification, and life stage-all themes in the Hocktide celebrations-
were also important concerns for the parish community. The holiday had
no single meaning within parish culture, instead it offered a way to find
the intersection of a number of issues relating to local religious participa-
tion. As Natalie Zemon Davis has argued, games involving sexual role-re-
versal and separate male and female activities expressed a variety of com-
munal concerns: they "gave a more positive license to the unruly
women,"75 they affirmed traditional sexual relationships during times of
change in the "distribution of power in family and politicallife,"76 and they
helped parishioners to negotiate the outside world by interpreting it
through local concerns_??
The cessation of Hocktide suppers for women was one manifestation of
anxiety surrounding women's activities. When parishes initially celebrated
Hocktide there was usually a supper for the women, although it never be-
came a permanent feature, and there was never a dinner for the men.
When St. Mary at Hill in London first celebrated Hocktide in 1498, the
parish contributed sixteen pence "for iij ribbes of bieff to the wyven on
hokmonday & for ale & bred for them that gaderyd." 78 In the next year,
there were only two ribs of beef, and in 1500 only bread and ale.79 After
1500, the women continued to celebrate Hocktide, but the parish no longer
provided a dinner for them. Similarly, for early celebrations in Kingston-
upon-Thames, St. Edmund's in Salisbury, and St. Giles in Reading, the
parishes paid for "mete and drynke at Hocktyde,"BO but these expenses
disappeared shortly thereafter. The initial inclusion of a feast suggests that
parishes reacted to the women's activities in much the same way as to a
parish guild. Gervase Rosser has written that "[f]easting and drinking
were in the Middle Ages regarded as defining activities of the guilds."Bl
Annual guild dinners allowed members to form new social relationships
by integrating members from potentially disparate social backgrounds into
the guild community and allowing for the development and expansion of
common ideas and attitudes.B2
The disappearance of Hocktide suppers suggests that the holiday and its
activities challenged assumptions about community involvement. The ac-
tivities of capturing and binding united women as they reenacted in comic
75 Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top," in Society in Culture in Early Modern France
(Stanford, 1965), 143-7.
76 Ibid., 150.
77 Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 103, 109.
7B London, Guildhall Library MS 1239/1 part 1 (St. Mary at Hill CWA), fol. 159.
79 London, Guildhall Library MS 1239/1 part 1 (St. Mary at Hill CWA), fols. 164, 179.
80 Kingston Borough Archives, KG2/2/1 (Kingston-Upon-Thames CWA), fol. 24.
81 Rosser, "Going to the Fraternity Feast," 431.
82 Ibid., 432-3.

170 Katherine L. French

form their shared experiences with men. A subsequent feast would further
unite them and strengthen their conviviality and solidarity, possibly creat-
ing an atmosphere of defiance. 83 Such a situation would permanently un-
dermine the very relations between men and women that the church
needed to uphold. The feast was such a potent forum for women that
parishes could not allow it to become permanent, lest they lose control of
it. Solidarity among women had to be channeled in ways that would
reestablish their behavior within traditional limits.
Hocktide's bawdy and unruly behavior also earned much criticism
from the authorities. Between 1406 and 1419, the mayor of London repeat-
edly forbade an activity called "hokking" carried out on the Monday and
Tuesday after Easter.s4 Later proclamations linked hokking with gambling
and other games that the authorities considered too violent to permit.BS In
1450 John Carpenter, Bishop of Worcester, roundly condemned the holi-
day, considering it to be a "noxious corruption" and a sign of "spiritual ill-
ness."86 The sexual license of the holiday especially drew his anger, and he
writes:

alas, when the solemn feast of Easter has ended women feign to bind men,
and on another (or the next) day men feign to bind women, and to do other
things-would that they were not dishonorable or worse!-in full view of
passers-by, even pretending to increase church profit but earning loss (liter-
ally damnation) for the soul under false pretenses. Many scandals arise from
the occasion of these activities, and adulteries and other outrageous crimes
are committed as a clear offense to God, a very serious danger to the souls
of those committing them, and a pernicious example to othersP

Visitations also found Hocktide problematic. The episcopal visitation of

the diocese of Canterbury cited widow Johanna Hornys of the Kent parish
of Little Mongeham for failure to turn over money gathered at Hocktide.ss
We do not know if this was embezzlement on Johanna's part or due to a de-
sire by the women to determine how the proceeds should be spent. Much
like the condemnations of women's behavior while sitting in church, these
passages reflect the visibility women gained from parish participation.
Furthermore, they hint at women's concerns about sex, status, and self-pro-

83 Houlbrooke, "Women's Social Life and Common Action," 171-5.

84 Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London at the Guildhall: Letter-Book I (c. 140o--1422),
ed. Reginald R. Sharpe (London, 1909), 48, 72, 85, 124, 161, 194, 211; Henry Thomas Riley,
Memorials of London and London Life in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Lon-
don, 1868), 561.
85 Letter-Book I, 72; Memorials, 571.
86 Records of Early English Drama: Herefordshire and Worcestershire, ed. David N. Klausner

(Toronto, 1990), 349-50; 553-4·

87 Ibid.
88 Kentish Visitations of Archbishop William Warham and His Deputies, 1511-1512, ed. K. L.

Wood-Legh, Kent Records 24 (1984), 101.

Women in the Late Medieval English Parish 171

 motion, all issues that drew their attention away from God and made cler-
ical authorities anxious.
Hocktide celebrations were a controlled way to examine and reaffirm
traditional gender roles in the face of the changing social dynamics that ac-
companied the growing influence of the parish in late medieval England. It
was a carnivalesque holiday that disrupted male-female relationships.s9
Games and rituals of inversion, such as Hocktide, called attention to, de-
fined, and preserved the status quo.9o Nonetheless, women derived status
from participating in Hocktide. Under its auspices they organized them-
selves, raised money, and purchased items that the community needed.
The opportunities for all-women's gatherings provided forums for the
expression and articulation of a women's subculture that the clergy would
have feared. Although many of these parish activities reasserted women's
secondary status and upheld traditional gender definitions, they simulta-
neously challenged them by providing women with unprecedented lead-
ership roles and sanctioned opportunities for social comment. Women's in-
volvement in the parish therefore had a subversive quality because it
allowed them to express their own desires and their concerns about the
parish and its activities. By raising money and directing their bequests,
women challenged the predominantly male parish administration and its
control over parish resources. Although women used these opportunities
primarily to support the parish, the means by which they did this made the
clergy nervous-which is itself a testament to the power of a women's sub-
culture. Women's activity in the parish is significant because it was a part
of local religious life and not separate from or in addition to it. Despite the
misogyny of much clerical discourse, Christianity at the parish level pro-
vided women with ways to construct meaning and value around their
family and social lives, and, in turn, their concerns and values shaped
parish life.
The changes in local religion that resulted from women's growing visi-
bility ended with the Reformation. The abolition of Hocktide marks the
loss of an opportunity for critiquing the social order. As another example of
what Peter Burke termed the "triumph of Lent," the reformers stressed so-
cial conformity and deference to authority, replacing what they saw as dis-
orderly, exuberant displays.9I The abolition of saintly images from the
parishes removed the purpose of the guilds and stores and the need for
Hocktide fund-raising activities. With the Reformation also came changes
to many churches' interiors. Some communities re-pewed their churches,
and increasingly women began sitting with their families instead of each

89 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978), 192-4; Sally-Beth
MacLean, "Hocktide: A Reassessment of a Popular Pre-Reformation Festival," in Festive
Drama, ed. Meg Twycross (Cambridge, 1996), 233-41.
9o Burke, Popular Culture, 200.
91 Ibid., 207.

172 Katherine L. French

other. The family, overseen by the father or husband, increasingly became
the unit of piety.92 Although churches still needed to be cleaned, there were
no longer saints to be dressed and adorned with the handiwork of parish
women, and the vestments and altar cloths they created out of their own
clothes and housewares were gone. When this happened, women lost an
outlet for pious expression and collective organization. Their responsibili-
ties to their households had previously given them the means to venerate
the saints and ask for God's intercession, but in the reformed religion of the
1550s, these were no longer acceptable practices.

92 For the impact of Protestant ideologies on women and the family see Lyndal Roper, The

Holy Household: Religion, Morals, and Order in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989).

Women in the Late Medieval English Parish 173

 CHAPTER NINE

Public Exposure? Consorts and Ritual in Late

Medieval Europe: The Example of the
Entrance of the Dogaresse of Venice

Holly S. Hurlburt

Even the most powerful late medieval consortsl participated infrequently

in the fundamental power-building activities of states and therefore ap-
pear rarely in the historical sources generated by these activities, such as
chronicles and governmental documents.2 Scholars of early modern
queenship and those interested in the influence of consorts must look else-
where for evidence of their participation in the shaping of state and soci-
ety. Although recent scholarship has begun to elucidate consorts' nuanced
relationship with power in various forms, a survey of this literature re-
veals little attention to royal ritual.3 Occasions such as religious and state
festivals, diplomatic visits, and rites of passage such as births, corona-

I thank John Carmi Parsons for his interest in my research on the dogaresse and for sug-
gesting comparison with other royal women, and Mitch Hammond for reading and cri-
tiquing drafts of this work.
1 For the purposes of this chapter, a consort is the wife of a royal or political figure.
2 John Carmi Parsons observes the limits of queenly influence in "Family, Sex and Power:

The Rhythms of Medieval Queenship," in Parsons, ed., Medieval Queenship (New York,
1993), 8.
3 Parsons has observed that "the topic needs investigation: as the king's wife was neither
warrior nor lawgiver, ritual had an especially crucial role in the construction of queenship,
beginning with the fundamental queen-making act of coronation," ibid. Recent works on
queenship include Medieval Queenship, ed. Parsons; Women and Sovereignty, ed. Louise Olga
Fradenburg (Edinburgh, 1992); Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, ed. Jennifer
Carpenter and Sally-Beth MacLean (Urbana, 1995); Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe,
ed. Anne Duggan (Woodbridge, 1997); Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, "Ruling Sexuality: The Politi-
cal Legitimacy of Isabel of Castile," Renaissance Quarterly 53 (zooo): 31-56; Theresa Earen-
fight, "Maria of Castile, Ruler or Figurehead? A Preliminary Study in Aragonese Queen-
ship," Mediterranean Studies 4 (1994): 45-61.

174
tions, and deaths placed not only consorts but also masses of elaborately
dressed ladies-in-waiting in the public eye. These public appearances by
such an assembly of women, whose threatening and threatened sexuality
necessitated that their day-to-day visibility be limited, created a live-
action tableau of female community and reminded viewers of women's
multiple roles as wives, mothers, and consumers. These occasions served
not so much to glorify individual women as to draw attention to their
gender's role in the creation and maintenance of political and dynastic
ties. Hence these appearances have been generally understood to present
women as symbolic objects, safely enclosed within the confines of patriar-
chal male ideology.4 However, rituals often do not offer a single perspec-
tive and frequently embody tensions between the real and the symbolic.
Using the example of the entrance ceremony of the fifteenth-century dog-
aresse of Venice, this essay will suggest that ritual occasions also created
visual reminders of the consort's physical proximity to the locus of politi-
cal power, presented the rare vision of a community of women, and im-
plied that consorts and royal women possessed potential influence, not
just as wives and mothers but as intercessors and political actors in their
own right.
The dogaressa was the wife of the Venetian doge, the often aged, life-
term elected head of the republic. The office of the doge evolved over cen-
turies from a position of great power to one constrained by a series of con-
stitutional limitations. Because of her husband's elective position, the
dogaressa must be seen as fundamentally different from most queens or
consorts. She was subject to the same strict constitutional limitations as her
husband and also swore to the oath of office (called the promissione ducale)
prepared for each doge. The oath prohibited the ducal family from many
common activities such as investing in international trade, intervening in
city factions, accepting gifts, or lobbying with the government for family
members.s Because she was the wife of an elected official, the dogaressa
did not have the same dynastic function as a queen because her sons could
not only not inherit her husband's position but were constitutionally
barred from holding the most powerful offices during his reign. Hence
Venetian law strictly controlled motherhood-traditionally a consort's
most fundamental role-as a means to exercising influence. Further, since
age and experience were valued characteristics for ducal candidates in the
late middle ages, many dogaresse were generally past the age of fertility at
4 For example, Edward Muir observes, "The ceremonial representation of womankind
occurred largely in a political and courtly context; women as well had been elevated to an
ideal status, and thus reduced to passive subjects of the all-embracing aristocratic republic."
Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981), 304.
s On the promissione, see Gisela Graziato, ed., Le promissioni del Doge di Venezia dalle origini
alia fine del duecento (Venice, 1986), and my doctoral dissertation, '"La Serenissima Domina
Ducissa': The Dogaresse of Venice, 1250-1500" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 2000),
76-105.

Consorts and Ritual in Late Medieval Europe 175

 their entrances, so their sexuality offered fewer opportunities and posed
fewer threats. As a result, the public ceremonies in which the dogaressa
took part were, for the most part, devoid of the fertility references common
to many consort's appearances. 6 Despite these constitutional differences in
the offices of queens and dogaresse, both positions gave women unusual
proximity to the male-dominated loci of political power in medieval Eu-
rope. As was frequently the case with medieval queens, the dogaresse
played a featured role in the celebrations surrounding their husbands' ac-
cession to office.
Immediately after his election, the new doge greeted the assembled pop-
ulace in the Piazza San Marco, the political center of the city. He entered the
church of San Marco, received a blessing, and from the adjacent ducal
palace, he swore to uphold the dictates of the promissione ducale and the
honor of the city? This series of events took place within the closed geogra-
phy of the city center, and its participants were all male. After his election,
the doge sponsored a series of tournaments, jousts, and popular feasts that
often lasted several weeks. One such celebratory event was the entrance of
his wife into the Doge's Palace.s
According to the various books of ceremony and chronicles that de-
scribed the entrances of fifteenth-century dogaresse such as Dogaressa Dea
Morosini Tron (1472), the event typically took place a few weeks to months
after the doge's election and had three distinct elements: a private oath-tak-
ing, a procession by land and canal through the city to the Piazza San
Marco, and the dogaressa's entrance first into the church and then the
ducal palace, where she was seated on the ducal throne.9 The processional
6 On procreative ability and queens, see Claire Richter Sherman, "Taking a Second Look:
Observations on the Iconography of a French Queen," in Feminism and Art History: Ques-
tioning the Litany, ed. Norma Braude and Mary Garrard (New York, 1982), 104; Richard Jack-
son, Vive le Roi!: A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X (Chapel Hill,
1984), 30-31; Parsons, "Medieval Queenship," 4-7. On the age and childbearing status of
dogaresse, see Hurlburt, "Ducissa," 58-65.
7 On the doge's election, see Muir, Civic Ritual, 281-89; Federica Ambrosini, "Ceremonie,
feste, lusso," in Storia di Venezia, vol. 5, II rinascimento: Societa ed economia, ed. Alberto Tenenti
and Ugo Tucci (Rome, 1996), 441-84-
s According to fifteenth-century chronicler Marino Sanudo, the entrance of the dogaressa
was the ultimate event in the 1423 election celebrations of Doge Francesco Foscari. Marino
Sanudo, Vitae Ducum Venetorum, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (RIS), ed. Ludovico Muratori
(Milan, 1733), XXII, col. 968.
9 My discussion of the dogaressa's entrance is drawn primarily from a description of the
entrance of Dogaressa Dea Morosini Tron in 1472 that appears in similar form in several
sources, including Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV), Collegio, Libra Ceremoniale, I, fol. 7r;
and ASV, Collegio Secreta, Liber Promissionum, I, fol. 40r. On the evolution of the ceremony,
see Hurlburt, "Ducissa," 109-25. The dogaressa's entrance is the one element of her position
that has been well-studied by recent scholars; see also Muir, Civic Ritual, 291-6; Matteo
Casini, I gesti del principe: La festa politica a Firenze e Venezia in eta rinascimentale (Venice, 1996),
37-38; Maximilian Tondro, "Memory and Tradition: The Ephemeral Architecture for the Tri-
umphal Entries of the Dogaresse of Venice in 1557 and 1597" (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge Uni-
versity, 2002), 17-30.

176 Holly 5. Hurlburt

entrance of the dogaressa differed from the election-day celebrations for
the doge in both geography and personnel. The ducal festivities featured
no formal procession along the canals and streets of the city. Rather, his cer-
emonies focused solely on the political center. The largest city-wide proces-
sion associated with the doge's election instead featured the dogaressa and
traversed various regions of the city, incorporating more viewers and unit-
ing the city. In addition, the dogaressa's entrance was more socially inclu-
sive; her procession prominently featured two groups excluded from both
the political franchise and the doge's election ceremony-guildsmen and
women.1°
Sources place the greatest emphasis on the processional element of the
dogaressa's entrance, describing the participants and their order of appear-
ance in painstaking detail. Servants, musicians, family, and a court of
ladies opened the procession. The dogaressa appeared in the middle, rep-
resenting the center or heart, placing her as the focus. In addition, many of
the most powerful Venetian officeholders, including members of the ducal
council and the Senate followed the dogaressa, ranked in descending order
of importance.1 1 The slow progression of this group, elaborately and offi-
cially dressed, through the streets and canals of Venice flanking the doga-
ressa and her ladies gave various citizens and visitors ample opportunity
to view the unusual gathering of women in this ritual. Further, visual asso-
ciation with the doge's servants, musicians, and governmental elite politi-
cized the dogaressa.
The most remarkable feature of the dogaressa's caravan, which most dis-
tinguished it from other Venetian ducal, civic, or religious celebrations, was
the sheer number and identity of women-relatives of the doge and doga-
ressa, wives of Venetian political officials, and matrons of Venice, both
young and old-who participated. The lack of an active presence by women
in Venetian public events and ceremonies has been well documented; this

lO In the celebrations surrounding the election of Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo (1268), the guilds

paid homage to both doge and dogaressa. However, by the fourteenth century the guilds
participated in the dogaressa's celebration only. On Tiepolo's election celebrations, see Mar-
tino Da Canal, Les Estoires de Venise, ed. Alberto Limentani (Florence, 1972), 283-99. On the
guilds and the dogaressa, see Richard Mackenney, Tradesmen and Traders: The World of the
Guilds in Venice and Europe, c. 1250-c.I65o (Totowa, N.J., 1987), 141-42.
11 ASV, Ceremoniale, I, fol. 7r. In many ways, the dogaressa's processional order mimicked

that used for the ducal andate or outings to commemorate religious and political festivals,
which have been thoroughly discussed by Edward Muir. Muir describes the three sections
into which the doge's procession was divided: (1) musicians, servants, standard-bearers,
church officials, and non-noble bureaucrats; (2) the doge, the ballot-bearer, ambassadors,
and some men bearing the symbols of the doge's power; and (J) the nobility, organized by
the hierarchy of their offices. Muir, Civic Ritual, 193. The dogaressa's procession featured this
basic tripartite organization, but the personnel differed in number and identity. Musicians,
servants, and family members preceded the dogaressa, the middle section consisted of the
dogaressa, her escorts, and ducal councilors, and the third portion consisted of officehold-
ers, but apparently fewer than in the doge's procession.

Consorts and Ritual in Late Medieval Europe 177

 ritual was a notable exception. 12 Humanists such as Venetian Francesco Bar-
baro commented on the necessary limits placed on the public appearances
of patrician females: "I would have wives be seen in public with their hus-
bands, but when their husbands are away wives should stay at home." This
maxim makes all the more remarkable the dogaressa's procession, in which
she and countless of the city's most elite women appeared without their
husbands, complicating the patriarchal vision of the Venetian republic.13
However, even in this procession dedicated to a woman and populated
with a multitude of women, no female appeared unchaperoned; male fam-
ily members and governmental representatives accompanied the matrons
and the dogaressa herself. In this respect, the dogaressa and her ladies rep-
resented every woman whose purity had to be shielded from the threats of
public exposure for her own sake, but more importantly for the honor of
her husband and family. The councilors, procurators, and relatives did not
safeguard just the honor of these women; they symbolically safeguarded
the Venetian social system of patriarchy and the honor of their state.l 4

12 Works by painter Gentile Bellini (Procession in St. Mark's Square, 1496) and engraver Jost
Amman (Feast of the Sensa, 1560) illustrate women as ritual spectators. In addition to Muir's
observations on women's limited role in civic ritual (see above, note 4), Dennis Romano also
discussed the restrictions placed on women in public and related these restrictions to issues
of honor in "Gender and Urban Geography," Journal of Social History 23 (1989): 339-53·
Other scholars suggest that in some circumstances, both everyday and ceremonial, women
of various classes and careers did occasionally occupy public space. See Monica Chojnacka,
Working Women in Early Modern Venice (Baltimore, 2001); Robert C. Davis, 'The Geography
of Gender," in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C.
Davis (London, 1998), 19-38; Deanna Shemek, "Circular Definitions: Configuring Gender in
Italian Renaissance Festival," Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995): 1-40; Linda Guzzetti, "Le
donne a Venezia nel XIV secolo: Uno studio sulla !oro presenza nella societa e nella
famiglia," Studi Veneziani n.s. 35 (1998): 15-88. Women did participate in the spectacles to
greet foreign guests, especially female dignitaries; see, e.g., the arrivals of Caterina Cornaro
(1489) and Anne of Foix (1502) as discussed by Patricia Fortini Brown, "Measured Friend-
ship, Calculated Pomp: The Ceremonial Welcomes of the Venetian Republic," in "All the
World's a Stage": Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque, ed. Barbara Wisch and Susan Scott
Munshower (University Park, Pa., 1990), 136-87. At least one dogaressa, Marina Nani Fos-
cari, participated in the greeting of female dignitaries in Venice; Hurlburt, "Ducissa,"
21 7-33·
n Francesco Barbaro, De Re Uxoria, in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Govern-
ment and Society, ed. Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt (Philadelphia, 1978), 204. How-
ever, Barbaro's pronouncement is somewhat ambiguous because elsewhere he observed
that women "should not be shut up in their bedrooms as a prison, but should be permitted
to go out, and this privilege should be taken as evidence of their virtue and propriety." Ibid.
Venice was gendered feminine, being called "La Serenissima," the most serene one, and al-
legorical figures of the city were common. See David Rosand, "Venezia Figurata," in Inter-
pretazioni Veneziane: Studi di Storia dell'Arte in onore di Michelangelo Muraro, ed. Rosand
(Venice, 1984), 177-96. On the dogaressa's role in this gendering, see Bronwen Wilson,
"'II bel sesso, e l'austero Senato': The Coronation of Dogaressa Morosina Morosini Gri-
mani," Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 73-139.
14 Sherry Ortner suggests that women's sexual purity is a concern among developing
states because "[it) is seen as adaptive for the social coherence, economic viability or cul-
tural reputation of the group." In other words, the chastity of Venetian noblewomen sug-

178 Holly S. Hurlburt

 Chroniclers who describe the fifteenth-century entrances of the doga-
resse and their other public activities emphasize the number and dress of
their court of ladies, highlighting this rarely seen feminine montage. Sev-
eral types of women processed with the dogaressa, forming her court. First
came a group of young married noblewomen, then older married noble-
women, in pairs. Following these women came the wife of the grand chan-
cellor, the non-noble counterpart of the doge. Finally came the daughters
and daughters-in-law of the dogaressa. In addition, two servants carried
the train of the dogaressa's gown. Most of these women, not just the doga-
ressa and wife of the grand chancellor, were born into and married into the
most politically and economically powerful families in Venice.1s Through
their presence, these women called to mind the crucial sociopolitical net-
works created via patrician marriage in the city.l6
The entrance ceremony created a rare moment of public interaction and
participation for many noblewomen. Not only did it afford them the op-
portunity to meet and socialize outside homes and churches, but it also
provided a moment of limelight. These women and their elaborate gar-
ments surely became the center of attention in the procession. Frequently
the stringent Venetian sumptuary laws were suspended for such events,
giving women an opportunity to don their finest and temporarily assume a
persona separate (although always related) from that of their husbands
who usually accompanied them in publicP The entrance of the dogaressa
offered these women an instant of self-expression and sisterhood in a
uniquely female community and allowed them to make a rare contribution
to the corpus of Venetian ritual as more than spectators.

gested the power of the patriarchal state to protect its own. Ortner, "The Virgin and the
State," Feminist Studies 4 (1978): 22. The concern with protecting the virtue of the dogaresse
is evident in two pieces of fifteenth-century Venetian legislation; see Hurlburt, "Ducissa,"
170-72.
15 For example, in his description of the visit of German empress in 1452, Sanudo noted
that two hundred women, dressed in jewels and silk, accompanied the dogaressa. Sanudo,
Vitae, col. 1143. A similar court of women consisting of a hierarchy of the wives of the most
important court officials was common in the Byzantine empire. Alexander P. Kazhdan and
Michael McCormick, "The Social World of the Byzantine Court," in Byzantine Court Culture
from 829 to 1204, ed. Henry Maguire (Washington, D.C., 1997), 182-85; and Pseudo-Kodinos,
Traite des Offices, ed. Jean Verpeaux (Paris, 1976), 287.
16 Themes of women and family networks have been developed by Stanley Chojnacki in
several essays in his Women and Men in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, 2000). For the net-
works established by ducal marriages, see Hurlburt, "Ducissa," 34-58.
17 On the suspension of sumptuary laws for various ceremonies, see Guilio Bistort, II
magistrato aile pompe nella republica di Venezia (Bologna, 1912), 33-36, and Diane Owen
Hughes, "Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy," in Disputes and Settle-
ments: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge, 1983), 90-91. On
fashion as a mode of self-expression, see Stanley Chojnacki, "La posizione della donna a
Venezia nel Cinquecento," in Tiziano e Venezia: Convegno internazionale di studi, Venezia, 1976
(Vicenza, 1980), 65-70; and the comments of Nicolosa Sanuti of Bologna in Hughes, "Sump-
tuary Law," 86-87.

Consorts and Ritual in Late Medieval Europe 179

 Since only married women formed this court (with the possible excep-
tion of the maidens who carried the dogaressa's train), the procession, as
well as the dogaressa herself, represented the fundamental function of
Venetian patrician women and symbolized the importance of marriage to
state and society. The young matrons who marched ahead of the doga-
ressa, recently married and prepared to bear children and therefore main-
tain noble family size and honor, represented the middle stage of the fe-
male life cycle. The older matrons stood for the female life cycle in its
twilight, after they had birthed, raised, and married off countless children.
This generational suggestion was made abundantly clear by the presence
of the dogaressa's married daughters and daughters-in-law. The average
age of dogaresse at their husband's election in the late fifteenth century
was at least fifty-nine. The advanced age of the dogaressa and her court of
matrons called to mind the successful system of gerontocracy at work in
Venice.1 8 Like the elderly men who ruled in Venice, elderly women repre-
sented the wisdom of old age and a life lived in service of family and state.
Further, the vision of an aged dogaressa, surrounded by her female prog-
eny and distanced from her husband and sons, downplayed the threaten-
ing implications of dynasty but still allowed a celebration of marriage and
family, the building blocks of the political elite of Venice, building blocks
cemented by these very women and their procreative ability.19
The dogaressa's entrance ceremony emphasized the influence Venetian
women exercised through marriage; in addition, it closely resembled the
ritual of marriage both in general formulae and in the specifics peculiar to
Venice, thus creating a ceremony in which the dogaressa emblematically
married the state. The three general phases of a late medieval Italian wed-
ding were the dowry negotiations, carried out by male relatives; the cele-
bration of the wedding at the house of the bride's father; and the proces-
sion of the bride and trousseau through the city to the house of the
husband, after which the newlyweds consummated their union. 2o In the

18 Matteo Casini has called this assemblage of women "an exaltation of femininity within

the family." Gesti, 43· On male gerontocracy, see Robert Finlay, "The Venetian Republic as a
Gerontocracy: Age and Politics in the Renaissance," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Stud-
ies 8 (1978): 157-78. Dea Morosini married Nicolo Tron in 1424, at which time she was most
likely around sixteen. Hence, in 1474 she was sixty-four or older; Hurlburt, "Ducissa," 64.
19 The various texts that describe Dea Morosini Tron's entrance make no specific mention

of the participation of her son but do make reference to a group of blood relatives of the
doge and dogaressa that could have included him. However, this group, possibly including
sons and other male family members, was visually separated from the dogaressa by the
court of matrons. See sources discussed in note 9· In the sixteenth century the dogaressa's
entrance cortege was larger; Sansovino's list of participants in the 1557 entrance of Doga-
ressa Zilia Dandolo Priuli included her son and sons-in-law; still her progeny did not ap-
pear directly with the dogaressa. Francesco Sansovino, Venetia: Cittii nobilissima et singolare
(Farnborough, England, 1968).
zo Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "Zacharias, or the Ousted Father: Nuptial Rites in Tuscany
between Giotto and the Council of Trent," in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy,

r8o Holly 5. Hurlburt

case of the dogaressa, the phase of dowry negotiations corresponded to the
oath-taking ceremony that preceded her entrance. Sources use the same
Italian word-giuramento-to describe both the agreement between fami-
lies over the dowry and the dogaressa's oath to uphold the promissione. Im-
portant officials of her governmental "family" witnessed this event, as in a
typical marriage ceremony. Further, the event sometimes took place at the
house of the dogaressa's father or brother, and the dogaressa presented the
governmental representatives a symbolic dowry in the form of purses that
contained coins.21 Even as husbands frequently provided their brides with
elaborate trousseaux to demonstrate their wealth and honor, after 1457 the
state required the dogaressa to wear an official ducal cloak in all her public
appearances for the honor of state, a legislative act that ensured that she
appeared not just as a woman but as a depersonalized representative of the
government.22 In the most overtly politicized aspect of the dogaressa's en-
trance, she processed first to the church of San Marco and then to the
Doge's Palace, a building that encompassed both public and private as
ducal residence and city hall. The seating of the dogaressa on the ducal
throne represented the consummation of this political arrangement. 23
The entrance of the dogaressa and its marriage symbolism shared many
details with actual weddings-everyday occurrences in Venice. In describ-
ing a typical patrician wedding, Francesco Sansovino stressed that the
guests included many important government officers; "in sum, all the no-

trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 1985), 181-9; Patricia Labalme and Laura Sanguinetti
White, "How to (and How Not to) Get Married in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Selections
from the Diary of Marin Sanudo)," Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 43-44; James Grubb,
Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto (Baltimore, 1996),
8-11.
21 Language provides a further link between these two ceremonies. Klapisch-Zuber
noted that the common verb used to describe the last phase of this process meant "to bring
one's wife under one's roof." The same sentence construction implying an action by the
doge in bringing his consort to the palace appeared in more than one description of the dog-
aressa's entrance. Klapisch-Zuber, "Zacharias," 189. On the oath-taking element of the dog-
aressa's entrance, see Ceremoniale, I, fol. 7r; Hurlburt, "Ducissa," 81-83. On dowries, Labalme
and White observed that "dowries were more than private exchanges of wealth. They were
meant for public display and were actually publicly displayed in a demonstration of wealth
which served the self-satisfaction of the city and its propaganda," "Married," 48. On the
marriage procession as a time of exhibition by the husband and family, see Klapisch-Zuber,
'The Griselda Complex: Dowry and Marriage Gifts in the Quattrocento," in Women, Family,
and Ritual, 213-46.
22 The law of 1457 prescribed an official uniform for both doge and dogaressa. See ASV,

Maggior Consiglio, Deliberazioni, Regina, fol. 15r. Other members of the government such
as senators and ducal councilors also had particular costumes. See Margaret Newett, 'The
Sumptuary Laws of Venice in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries," in Historical Essays
by Members of the Owens College, Manchester, ed. T. F. Tout and J. Tout (New York, 1902),
245-78.
23 Asa Boholm addresses but does not fully develop the metaphor of the dogaressa's en-
trance as a wedding. Boholm, 'The Coronation of Female Death: The Dogaressas of Venice,"
Man 27 (1992): 91-104-

Consorts and Ritual in Late Medieval Europe 181

 bility." Sansovino also noted the pageantry involved in a patrician wed-
ding, from the participation of musicians, to the large number of guests, to
the particular sugary confections prepared for the event-all items that
weddings shared in common with the dogaressa's entrance. Further, he
made the association between patrician marriage and the state by noting
that at one time, brides had been presented to the doge.24 Evidence from
Venetian sumptuary law reveals concern for the appearance of the bride,
who was allowed certain adornments prohibited to other women (such as
pearls) during her wedding. In addition, this legislation revealed particular
concern with the women who attended the bride, frequently decreeing the
precise number of women and their marital status. As in the entrance of the
dogaressa, a variety of women accompanied the bride on her procession.
Sumptuary legislation frequently included a blanket exemption for the
dogaressa, suggesting that every time she appeared in public, this matron
became a symbolic bride.2s
Not only was the entrance of the dogaressa similar to a wedding in its
external trappings, but it also typified the same blend of familial and civic
issues. 26 The family of both doge and dogaressa, including brothers of both
and daughters and daughters-in-law, occupied important spaces in her
procession. The dogaressa, located centrally between family and govern-
ment representatives, stood for the crucial role of all patrician women in
Venice who increased social and political mobility of their natal family
through marriage and who within marriage produced heirs that perpetu-
ated the system. Patrician daughters cemented another generation of ad-
vantageous marriages, and noble sons assumed their places within the
government.27 Venetian marriages united families, created political fac-
tions and economic partnerships, facilitated dynastic continuity, and there-
fore commanded a good deal of ritual importance. A tension existed in this
ritual, which simultaneously created the dogaressa as a woman restricted
from acting in the interests of her own children and as a symbol for the role

24 Sansovino, Venetia, 401-2. Certain weddings, like that of Giacomo Foscari, son of Doge
Francesco, and Lucrezia Contarini in 1442, created the same festive atmosphere across the
city as the entrance of a dogaressa and even followed the same processional pattern.
25 Bistort, Magistrato, 9o-96; and Newett, "Laws," 261-67.
26 "Venetian patrician marriages in this period exemplified the blending of familial and

civic concerns," Labalme and White, "Married," 45·

27 Giovanni Caldiera suggested that the family was a microcosm of the government; al-
though he did not glorify women's role in this model, he did acknowledge their procreative
power. Margaret King, "Personal, Domestic and Republican Virtues in the Moral Philoso-
phy of Giovanni Caldiera," Renaissance Quarterly 28 (1975): 554-57. On women's roles as so-
cial conduits and perpetuators of the patrician class in Renaissance Venice, see Chojnacki,
Women and Men. See also Labalme and White, "Married," 43-72. Boholm ("Coronation,"
102-3) suggests that the dogaressa simultaneously represented every patrician woman and
none because she was married to a man whose identity was subsumed by the office he oc-
cupied.

182 Holly 5. Hurlburt

of women in the (pro)creation and stability of the Venetian sociopolitical
system.
The ritual and imagery of weddings carried still further import in
Venice. Many important civic festivals were expressed in terms of mar-
riage. For instance, a key annual festival in Venice occurred on Ascension
Day when the doge "married" the sea by dropping a blessed ring into the
lagoon. On this day the sea became the bride and through this ritual the
doge proclaimed Venice's patriarchal authority and dominion over it. In
this way, the state became a typical patriarchal family. In another ritual, the
doge married each new abbess of the convent of Santa Maria delle
Vergini.28 Hence, the marital language of the dogaressa's entrance was one
familiar to Venetians and placed the event in the same category as other
important civic events that occurred more frequently.
It should not surprise us that a woman's procession should be seen in
terms of a nuptial ritual. Women who were not nuns rarely acted in city rit-
uals with the exception of weddings, which ritualized a woman's passage
from father to husband. The dogaressa's entrance symbolized this same
passage from father to husband, as well as passage from husband to gov-
ernment. The conscious use of wedding symbolism encased a potentially
disturbing vision of women's public interaction within the accepted ritual
vocabulary of a ceremony that defined women in patriarchal society.
However, wedding ritual should not just be seen as an expression of pa-
triarchal constraints, particularly in the case of the dogaresse. The notable
absence of the dogaressa's actual husband the doge in his wife's entrance
ceremony suggested her (temporary) autonomy. In particular, the restric-
tions placed on the dogaressa by the ducal oath and the seating of the dog-
aressa on the vacant ducal throne in the Hall of the Great Council at the
completion of her procession implied the dogaressa's place as a potential
independent political actor. 29 The mere appearance of this noblewoman in
a public ritual without her male counterpart further signified the position
of the dogaressa, clearly an unusual woman, and one of unusual political
and cultural importance to the state.
How does the entrance of the dogaressa compare with those of other
regal consorts and female rulers of the late medieval era? I would like to

28 In addition, the Venetian festival of the Purification of the Virgin incorporated the leg-

end of tenth-century kidnapped brides to highlight marital themes. Like the entrance of the
dogaressa, this annual ritual offered roles to the city's women and celebrated their social
contributions. However, women's prominent place in this ritual was curtailed after 1379.
Muir, Civic Ritual, 135-56. See also Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late
Renaissance Venice (Chicago, 1999), zo6-15; Ambrosini, "Ceremonie, feste, lusso," 444· On
the state as patriarchal family, see the writings of Caldiera as discussed by Margaret King,
"Caldiera," 535-74. Bronwen Wilson also discusses the relationship between the dogaressa
and the ritual language of marriage; "Grimani," 87-88.
29 On dogaressal restrictions in the promissione, see Hurlburt, "Ducissa," 76-105.

Consorts and Ritual in Late Medieval Europe 183

 conclude with some introductory observations on this question. Although
scholars have traced the development of coronation ritual for early me-
dieval queens, systematic analysis of women's political ritual in the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries is frustratingly absent.3o The women of the
principalities of northern Italy sadly are not exceptions to this rule. Many
Italian city-states achieved political stability in the fifteenth century, at
which time they became increasingly concerned with ceremony and its im-
plications. Yet scant attention has been paid by modern scholars to occa-
sions such as Bona of Savoy's entrance into Milan (1468) or celebrations
surrounding Caterina Sforza's entrance into ForB. with Girolamo Riario
(1481), her assumption of power there after her husband's murder (1488),
or how these and other events seen together nuance our understanding of
Renaissance pageantry.31
Despite the relative paucity of studies focusing directly on royal corona-
tion ritual of the late middle ages, it is clear that the entrance ceremonies of
consorts, regents, and queens of the late middle ages were important cere-
monies full of religious and civic pomp. One rare example of a well-
studied medieval female coronation is that of Queen Jeanne, wife of
Charles V of France, whose entrance was preserved in a coronation book,
probably commissioned by her husband, that has been the subject of much
illuminating study by Claire Richter Sherman. The coronation rites of me-
dieval Byzantine empresses have also received some attention.32 A cursory

30 Early coronation ritual is discussed by Janet Nelson, "Early Rites of Queen-Making

and the Shaping of Medieval Queenship," in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, ed.
Duggan, 301-16. See also Richard Jackson on the ninth-century coronation of Judith, daugh-
ter of Charles the Bald, Ordines Coronationis Franciae: Texts and Ordines for the Coronation of
Frankish and French Kings and Queens in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1995), 173-86.
31 In his study of the court of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Gregory Lubkin notes that most of

the celebrations for Bona of Savoy's arrival in Milan were canceled due to plague and
weather. He does not indicate what was planned. Lubkin, A Renaissance Court: Milan under
Galeazzo Maria Sforza (Berkeley, 1994), 52-55. Ernst Breisach notes that on her first entrance
to Forli, Caterina rode in a military procession with her husband and attended a ball.
Breisach, Caterina Sforza: A Renaissance Virago (Chicago, 1967), 52-53. Both these authors got
most of their information on these occasions from archival sources I have been unable to
consult. For the legend of Caterina and her victory over conspirators, see Julia Hairston,
"Skirting the Issue: Machiavelli's Caterina Sforza," Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2ooo): 687-712.
32 For the purposes of this short comparison, I have distinguished between queens who
ruled in their own right, such as Giovanna I of Naples (r.1343-81), not discussed here, and
royal consorts, such as Jeanne of France and most Byzantine empresses. I am particularly in-
terested in the comparison between Venice and Constantinople because of Venice's close re-
lationship with the east. On Byzantium, the Pseudo-Kodinos's Traite des Offices, written in
the mid-fourteenth century, gives an outline of the coronation of the empress in conjunction
with her husband, 252-74; see also Donald Nicol, The Byzantine Lady: Ten Portraits,
12 50-1500 (Cambridge, 1994); Lynda Garland, "The Life and Ideology of Byzantine Women:
A Further Note on Conventions of Behavior and Social Reality as Reflected in Eleventh- and
Twelfth-Century Historical Sources," Byzantion 58 (1988): 361-89. Given Venice's historical
relationship with the Byzantine empire, I believe comparison between empress and doga-
ressa could be fruitful. On Jeanne and the Coronation Book of 1365, see Claire Richter Sher-

184 Holly 5. Hurlburt

comparison of the coronation rites for Jeanne and Byzantine empresses
with the entrance of the fifteenth-century dogaressa reveals that female en-
trances shared certain salient characteristics but also had some crucial dif-
ferences. These differences tell us much about the peculiar nature of politi-
cal ceremony in republican Venice and the dogaressa's crucial role in that
context. First, and most obviously, the dogaressa's ceremony cannot be
called a coronation because she received no crown, ceremonial headgear,
or other trappings of royalty.33 Second, the most important elements of a
queen's coronation generally took place within a church, although civic
processions sometimes preceded or followed events. The liturgy of these
events linked queens with their pious biblical predecessors. Although she
visited the sacred relics in San Marco as part of her entrance, the doga-
ressa's ritual contained no such explicitly religious role.
The meaning of these rituals differed in one particularly notable way.
Most queens, consorts, and empresses entered office as young, fertile
women on whom rested the dynastic future of the family and crown. In the
ceremonies for the queens of France, great emphasis was placed on the
queen's procreative ability, from stressing the legal succession of her chil-
dren and her right to act as regent, to comparisons with famous biblical
mothers. In many cases, this maternal emphasis shaped the coronation of
Byzantine empresses as well.34
With the responsibility of childbearing in these monarchical regimes
came the possibility of regency or outright rule by women. Hence the
women's coronations carried direct political import. By contrast, the doga-
ressa possessed no potential for regency or rule. Further, no part of the
dogaressa's entrance into the republican political realm of Venice stressed
fertility for the sake of dynastic continuity. Her generally advanced age
and the absence of her husband downplayed any suggestion of dynastic

man, "The Queen in Charles V's 'Coronation Book': Jeanne de Bourbon and the 'Ordo ad
Reginam Benedicendam,'" Viator 8 (1977): 255-98; "Iconography," 100-117.
33 According to the Pseudo-Kodinos, the new empress was crowned and given a jewel-
encrusted staff that was considered to be her emblem; her husband's was a cross; Traite, 261.
In France, Queen Jeanne received a crown (albeit smaller than the king's) and a scepter.
Sherman, "Ordo," 270. The doge received his crown (corno) in the final part of his ceremony,
but no such crowning ritual took place in the dogaressa's entrance. Muir, Civic Ritual, 288;
Tondro, "Memory," 97· A portrait of Dogaressa Giovanna Dandolo Malipiero on the reverse
of a ceremonial medal of her husband, Pasquale Malipiero (1457-62) displays headgear that
is definitely not the ducal como. However, in the sixteenth century, dogaresse were fre-
quently depicted wearing a smaller version of the ducal como. See, e.g., the overleaf of ASV,
Collegio, Ceremoniale, I; or the illustrations of Giacomo Franco in his Habiti l'huomeni et donne
Venetiane (Venice, 1610).
34 Sherman notes that this emphasis was particularly evident in the ceremony for Charles

V and Jeanne of Bourbon because they had been married for fourteen years before he suc-
ceeded to the throne and had no children. Sherman, "Ordo," 269, 292-93. Empress Irene, the
former Yolanda of Monferrat, received the empress's crown from her husband only after she
gave birth, again linking coronation with procreation. See Nicol, Portraits, 49·

Consorts and Ritual in Late Medieval Europe 185

 imperatives. Even though republican rhetoric nullified any fertility sym-
bolism or references in the entrance of the dogaressa, the presence of her
family members, and specifically her married daughters and daughters-in-
law, still highlighted the crucial networks between families created by
queens, consorts, and women everywhere. The presence of the grown
progeny of the dogaressa situated her at a different point in the female life
cycle than young, nubile queens. Dogaresse had usually passed through
their youthful, threatening sexuality, but many were still mothers and had
thus completed medieval woman's most fundamental duty.
Finally, unlike other European and Mediterranean female consorts, the
dogaressa proceeded through her coronation alone, without her consort. In
the Byzantine Empire, the emperor usually crowned his consort himself,
confirming their relationship. Although King Charles V is not present in
any of the miniatures of the 1365 Coronation Book that depict elements of
the coronation ceremony dedicated to Jeanne, they were crowned on the
same day and at the same location, the cathedral of Reims.35 Even when
French kings and queens could not be crowned jointly, the intent was a col-
lective one, and the king almost certainly attended the later ceremony of
his wife. By contrast, the doge was always and intentionally absent from
the dogaressa's entrance-a nonappearance that consciously lessened the
similarity of ducal rites to those of monarchical regimes and eliminated
comparisons between the elected doge and dynastic kings.36 Further, un-
like Jeanne, who was seated on her own diminutive throne and in no way
replaced the king, the dogaressa took her place on the doge's chair at the
completion of her ceremony, symbolically occupying his space.37 Although
the patriarchal presence of physical husband was replaced by patriarchal
state in the dogaressa's ceremony, the absence of a male authority figure

35 On the crowning of Byzantine empresses, see the Pseudo-Kodinos, Traite, z6o-63. In

the case of France, Sherman has observed that tradition dictated that the king and queen be
crowned together when "circumstances permitted." Otherwise the queen was crowned
alone at St. Denis, rather than at the cathedral in Reims. Apparently circumstances were less
permissive in the fifteenth century than in previous eras because Jeanne of Bourbon (1364)
was the last queen to be crowned at Reims. Sherman, "Ordo," 268-70.
36 One of the earliest descriptions of a dogaressa's entrance ceremony is that of March-

esina Tiepolo, wife of the thirteenth-century Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo (1268-75). Marchesina
was of royal blood, the daughter of a Mediterranean prince. She did not have an "entrance"
like later dogaresse-she participated in her husband's celebration in the Piazza San Marco.
Later the guilds visited first the doge at the ducal palace and then the dogaressa at the cou-
ple's private home to pay homage. By the fourteenth century the dogaressa's celebration
was completely separate from that of the doge. See Martino da Canal, Estoires, 283-99; Hurl-
burt, "Ducissa," n6-zz.
37 On Jeanne's royal symbols, all of which were smaller or less pronounced than those of
Charles, see Sherman, "Iconography," 105-6. Interestingly, the ducal throne was the only
ducal symbol present in the dogaressa's entrance-the use of other vital items such as the
ducal umbrella is not mentioned. On ducal symbols, see Muir, Civic Ritual, 103-19.

186 Holly S. Hurlburt

from the ceremony created for her on some levels an identity independent
from any male.
Despite these crucial differences, a few general similarities in these
women's entrances are equally telling. In the French and Byzantine cere-
monies, the entrance of a female ruling figure frequently involved a pro-
cession, a gathering of the most important religious and political figures in
the realm, and the religious blessing of the woman in question. In each case
the woman was the object of pomp and ceremony, marking her as an em-
blem of royalty. The symbolism of these ceremonies suggested that the fe-
male in question had less political significance than her male counterpart,
but perhaps as much ceremonial import as he had.38
In each case, the coronation or entrance of a female consort was an occa-
sion that featured multitudes of women. In his description of the arrival of
the future Byzantine empress, the Pseudo-Kodinos noted that the wives of
various imperial officials accompanied the emperor to meet the royal ar-
rival. Several of the miniatures of the Coronation Book of King Charles V
dedicated to Queen Jeanne's coronation depict her accompanied by several
women.39 Again, as in the dogaressa's entrance, these ceremonies show-
cased the merits of women both as ritual actors and as citizens of the realm.

38 Sherman observes that the ordo (written "rule" or description) of the queen's corona-
tion called for her throne to be smaller than the king's, and the miniatures that accompany
the ordo reveal that the queen entered Reims Cathedral by a side door unlike the king who
came through the main portal. Sherman, "Ordo," 274-75. In Byzantium it was customary
for the emperor to crown the empress himself, suggesting her subjugation to him. Nicol,
Portraits, 74· The Pseudo-Kodinos wrote, "After the crown was placed upon her head by the
hand of the emperor, her husband, she prostrated herself in front of him, as if to say that she
is his subject and depends upon him." Traite, 261. A twelfth-century Byzantine commentary
on rulers observed that the role of emperors included "the enlightening and strengthening
both of soul and body ... likewise the care and thought given to subjects by the empress is
simply directed to the welfare of the body and only to that (for women are devoid of the
power of giving spiritual succor)," Garland, "Byzantine Women," 388-89. A similar obser-
vation about the lack of a liturgical role for the empress appears in George Majeska, "The
Emperor in His Church: Imperial Ritual in the Church of St. Sophia," in Byzantine Court Cul-
ture, ed. Maguire, 4· On processions and queens, see lists compiled by Lawrence M. Bryant,
"The Medieval Entry Ceremony at Paris," in Coronations, ed. J. M. Bak (Berkeley, 1990),
89-90.
39 See especially the scenes, "The Preparation for the Unction of Jeanne de Bourbon" and
"Jeanne de Bourbon Receives the Ring," in Sherman, "Ordo," figs. 7, 10. On the Byzantine
court of women, which apparently became less segregated from men and more active in cer-
emony in the late middle ages, see the Pseudo-Kodinos, 287; Alexander P. Kazhdan and
Michael McCormick, "The Social World of the Byzantine Court," in Byzantine Court Culture,
ed. Maguire, 182-85. There is remarkable similarity between the female-dominated doga-
ressal procession and the procession of the newly elected mayoress of the English city of
Coventry. There the retiring mayoress went with a retinue of the leading ladies of the city to
meet and escort the new mayoress to her inauguration at St. Michael's church. As in the case
of the dogaresse, the mayoress of Coventry did not take part in her husband's inauguration,
but had a separate ceremony. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England,
1500-18oo (New Haven, 1995), 90-91. Thanks to Cissie Fairchilds for this reference.

Consorts and Ritual in Late Medieval Europe 187

 The differences in the entrance ceremonies of queen, empress, and doga-
ressa in part stem from the constitutional differences in these offices, as
well as local custom. Despite the variations discussed above, these gen-
dered rituals sent similar messages to their audiences about the multiva-
lent roles and responsibilities of royal women through their use of the com-
mon and expandable language of marriage symbolism and customs.
Scholars have noted various similarities between coronations and wed-
dings-the use of similar prayers and the use of a ring as a signifier are but
two examples.4o It should not surprise us to find the repeated use of these
symbols in civic as well as religious ritual; marriage was not only a com-
mon occurrence in the lives of most Europeans but also a fundamentally
political act. 41 In addition, many of the early medieval coronation cere-
monies that established precedent for the rituals of the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries also served as wedding ceremonies for the king and his
bride. Further, marital rhetoric appeared in medieval political philosophy.
The male ruler was frequently depicted as the father of his people, and
even occasionally as the bridegroom of the state. 42 Hence the entrances of
political consorts were extraordinary gendered events encapsulated in an
everyday language with several levels of meaning.
Finally, as previously noted, the use of wedding symbolism made more
comfortable the presence of a woman in the political sphere. 43 Although
wedding imagery could be constricting for women by making visible the
system of patriarchy, it is also true that women of the late middle ages
gained much of their influence-be it economic, familial, or social-
through marriage. Hence, marriages and the rituals that employed the
marriage paradigm certainly enclosed women in a safe patriarchal vision,
but these events also created female communities of authority. The unusual
appearance and progress of a mass of women through a city to its political
or religious center challenged the traditional masculinity of civic ritual

•o On prayers, see Parsons, "Medieval Queenship," 8. On the use of a ring, see Sherman,
"Ordo," 269.
41 "The political marketplace for state and family in sixteenth-century France is mar-

riage." Carla Frecero, "Marguerite de Navarre and the Politics of Maternal Sovereignty," in
Women and Sovereignty, ed. Fradenburg, 133.
42 Richard Jackson comments extensively on marriage imagery and coronations; he notes

that the first overt marriage metaphor occurs in the coronation of Queen Anne of Brittany in
1504; see Jackson, French Coronation, 86-90, and Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A
Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957), 207-23.
43 Sherman, "Ordo," 268. Although Sherman and others have noted that royal weddings
and coronations were more often separate after 1200, the combination of marriage and en-
trance ceremony occurred frequently in the principalities of northern Italy in the fifteenth
century and in the Byzantine empire. This was the case with the entrance of Bona of Savoy
into Milan in 1468 and the entrance of Eleonora of Aragon into Ferrara in 1473. Werner Gun-
dersheimer, "Women, Learning, and Power: Eleonora of Aragon and the Court of Ferrara,"
in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia Labalme (New York,
1980), 42-43. See also the Pseudo-Kodinos, Traite.

188 Holly S. Hurlburt

and, at least temporarily, gendered that city female. In other words, unlike
the unfortunate Griselda, whose public exposure was one of humiliation
and patriarchal control, these entrance rituals both contained and empow-
ered their female participants. 44 Further studies of female consort ritual
will do much to elucidate the duality of ritual as limiting and empowering
for women and will also contribute to a more nuanced understanding of
gendered spaces and women in the public eye.

44 In the story of Griselda, most famously told by Boccaccio, the poor bride is literally ex-
posed by her groom when he tests her fidelity by returning her, humiliated, to her father.
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella (New York,
1982), 672-81. The rituals described in this chapter resemble those described by Natalie
Davis in an article on sexual inversion. Davis observes that ritual participation frequently
confirmed the patriarchal model but also had the potential to challenge or undermine it.
Davis, "Women on Top," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1965),
1}0-1.

Consorts and Ritual in Late Medieval Europe 189

 CHAPTER TEN

Women's Influence on the

Design of Urban Homes

Sarah Rees Jones

The Gendering of Domestic Space

This chapter addresses the issue of how far women, and attitudes to-
ward women, influenced the design of urban homes in later medieval
England.l The relationship between women and the built environment
was not considered in Erler and Kowaleski's 1988 collection of essays
on medieval women and power, but six years later Roberta Gilchrist's
book, The Archaeology of Religious Women, persuasively demonstrated
the distinctive contribution that the study of the built environment can
make to our understanding of the construction of gender identities. 2
Scholarly debates about the extent to which space was gendered have
also surfaced. Barbara Hanawalt, for instance, has suggested that space
was "very gendered" in the middle ages with respectable female activ-
ity being confined to such areas as the home or the cloister. 3 By contrast,
Jeremy Goldberg has argued that spatial distinctions were less gen-
dered before the second half of the fifteenth century when craft work-
shops became "increasingly masculinised and mercantile households
increasingly feminised" as social practices changed in the later middle

1All the primary research in this article is based on the city of York between 1300 and 1soo.

The author wishes to thank Maryanne Kowaleski for her many editorial suggestions and
criticisms, so generously given.
2 Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (Lon-
don, 1994).
3 Barbara Hanawalt, "At the Margins of Women's Space in Medieval Europe," in idem,
"Of Good and Ill Repute": Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (Oxford, 1998), 70-87.
ages.4 Evidence drawn from records of property ownership and man-
agement and from the archaeology of urban buildings can illuminate
these issues.
The relationship between gender and domestic buildings is complicated
by several issues, particularly the difficulty of distinguishing spaces that
were specifically designed for, or used by, one sex rather than another.s
Homes were also often workplaces, and the same room might be used for a
variety of domestic and productive purposes. Smaller houses had to bees-
pecially flexible in how their space was used. The design of the timber-
framed constructions so typical of the later medieval English town could
also be easily and frequently changed through relatively modest building
work. The constant alterations, divisions, amalgamations, and extensions
of houses to suit the changing needs of their occupants means, moreover,
that what now survives from the fabric of these buildings cannot give us a
full insight into this past history of flexible use.
Nevertheless, archaeologists and historians have amassed a consider-
able body of information about changes in the design of urban houses and
have ventured several hypotheses with implications for the relationship
between gender and buildings.6 The proliferation of rooms in the largest
town houses, especially after c. 1400, is seen as evidence for an increase in
privacy, as different rooms became increasingly specialized in use. John
Schofield has suggested that this proliferation of rooms in the larger Lon-
don houses enabled the clearer separation of working from domestic
spaces within the home.? He identifies three spheres of activity: work-
shops and retail space, service areas (such as kitchens and pantries), and
living accommodation (such as halls, chambers, and parlors), and argues
that the segregation of working from domestic space anticipated, by at
least a century or more, this separation of workplaces from the home that
has previously been thought to be typical of early modern (or "capitalist")
4 P. J. P. Goldberg, "Household and the Organisation of Labour in Late Medieval Towns:
Some English Evidence," in The Household in Late Medieval Cities, Italy and Northwestern Eu-
rope Compared, ed. Myriam Carlier and Tim Soens (Louvain-Apeldoorn, 2001), 61.
s Jane Grenville, "Houses and Households in Late Medieval England: An Archaeological
Perspective," in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity
Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne eta!. (Turnhout, 2000), 309-28.
6 Scholars have established a working typology in the design of urban buildings for the
broad period, c. 1250-1600. Two trends stand out: the proliferation, by 1300, of small single-
or double-roomed "cottages" as population densities in towns increased; and the growing
complexity of the larger timber-framed "hall" houses constructed after c. 1250, especially
after c. 1400. See Derek Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, Winchester Studies 2 (Oxford,
1985), 1:155-76; John Schofield and Alan Vince, Medieval Towns (London, 1994), 63-98; Jane
Grenville, Medieval Housing (London, 1997), 157-93; Royal Commission of Historical Monu-
ments England, An Inventory of Historical Monuments in the City of York, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1972),
lxi-lxxviii; vol. 5 (1981), lviii-lxxiv.
7 John Schofield, Medieval London Houses (New Haven, 1995), 61-93; idem, "Urban Hous-

ing in England, 1400-16oo," in The Age of Transition. The Archaeology of English Culture
140o-16oo, ed. David Gaimster and Paul Stamper (Oxford, 1997), 127-44.

Women's Influence on the Design of Urban Homes 191

 modes of production.s We can extend this analysis to mid-sized hall
houses, where it was common practice for the main residence to be lo-
cated at the rear of urban plots away from the street, while the street
frontage would typically be developed with a small number of shops, or
workshops, or cottages for renting out to tenants. This arrangement af-
forded some separation of work and residence, at least for the occupants
of the larger "hall" house.
Yet the separation of working from living space was subtle and gradated
because some productive work, such as carding and spinning, was clearly
conducted in the living space of the main house, and inventories from
craftsmen's houses suggest that a wide variety of working implements and
stores might be left in rooms described as parlors or chambers.9 Moreover,
the reasons for the separation were often more practical than gendered be-
cause some workplaces-such as smelting furnaces, bake houses, and even
kitchens with large ovens-posed a fire risk to the home and thus were lo-
cated away from the main living accommodation.lo Thus this spatial segre-
gation facilitated a conceptual separation not so much between domestic
and working accommodation, as between the kind of work that could
safely and quietly be done in the house as part of domestic life and the
heavy, noisy, and dangerous work that could not. A similar polarity was
also used to structure the working day. Civic and guild regulations permit-
ted only quiet work (including office work) to be done outside set working
hours, for various reasons, including the disturbance caused by heavier
and noisier industrial processes. 11 In conduct literature this emphasis on

s According to Schofield these three spheres of activity might be evident both in the hor-
izontal plan of houses, with workshops occupying one side of a courtyard and living space
the other, or in the vertical plan, with workshops on the ground floor and living space
above.
9 For example, carding and spinning often took place in the halls of such houses: Gold-

berg, "Household and the Organisation of Labour," 66; P. M. Stell and Louise Hampson,
Probate Inventories of the York Diocese, 1350-1500 (unpublished typescript, University of York,
1999), passim.
10 This separation was evident in middling sized and larger town houses, especially in

the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, although these working spaces often had
other rooms above that were used as living accommodation by servants and tenants. Keene,
Survey of Medieval Winchester, 1:159; Schofield, Medieval London Houses, 69-71; Grenville, Me-
dieval Housing, 171-74, 181-89; Sarah Rees Jones, "The Household and English Urban Gov-
ernment," in The Household in Late Medieval Cities, ed. Carlier and Soens, 87; idem, "Histori-
cal Introduction," in Medieval Urbanism in Coppergate: Refining a Townscape, ed. R. A. Hall and
K. Hunterman, The Archaeology of York, 10/6 (London: Council for British Archaeology,
2002), 684-98. This separation also reflected the ideal spatial arrangement that was found in
aristocratic houses and imitated in prestigious public town buildings such as guildhalls; see
Kate Giles, "Framing Labour: The Archaeology of York's Medieval Guildhalls," in The Prob-
lem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. J. Bothwell, P. J.P. Goldberg, and W. M. Orm-
rod (Woodbridge, 2000), 75-76.
11 Maud Sellers, ed., York Memorandum Book, A/Y, part 1, Surtees Society 120, 1912 for 1911,
49, 102, 180-81; R. R. Sharpe, ed., Calendar of Letter Books of the City of London, Letter Book K
(London, 1911), 199.

192 Sarah Rees Jones

physical safety in the home was translated into an emphasis on moral
safety, thus casting an implication of moral impropriety on female employ-
ment and activities located outside the home.1 2
This notional zoning of houses into safe and dangerous working areas
may therefore have had some influence on popular perceptions of the gen-
dered nature of work. The kinds of occupations most safely located in the
domestic part of the house, such as spinning, carding, and some brewing,
are also those most commonly associated with female employment in writ-
ten sources by the second half of the fourteenth century.l3 In contrast, occu-
pations least likely to be pursued in the domestic zone, such as heavy
metal trades and baking, were less frequently practiced by women.1 4 To
date, however, the debate about the degree to which the physical space of
the house was gendered has tended to consider only how social conduct
and mores affected the design of buildings, not how the buildings shaped
those mores.lS
Yet the evidence of the buildings might indeed provide a fresh perspec-
tive on the debate as to how far gender norms were reproduced in
women's and men's daily lives.16 The ideal separation of dangerous from
safe spaces was not always easily maintained in the crowded conditions of
the later medieval town, especially in homes of up to about six rooms.
Kitchens in particular were often integrated into the main building and
sometimes located on the first floor, perhaps indicating the obvious point
that of all the "dangerous" spaces, kitchens were most associated with do-
mesticityP Living quarters also extended above workshops, and work-re-
lated activities might be located in a variety of rooms in the house.ls For all
but the wealthiest sections of the urban population, therefore, the segrega-
tion of dangerous from safe working spaces may often have been difficult
to achieve in practice. Yet it was still an influential ideal, and the degree to
which dangerous activities had become gendered seems to have been a
stronger influence still. The kitchen, for example, was the most likely of all

12 Hanawalt, "At the Margins of Women's Space," 70-87.

13 Simon A. C. Penn, "Female Wage-Earners in Late Fourteenth-Century England," The
Agricultural History Review 35 (1987): 5; P. J.P. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life-Cycle in a Me-
dieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300-1520 (Oxford, 1992), 104-37; Maryanne
Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter (Cambridge, 1995), 120-75. It
is interesting that brewing, which done on a large scale is perhaps not so "safe," was pro-
gressively taken over by men in the later middle ages: Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brew-
sters in a Changing World, 1300-16oo (Oxford, 1996).
14 Ibid. Some women, however, were employed in all of these trades.
15 Grenville, "Housing and Households," 320.
16 Hanawalt, "At the Margins of Women's Space," 76-83; P. J.P. Goldberg, "The Public
and the Private: Women in the Pre-Plague Economy," in Thirteenth-Century England, III, ed.
P.R. Coss and S.D. Lloyd (Woodbridge, 1991), 75-89.
17 We have evidence of this in several towns from at least the mid-fourteenth century:
Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, 1:159; Schofield, Medieval London Houses, 69-71.
1s See notes 9 and 10 above.

Women's Influence on the Design of Urban Homes 193

 the "dangerous" spaces to be associated with the living accommodation,
the smelting furnace the least likely.
The social construction of gendered space in the urban home was also a
reflection of other kinds of status apart from gender. Accommodation for
poorer urban dwellers-typically cottages containing no more than two
rooms and built either in rows along street frontages or in crowded court-
yards off the street-offered no place for specialist workshops.19 Referred
to as "rents" in York and elsewhere, these accommodations also included
single rooms, often above a landlord's shops. The absence of designated
workshop space in these homes also reflected the expectations of many
guild masters, who not only discouraged their employees from owning
their own workshops but also limited and controlled the circumstances
under which male employees, both apprentices and journeymen, might
marry and establish households of their own.2o Thus the marital status of
many urban employees was determined by their place in the hierarchy of
labor and further reflected in and reinforced by the design of "rents." In-
deed it is in these kinds of "rents" in fourteenth-century York that clusters
of female tenants lived, along with the elderly of both sexes, male tenants
who sold their labor to others (such as builders), men who worked in
"light" trades such as barbers, and scribes, clerks, and priests. For example,
in 1342 one row of cottages was tenanted by William Symes, Margaret
Scrivener, Agnes de Strensall, and Elisabeth de Malton, while another was
tenanted by Alice de Derlington, John Parow, Thomas de Miton, Mathilda
de Bolton, Stephen the tiler, Robert the carpenter, and Robert the plasterer,
and a third row by Alexander the mason, Elias the plasterer, and Sir Geof-
frey Langhald, a priest. 21
The design of both larger and smaller town houses thus influenced, and
was influenced by, prevailing ideas about the social nature of labor and its
relationship to gender and marital status. Men's domestic status, in terms
of their ability to marry and establish a household, was as much related to
their economic status as was that of women, and it influenced the style of
housing provided for them. These small "rents" were, by design, a form of
dormitory-style housing whose occupants were not expected to own
workshops and other facilities such as kitchens. 22 As employees, and possi-

19 See works cited in note 6 above; see also S. Rees Jones, "Property, Tenure and Rents:
Some Aspects of the Topography and Economy of Medieval York" (D.Phil. diss., University
of York, 1987), I, 200-6, 241-3; D. Keene, "Landlords, the Property Market and Urban Devel-
opment in England," in Power, Profit and Urban Land: Landownership in Medieval and Early
Modern Northern European Towns, ed. Finn-Einar Eliassen and Geir Atle Ersland (Aldershot,
Hants., 1996), 103-6.
2o Rees Jones, "Household and English Urban Government," 71-87.

21 York Minster Library (YML), VC 4/I/7. However, whenever housing pressure eased
or means allowed, tenants often seized the opportunity of renting more than one cottage
and so enlarging their home.
22 Martha Carlin, "Fast Food and Urban Living Standards in Medieval England," in Food

194 Sarah Rees Jones

bly also as tenants, they were subject to the government of the master
householder, who circumscribed their prospects of formal marriage.23 The
domestic status of such tenants, both male and female, thus shared many
common characteristics in which their sex was less important than their
place in hierarchies of labor and property ownership. 24 As the built envi-
ronment facilitated the construction of normative social hierarchies, so its
design could also be used to reinforce cultural aspects of gender, such as
the regulation of marriage, that were not easily or simply related to biolog-
ical sex.
Such overlapping gender identities could be found even in the largest
houses, for not all "safe" work was associated with women. Many men
also worked in the "residential" parts of the house. Office work in particu-
lar was done at home, and some middling to larger houses of the later four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries contained a special room, sometimes called
the "counting house," for such work. 25 Office work was undertaken by
both sexes. It was expected that wives should help their husbands with the
financial side of their business, as well as manage businesses on their
own.26 In normative texts, however, this work was gendered male. In
Chaucer's "Shipman's Tale" it is the husband who withdraws upstairs to
his counting house, just as in the household inventory of the London gro-
cer Richard Toky in 1391 the counting house was gendered male by the full

and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. M. Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal (London, 1998), 42-44.
Again, although the original design did not provide for purpose-built workshops or
kitchens, it was quite possible for existing buildings to be adapted or extended to provide
such facilities. A row of small cottages constructed in Aldwark, York, c. 1300 was not pro-
vided with kitchens, although some of the rooms had hearths. Larger hearths, for both do-
mestic and "semi-industrial" purposes were inserted in the later fourteenth or fifteenth cen-
turies: R. A. Hall et a!., Medieval Tenements in Aldwark, and Other Sites, The Archaeology of
York 10/2 (York: Council of British Archaeology, 1988), 105, 108-9.
23 Sarah Rees Jones, "Household, Work and the Problem of Mobile Labour: The Regula-
tion of Labour in Medieval English Towns," in Problem of Labour in the Fourteenth Century,
ed. Bothwell, Goldberg, and Ormrod, 140-44, 152-53; idem, "Household and English Urban
Government," 71-73, 8o-83.
24 Michael Rocke has further argued that similar social hierarchies in fifteenth-century
Florence even influenced sexual mores. Socially dominant males were expected to be sexu-
ally dominant in both homo- and heterosexual relationships. Subservient male partners
were thus, according to Rocke, "feminized" and their cultural gender was determined by
social status as much as by sex; see Michael Rocke, "Gender and Sexual Culture in Renais-
sance Italy," in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. J. Brown and Robert C. Davis (Lon-
don, 1998), 150-70.
2s Schofield, Medieval London Houses, 74, 233, 235.
26 "How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter," in F. J. Furnivall, ed., The Babees Book,

EETS o.s., 32 (1868), 41-42; Kowaleski, Medieval Exeter, 124, 139, 154- For recent summaries
of the debate about married women's work see S. H. Rigby, English Society in the Late Middle
Ages: Class, Society, and Gender (London, 1995), 271-73; Mavis Mate, Women in Medieval Eng-
lish Society (Cambridge, 1999), 51-54; Caroline M. Barron, "London 1300-1540," in D. M.
Palliser, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, I, 600-1540 (Cambridge, 2ooo), 427-8 and
works cited there.

Women's Influence on the Design of Urban Homes 195

 set of armor and weapons kept there.27 Yet the location of such work in the
home rendered this a rather ambiguous and second-rate kind of masculin-
ity, less impressive than more adventurous, outdoor, physical pursuits. 28
As Isabel Davis and Felicity Riddy have suggested, the urban home may
therefore have been a location where normative gender identities were
challenged and new kinds of masculinity and femininity created. 29
Hanawalt and Goldberg's differing opinions on the extent to which the
demographic and economic circumstances of the fifteenth century pro-
voked a stronger gendering of residential and working space than earlier
could thus also benefit from recognizing that simple categories of mascu-
line and feminine are not adequate.3o The organization of domestic space
into safe and dangerous zones seems to have had a marginal influence on
women's patterns of employment. Instead, the complexities of urban
work (which encompassed business as well as manual skills), the
cramped and crowded interiors of all but the minority of urban houses,
and the hierarchical nature of the organization of labor all combined to
modify simple stereotypes. Goldberg also posits that a decline in demand
for urban property in the fifteenth century facilitated a reassertion of tra-
ditional values in the clearer demarcation of working and residential
space. But his chronology of change in the gendering of work involves a
sequence of specific changes over relatively short periods of time between
1350 and 1500, and such historical specificity is not easily related to the
more static idioms of rhetoric.3 1 This is as true of our consideration of the
rhetoric evident in the design of buildings as of normative texts. In partic-
ular our knowledge of the date of surviving buildings is still not suffi-
ciently specific to permit an easy correlation between changes in building
type and short-term changes in social practice. 32 Before we can examine

27 Chaucer, "The Shipman's Tale," in The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed.,

ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987), 11. 75-88; A. H. Thomas, ed., Calendar of Plea and Memo-
randa Rolls of the City of London 1381-1412 (Cambridge, 1932), 212-3.
28 Which may suggest why Richard Toky kept his armor in his office: to provide it with a

more appropriately masculine ambience.

29 For femininity see Felicity Riddy, "Looking Closely: Authority and Intimacy in the Late

Medieval Urban Home," chap. 11 in this volume. For masculinity see Isabel Davis, "John
Gower's Fear of Flying: Transitional Masculinities in the Confessio Amantis," paper delivered
at the Conference on "Rites of Passage," York, 2001, and to be published in P. J.P. Goldberg
et al., eds., Rites of Passage (Woodbridge: Boydell, forthcoming). I am grateful to Isabel for
permission to cite her unpublished work.
30 Hanawalt, "At the Margins of Women's Space," 76-83; Goldberg, "Public and the Pri-

vate."
31 S. H. Rigby, "Gendering the Black Death: Women in Later Medieval England," Gender
and History 12, no. 3 (2ooo): 746.
32 Much of Schofield's evidence for the use of rooms, for example, comes from surveys of

London houses in the seventeenth century, while the dating of buildings by style of con-
struction can offer only a very broad chronology that is hard to reconcile with the more pre-
cise dates used by historians. Schofield, Medieval London Houses, 150, 152; Grenville,
"Houses and Households," 315.

196 Sarah Rees Jones

the relationship between the developing form and function of urban do-
mestic buildings further, we urgently need a program of more scientific
dating, such as dendrochronology, to provide more specific dates of con-
struction and alteration for all surviving medieval town buildings. We
also need to consider more carefully the evidence not only for how build-
ings were designed but also for how they were actually used and devel-
oped over time.

Women and Property

So far this chapter has reviewed evidence from studies based on archaeol-
ogy, on literature, and on the role of labor in the construction of households
and gender identities. The remainder of this chapter offers an alternative
framework for thinking about the gendering of domestic space using
records of property ownership and management. Although much work
has been done on the property market in late medieval English towns, al-
most none of it has considered patterns of housing ownership, manage-
ment, and occupation from a gendered perspective. This chapter will sug-
gest three main areas where further research might be useful in relation to
the study of women in particular: home ownership, the value of the house
as a medium for conveying status and identity, and the management of
urban estates.

WOMEN AS HOME OWNERS

We know a great deal about the conventions of English common law

concerning townswomen's ownership of property, but relatively little
about the ways in which social practice conformed to the norms of the
law. In theory, property taken into a marriage by a wife became part of
the conjugal estate controlled by her husband, but when he died it re-
verted to her and to her descendants. 33 Widows' rights varied in detail
from one town to another, but in many they enjoyed a right of residence
in the conjugal home for life, a right to one third of their husband's prop-
erty for life, and one third of their wealth in moveable goods (or one half
if there were no children).34 These conventions ensured that women who
owned property could be powerful entities in the urban property mar-
ket. They might be much sought after as marriage partners and could be
33 S. J. Payling, "The Politics of Family: Late Medieval Marriage Contracts," in The McFar-

lane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society, ed. R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard
(Stroud, 1995), 25-26; Jennifer Ward, ed. and trans., Women of the English Gentry and Nobility
(Manchester, 1995), 16-18, 85-90; Peter Fleming, Family and Household in Medieval England
(Basingstoke, 2000), 36-42, 83-121. All provide lucid accounts of the legal framework of
property ownership and of innovations in legal practice from the thirteenth century.
34 Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, 1:216; Caroline Barron, "Introduction: The

Widow's World," in Medieval London Widows 1300-1500, ed. Caroline M. Barron and Anne
F. Sutton (London, 1994), xvii-xxi.

Women's Influence on the Design of Urban Homes 197

 in a position to dispose of relatively large quantities of property both
during their life and at their death, enjoying the patronage that went
with that power.
Such bald statements of either local custom or common law paint a very
deceptive picture of the actual legal position of women in relation to prop-
erty in the later middle ages. For, by the early fourteenth century, many
legal devices (such as entails or conditional gifts, uses, trusts, wills, and
leaseholds) were developing whereby families could make much more
flexible choices about the ownership and inheritance of property than the
bare requirements of common or customary law would suggest.3s In order
to understand women's property interests, we therefore need to study the
ways in which families exploited these choices. In England, to date, more
detailed work has been done on the social use of the law among the gentry,
nobility, and peasantry than among townspeople.36 Studies of the aristoc-
racy, in particular, suggest a severe curtailment of female property rights
from the end of the fifteenth century and particularly after 1536. As yet
there is nothing comparable, for an urban context, to Martha Howell's
work on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Douai in Flanders, which also
traced a significant reduction of female property rights and the increasing
concentration of wealth in male-dominated lineages.37
How were women treated in the urban property market in England? No
clear trends have yet been established for urban practice, partly because
records of lay property ownership in towns tend to be much more dispersed,
and thus incomplete, than surviving noble or manorial archives. 38 Sufficient
specific examples survive from English towns, however, to suggest that it
was commonplace in England after 1300 for urban families to use the new
legal devices available to alter female rights to property. In the period
1300-1450 these changes did not necessarily exclude women from the own-

35 See note 33 above.

36 L. Bonfield, Marriage Settlements, 1601-1740: The Adoption of the Strict Settlement (Cam-
bridge, 1983); R. E. Archer, "Rich Old Ladies: The Problem of Late Medieval English Dowa-
gers," in Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History, ed. A. J. Pollard
(Gloucester, 1984), 15-35; R. M. Smith, "Women's Property Rights Under Customary Law:
Some Developments in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries," Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society 5th ser., 36 (1986): 165-94; idem, "Coping with Uncertainty: Women's
Tenure of Customary Land in England c. 1370-1430," in Enterprise and Individuals in Fif-
teenth-Century England, ed. J. Kermode (Stroud, 1991), 43-67; Ward, Women of the English
Gentry and Nobility, 16-18, 85-90; S. J. Payling, "Social Mobility, Demographic Change, and
Landed Society in Late Medieval England," Economic History Review 2d ser., 45 (1992):
51-73; S. J. Payling, "The Economics of Marriage in Late Medieval England: the Marriage of
Heiresses," Economic History Review 2d ser., 54 (2001): 413-29.
37 Martha C. Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place and Gender in Cities of the

Low Countries, 1300-1550 (Chicago, 1998).

38 However, relatively full surviving series of wills, such as those from London and York,
would sustain a coherent study of patterns of bequests of property among family members,
especially when (as in London) these could be combined with a full series of registered
property transactions.

198 Sarah Rees Jones

ership of property altogether, but may have emphasized the relationship be-
tween a woman and particular kinds of property, especially her home. The
following examples from later-medieval York indicate some of the varieties
of choice available to property owners in towns. They also illustrate how
legal arrangements for the inheritance of property enabled people to give
some concrete expression to affective relationships within the family.

In 1330 Richard Tunnock, a goldsmith, left his dwelling house in Stonegate

to his wife for her life, and after her death to her son John. He left a different
property to his own son, and divided the rest of his city properties between
a third son and his daughter, Katherine.39

In 1334 John Gatenby died, but prior to his death he and his wife Agnes had
used a conveyance through feofees [trustees] to ensure that the property in
York brought to the marriage by Agnes was transferred into a new title
owned by both of them jointly. On John's death he bequeathed this property
to her, allowing inheritance by her heirs (so respecting the fact that the prop-
erty was inherited from her family), but this was on the fresh condition that
if Agnes were to share the tenements, having a certain couple called Alan
Helk de Killum and Mathilda his wife to live with her, she was to pay John's
son, William, an annual rent of twenty shillings from the property. In fact
the property eventually passed to Katherine, daughter of Alan de Killum,
and her husband, though we do not know how. 40

Adam Skipwith, a skinner, bequeathed his house in Petergate to his wife,

Isolde, for her life in 1337. After her death the tenement was to revert to
their son Adam on condition that within two years he gave five pounds to
each of his younger brothers. Further conditions described what was to hap-
pen to the estate if Adam (or the other brothers) died before their mother,
the very last resort being to endow an obit for the family. Just over thirty
years later, in 1370, Robert Skipwith, the youngest and only surviving son,
did indeed use the property to endow an obit for his parents and two older
brothers in the nearby chapel of St. Leonard's Hospital. 41

In 1392 William Strensall, a butcher, used feofees to ensure that his wife
shared his title to his houses and shops in Stonegate and Micklegate, reserv-
ing inheritance first to their joint heirs and second to his heirs alone. 42

In 1427 William Selby, a former mayor of York, left a house each to his wife,
his sister, and his niece, but the rest of his large and valuable estate to his
nephew since he did not have a son.43

39 YML, L2/4f, fol. 8.

40 YML, L2/4f, fol. 16; M2/4, fol. 3; VC 3/Vi 97,317,427, Vo 47·
41 BL, Cotton MS Nero D iii, fols. 183, 184v; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1367-70, 399·
42 J. W. Percy, ed., York Memorandum Book B/Y, Surtees Society, 186, 1973, 24-25.
43 YML, L2/4f, fols. 227-8. Selby was dealing with a common problem in the disease-rid-

den later middle ages, namely the high failure rate of families to produce immediate sur-
viving heirs: Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Ann Arbor, 1948),
199-206; Pay ling, "Economics of Marriage," 414.

Women's Influence on the Design of Urban Homes 199

 In 1465 William Vesey, a merchant, also used feofees to ensure that his house
in Coney Street would be inherited after his death by his niece, her husband,
and their children.44

These examples, together with others from London and Winchester,

offer us some insight into common, though not universal, social practices
that modified the more rigid provisions of common law. 45 First, they sug-
gest that it was common for couples to establish a joint title to property that
either husband or wife had brought into the marriage. The reasons for such
jointures and their consequences have been much disputed, 46 but they cer-
tainly aided in the second common feature of these property arrange-
ments, which was the tendency for couples to practice a form of partible in-
heritance, either dividing their properties between different children from
one or more marriages (as in the case of Richard Tunnock) or providing
cash settlements for younger children from the main (and perhaps only)
family property (as in the case of the Skipwith family). In the example of
William Strensall the jointure not only protected his new wife's claim to
dower in his estate but also the rights of inheritance of the children of their
marriage against the interests of children from any of Strensall's earlier or
subsequent wives.4 7 Without such explicit provision the claims of city or-
phans to their inheritance could be easily abused.
Women both gained and lost from these arrangements. Some women,
such as William Vesey's niece in 1465, inherited more property than they
would have done otherwise. Yet many widows lost the power to choose
how to dispose of their property if its inheritance had already been
agreed. 48 Presumably many mothers understood such an act of placing
their children's interests before their own as an act of love. Indeed John

44 York Memorandum Book A/Y, part 2, 231-2.

45 Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, 1:190-1; D. J. Keene and V. Harding, Historical
Gazetteer of London before the Great Fire. Part 1. Cheapside (Cambridge, 1987), 57 microfiches.
46 Such jointures were often made at the time of marriage and used to safeguard a wife's
right to dower in her husbands' estates: Ward, Women of the English Gentry and Nobility,
16-18; Fleming, Family and Household in Medieval England, 36-42; Keene, Survey of Medieval
Winchester, 1:190; Derek Keene, "Tanners' Widows, 1300-1350," in Medieval London Widows,
ed. Barron and Sutton, 6; Payling, "Politics of Family," 29-31. As Payling argues, jointures
also safeguarded the inheritance of the children of a marriage and allowed the paternal
grandparents to contribute to their maintenance. In urban contexts such jointures were
sometimes made after marriage and seem to have involved the wife's inheritance just as
often as the husband's. Thus jointures were a way in which both maternal and paternal fam-
ilies could provide for a couple's children.
47 Children from any other marriages were probably provided for in separate agree-
ments.
48 Almost certainly, however, such arrangements were usually made with the woman's

technical agreement, since without her cooperation any "conditional gift" of the property,
which had created a new pattern of inheritance without her consent, could have been easily
undermined by a challenge in the courts.

200 Sarah Rees Jones

Lawney and his wife Margaret described their settlement of properties on
the children of their marriage as a sign of "our grete love to you oure
eyris."49
Above all, the surviving agreements suggest that great importance was
attached to providing widows, but also other women, with homes. William
Selby's bequests are a good example of a man providing homes for close,
unmarried female relatives in addition to his wife. In this respect popular
usage reinforced, and even extended, common rights of widow's bench.so
Indeed, one obvious conclusion to draw from these property arrangements
is that the first priority of landowners was to use their property in a func-
tional way to provide their relatives, and perhaps especially their female
relatives, whether married or unmarried, with a secure residence, either
within or outside the main family home.s1 Families therefore invested sig-
nificant amounts of money and time in transforming the abstract concepts
of property law into the more social concept of a home.

CHANGES IN THE HOUSE AS AN OBJECT OF STATUS

This emphasis on the house as a home, rather than simply an investment,

can be placed within a wider context of the changing social use of housing
in the later medieval English town. In England a house could not be
owned separately from the land on which it was built, and all titles under
common law related to the ownership of the land rather than any build-
ings constructed on it. 52 However, in the later middle ages at least two de-
velopments in legal and social practice increasingly enabled people to
value individual houses separately from the land, or burgage tenement,
on which they stood. These developments focused more attention on the
individual house and accelerated investment in the notion of the house as
"home."
One process is of particular significance: namely, the changing relation-
ship between families, households, and houses.53 In thirteenth-century

49 Margaret's son from an earlier marriage was separately provided for: Thrupp, Mer-
chant Class of Medieval London, 123-24.
5o See also Keene, "Tanners' Widows," 14, 16-17.
51 The arrangements we find at death mirrored those made during life. For examples
from York of unmarried women living alone or with other female relatives, see Cordelia
Beattie, "A Room of One's Own? The Legal Evidence for the Residential Arrangements of
Women Without Husbands in Late Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century York," in Me-
dieval Women and the Law, ed. N. J. Menuge (Woodbridge, 2000), 51-55. The York evidence
suggests that some unmarried men, particularly clergy, were similarly provided with ac-
commodation by families wealthy enough to do so.
52 S. F. C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law (London, 1969), 88-126.
53 Although we might often assume a one-to-one relationship between a single conjugal

household and their house, detailed studies of patterns of occupation in continental cities
have revealed different sets of relationships between families and buildings, suggesting
household formation in the central middle ages differed from the late middle ages. See

Women's Influence on the Design of Urban Homes 201

 English towns, the main units of land ownership in a town were burgage
tenements: large plots of land that were developed with more than one
house. The main house commonly occupied the rear portion of such a site,
while the street frontage was developed with separate shops or cottages,
which could be let out to provide a rental income. The relationship be-
tween the main householder and the tenants of these smaller properties,
however, was not always purely commercial. In the later thirteenth cen-
tury, the main burgage holder might sublet the smaller units on the plot to
relatives, friends, "employees," and business associates.s4 So, for example,
a father might sublet subsidiary buildings to his children, both married
and single. Hence a burgage might support a small cluster of related
households, each occupying separate buildings (or separate elements of a
larger building) on the same site, but with shared access to some common
facilities, such as the yard or court and perhaps some other facilities such
as latrines or ovens. Such extended or stem-family groups may even have
feasted together in the hall of the main house.
By the fourteenth century, however, such stem-family housing clusters
were disappearing as familial relationships between burgage owners and
their tenants became less common.ss The reasons for the fragmentation of
stem-family groups were complex, but three developments can be singled
out. First were changes in the pattern of urban landownership as corporate
landlords, such as the church, acquired and directly managed more free-
hold property and let it to any available tenant, thus disrupting familial re-
lationships. Second, the higher death rate and higher rates of immigration
to towns after the Black Death also disrupted families and promoted a
higher turnover among tenants. Third, the political status attached to the
ownership of burgage tenements was gradually being replaced by other
forms of citizenship more likely to be associated with membership in a
trade or craft, rendering the ownership of burgage plots less essential to
the acquisition of social and political status within the town. 56
By the later fourteenth century, these changes in the ownership and
management of property were accompanied by the development of writ-
ten leaseholds, which placed more emphasis on the design and value of the
house, rather than the land on which it stood. 57 The length of these leases,

Diane Owen Hughes, "Urban Growth and Family Structure in Medieval Genoa," Past and
Present 66 (1975): 3-28; F. W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence (Princeton,
1977>, 21-55,229-30.
54 Rees Jones, "Household and English Urban Government," 8o-82, 87. Similar examples

from Winchester are given in Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, 1:219, 2:746-48, 752,
755-56, 788-89.
55 Rees Jones, "Household and English Urban Government," 83-84.
56 Rees Jones, "Household, Work and the Problem of Mobile Labour," 133-54.
57 In particular landlords began to develop written leaseholds for their more prosperous
tenants, who might otherwise have aspired to the ownership of a "freehold" property.
Keene, Survey of Medieval Winchester, 1:187, 191-93; Rees Jones, "Property, Tenure and

202 Sarah Rees Jones

which specified the exact term of years of the tenancy and the annual rent
due, tended to increase in the fifteenth century, and the lump sum paid by
the tenant on entering the lease also became more important than the an-
nual rent owed. As a result, landlords increasingly invested in building
and repairing houses before letting them (to justify the large lump sum the
tenant paid to enter the lease) or offered a lower rent in return for the ten-
ant rebuilding and maintaining the property to an agreed standard. Writ-
ten leases nearly always contained a building clause specifying who was
responsible for maintaining the buildings to an agreed standard. Thus the
real value of the property came to reside more and more in the design and
building quality of the house.
While the development of the written leasehold put more emphasis on
the tenancy and quality of the house, it was a form of tenancy that was gen-
erally more available to men than women because it was regarded as a fi-
nancial contract. A woman would not usually be regarded as a trustworthy
leaseholder because her husband or father would have to underwrite all
her debts. In the twenty-eight leases surviving for the York city corpora-
tion's estate between 1415 and 1422, all the leaseholders are male and no
wives are mentioned.ss
The decline of the social importance of the burgage plot and the devel-
opment of new forms of leasehold tenure thus both conspired to put more
emphasis on individual buildings or houses, at the same time that social
patterns of landownership among town dwellers emphasized that houses
should primarily be thought of as homes rather than investments. So the
individual town house, rather than the burgage plot on which it was built,
increasingly became the principal spatial unit for reproducing family iden-
tity. At the same time such self-sufficient houses became more complex.
Prosperous householders, in particular, needed to accommodate a greater
variety of spaces under a single roof as communal facilities shared with re-
lated neighbors became less common.
If we put these hypotheses together, we can see that for those townswomen
fortunate enough to be property owners, there were important changes in the
social use of law in the long fourteenth century and in the social use of hous-
ing, which materially affected their relationship to their homes. These
changes worked to detach women, to some extent, from wider contexts of
kinship, inheritance, and estate ownership and to focus their legal interests
more on the temporary possession of a single house. This was often their con-
jugal home, although single women were also provided with independent
homes by wealthy relatives. The secure ownership of a home was especially

Rents," 1, 289-91; Keene, "Landlords, the Property Market, and Urban Development,"
109-10. Many tenants of rented property, especially poorer ones, continued to occupy their
homes "at will" without any written contract.
ss York Memorandum Book B/Y, 53-67. Widows and married couples, however, did assign
outstanding portions of leasehold terms.

Women's Influence on the Design of Urban Homes 203

 important for the female members of prosperous families because other
forms of secure tenancy, such as the written lease, were less readily available
to them than to men of the same class.s9 If the hypothesis can be sustained
that there was a slow and gradual transition from stem- or extended-family
groups occupying adjacent parts of burgage plots to more nuclear house-
holds occupying individual houses, then such a home was also increasingly
likely to be detached and self-sufficient, in both function and form, from the
homes of other relatives. The "housewife" in charge of such an autonomous
household would thus need to take responsibility, either with her husband or
by herself, for a wide variety of domestic and business activities, as indeed
conduct literature of the time suggests.6° Here is a powerful set of circum-
stances for the creation of an ideal of bourgeois female domesticity, shaped by
the home itself, among the wealthier artisans and merchants of the town. It
suggests that the physical environment of the independently owned house
provided, and was perhaps increasingly seen to provide, a safe forum for the
expression of feminine identity among both married and single women of
property.

WOMEN AS TENANTS

We can extend this discussion of the status of women in relation to their

homes by looking at the circumstances of those women who rented rather
than owned their property. In this case we are primarily discussing "ten-
ants at will," not leaseholders; that is, those who rented accommodation
without any written contract and without any rights of inheritance of their
tenancy by their heirs or assigns. Such tenants are listed in detail in many
surviving urban rent accounts, although these have never been subjected
to a sustained analysis according to gender. The following is a preliminary
analysis of the later-medieval rent accounts of the Vicars Choral of York
Minster. Their estate grew from under 100 to over 200 tenancies in the city
during the course of the fourteenth century, and it included both larger
houses of the hall-house type and many smaller rows of cottages or rents,
of which the vicars constructed large numbers in the fourteenth century.61
An analysis of this estate's rented properties (table 1) certainly suggests a
long-term change in the status of women tenants. Table 1 shows the num-
bers of male and female tenants, the percentage of total rents paid by them,
and the percentage of the total cost of repairs made to properties tenanted
by men and women. In the fifty years before the Black Death about 20 per-
cent of the Vicars' tenants were women, and they paid a roughly propor-

59 Tenants renting property by leasehold agreements before 1450 remained a privileged

minority compared to the majority of tenants who rented "at will" (see below).
60 "How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter"; Riddy, "Looking Closely."
61 Rees Jones, "Property, Tenure and Rents," 1, 207-11; Nigel Tringham, ed., Charters of the
Vicars Choral of York Minster: City of York and its Suburbs to 1546, Yorkshire Archaeological So-
ciety Record Series 148, 1993, xxxii, xxxvi.

204 Sarah Rees Jones

TABLEI. The estate of the Vicars Choral in York, 1309-1472

Men Women
Total rent Total cost of % rent paid % repairs % rent paid % repairs
Year incomea repairs % tenants by mena (by cost) % tenants by womena (by cost)

1309 £17 11s o.5d No data 64-87b 56-9zb 13-36b 7-44b

132819 £39 12s ~d £1 4s 6d 80 75 67 20 18 21
134415 £38 13s 3d 19s iod 76 74 98 21 18 2
'37lC £64 19s 9d £4 0s lldd 75 89 58-8? 25 11 13'42'
1399 £72 6s 4d £12 5s 3d 68 80 78 32 19 20
1426 £65 4s 6d Approx. £2 13sf 76 89 90 24 11 10

1449 £32 45 9d No data 87 90 13 10

147112 £36 7s i d £4 2s jd 90 95 39 min. 10 5 o min.

Sources: YML, VC 4/1/1, 4, 8, 14; VC 6/2/10, 26, 38,50, 54, 63; VC 6/6/7.
Note: The percentages given in each row do not always total loo because not all tenancies and repairs were identified by the name of the tenant. E = pounds;
s = shillings; d = pence.-
"Based on a calculation of rents recorded as collected, not rents recorded as owed. The Vicars accounted for their rental income twice a year, at Pentecost and
Martinmas. All the figures given here are therefore for rental periods of six months.
bProportions of male and female tenants are uncertain in 1309 because in 23% of the tenancies (accounting for 37% rents due), the name of the current tenant
is not given. The proportions given here are therefore minimum-maximum range.
'From 1371 it is possible to distinguish assize rents from farms, and the latter are listed here. See text for discussion.
*Repair accounts are for 1369, the closest available surviving record. In 29% of repairs this year, the tenants of the house were not named.
eAll on one householder-Emma Saddler.
'Full repair accounts are not available because by the mid-fifteenth century many of the repairs had become the responsibility of a different official, whose
accounts did not always survive.
 tional amount of rent, suggesting that on average women paid roughly the
same level of rents as male tenants. But in the 75 years after the Black
Death, the proportion of women tenants increased, rising to 32 percent of
tenants by 1399.62 Even more significantly, their economic status had obvi-
ously declined; they provided no more than 10-20 percent of the Vicars'
rent income in the period 1370-1450, despite accounting for almost one
third of the tenants. Another change occurred in the mid- and later fif-
teenth century when there appears to have been a significant decrease in
women tenants to numbers well below those of the pre-plague period. By
1471/2 just 10 percent of the Vicars' tenants were female, and they con-
tributed only 5 percent of the Vicars' rent income.
How might we explain these three phases in the changing number and
status of female tenants on a single estate? The rental evidence might be
used to support the hypothesis of Jeremy Goldberg, who has argued for an
increase in the employed female population of York after the Black Death
as women found more opportunities for work in a period of increased de-
mand and reduced labor supply. 63 The growth in the numbers of female
tenants after the Black Death might indeed indicate a few more women,
both widowed and newly arrived in the city, eking out an independent liv-
ing in low-paid work and able to afford independent tenancies in the
cheaper properties on the estate. Similarly the decline in the number of
such female tenants later in the fifteenth century would correspond well
with Goldberg's argument that women were the first to be excluded from
the workforce during an economic recession.64
There may also be other explanations. The overall increase in the number
of female tenants after 1350 was not very great, and may not be statistically
significant. It can be examined in more detail by comparing the accounts
for the term Martinmas 1344 to Pentecost 1345 with those for the term Pen-
tecost 1399 to Martinmas 1399· 65 In 1344/5 there were 29 female tenants on
the estate, which at that time included a total of 145 tenancies, so that
women accounted for 20 percent of all tenants. By 1399 there were 63 fe-
male tenants on the estate, which by then had increased to 238 tenancies.
Female tenants were thus 26.47 percent of all tenants in 1399, only a slight
increase from the figure of 20 percent in 1344/5. By 1399, however, the in-
formation that we have about free tenants is unreliable and often out of
date; only in the lists of tenants of "farmed" tenancies do we have even rea-
sonably accurate information.66 If we only count farmed tenancies, then 53

62 For further discussion of these figures, see below.

63 Goldberg, Women, Work and Life-Cycle, 336-g.
64 Ibid.
65 YML, VC 4/ 1/8; VC 6/2/38. Values of rents do not seem to have varied between win-

ter and summer terms. More money was generally spent on repairs in the summer months.
66 Before 1371 the lists of tenants do not distinguish between those who "farmed" their
tenancies "at the will" of the Vicars Choral and those who were free tenants owing "assize"

206 Sarah Rees Jones

out of 185 (or 31.35 percent) farmed tenancies were let to women in 1399.
This figure gives us a more accurate idea of the proportion of tenants who
were women and who rented houses that the Vicars were responsible for
maintaining, but is not directly comparable to pre-plague figures and,
taken alone, exaggerates the increase in numbers of female tenants com-
pared to 1344/5.
Much more significant than the increase in numbers of female tenants
was the decline in the value of the rents owed and paid by them after the
Black Death (see table 1). Before the Black Death the ratio of female tenants
to rents they paid on the Vicars' estate was approximately 1:1, suggesting
that, on average, female tenants paid the same levels of rent as male ten-
ants. By contrast, in all but one of the years of sample data for 1370-1470
this ratio was more like 2:1, suggesting a dramatic decline in the capacity of
female tenants to pay rents comparable to those paid by men. Once again a
direct comparison of the accounts for 1344/5 and 1399 permits a more de-
tailed picture to emerge. In the account for 1344/5 the inclusion of both
"farms" and "free" rents exaggerates the number of tenants of both sexes
who paid comparatively modest rents. In that term the value of rents paid
by women ranged from nothing to 26 shillings. Seven women paid rents of
10 shillings or more, and 19 women paid rents of 5 shillings or less. 67 By
contrast in 1399 only two woman paid rents of 10 shillings or more, and 55
women paid rents of 5 shillings or less.6s This evidence suggests that fe-
male tenants were increasingly concentrated in the cheapest properties,
and after the plague were much less likely to take responsibility for the
more expensive houses that were largely rented to male tenants. This
would certainly seem to support those who argue that even if there was an
increase in female employment after the Black Death, it was in lowly paid

or "free" rents, which were generally small rents of fixed value. Free or assize rents were often
the result of rent charges or quit-rents with which properties had been burdened by previ-
ous owners, often many years earlier. The Statute of Quia Emptores in 1290 had outlawed the
creation of most new rents of this kind, but took some time to be fully effective. Free tenants
usually retained full ownership of their property, together with control of its development
and letting to subtenants. The free rents from such property thus did not reflect its true
value. Farms were more comparable to the modern concept of rent. They represented rents
from houses and properties of which the landlord had full possession and control, and thus
reflected the market value of the property more closely. In general the Vicars Choral strove
to maximize its control of property and to reduce the number of free tenants on its estate. By
1371 their accounts listed the two kinds of rent separately, and the free rents due to them
were often not collected. Before 1371 it is sometimes possible to distinguish between the two
kinds of rent in the account, but often it is difficult, just as the distinction was not always
clear, at this date, to contemporaries. For further discussion, see Keene, Medieval Winchester,
185-89, 207-14.
67 In addition, two women paid rents of between six and nine shillings, and two women's
rents were unpaid ("vacat").
68 For the sake of comparison this includes both farms and assize or free rents, but only
five women were listed as free tenants in 1399. In addition six women paid rents of between
six and nine shillings.

Women's Influence on the Design of Urban Homes 207

 and relatively precarious employment. 69 Yet we have already seen that the
overall increase in the numbers of women tenants was not great. What re-
ally requires explanation is the decline in their economic status.
The declining economic status of female tenants in post-plague York
raises more questions than can be answered easily in a short essay, but two
aspects of the local economy should, at least, be indicated. Although the
period between the mid-136os and mid-138os was one of rental inflation on
the Vicars' estate, from the 1390s the Vicars increasingly struggled to find
tenants, and rents in general were progressively reduced.70 The Vicars' ef-
forts to find tenants after the plague may have prompted them to cast a
wider net and draw from a wider social group than previously. Certainly
by 1399 the Vicars were letting to women who were unable to pay the rent,
as in that year three women were excused payment of their rent because
they were poor?I Thus, poorer women may simply have been more visible
in the rent accounts by 1400, rather than more numerous in the city. The
higher profile of poorer women appearing in the rentals might also account
for the numbers of these tenants who can be identified as involved in pros-
titution around c. 1400.72
None of this, however, explains why the numbers of women renting
more expensive properties in the city also declined. It may be that local eco-
nomic factors were important in determining their life opportunities. Dur-
ing much of the first half of the fourteenth century, York benefited econom-
ically from of its role as the royal center of operations for the wars against
Scotland.73 In the late fourteenth century a growth in cloth exports also
boosted the local economy/4 but the evidence of these rentals may indicate
that opportunities for female employment in the cloth industry, later in the
century, were less financially advantageous to them (and demanded sim-
pler accommodation) than the extra work (such, perhaps, as brewing)
available at least to some women while York was the temporary center of
royal government earlier in the century. Different kinds of work were not

69 Mate, Women in Medieval English Society, 28-30 and works cited there.
70 Rees Jones, "Property, Tenure and Rents," 212-3, 215-7, 236-58. This chronology of de-
cline corrects that found in J. N. Bartlett, "The Expansion and Decline of York in the Later
Middle Ages," Economic History Review 2d ser., 12 (1959-60): 17-33. This initial increase and
eventual fall in rental values also occurred on many rural estates when poor, "landless" men
and women initially took up vacant rural holdings in the first decades after the Black Death;
see J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy 1150-1500 (London, 1980), 209-11.
71 YML, VC 6/2/38.
72 The replacement of male by female tenants was particularly noticeable in the "rents"
owned by the Vicars in Aldwark in the later fourteenth century. YML, VC 4/I/I-14, VC
6/2/10,26,38,50,54, 63. Cf. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life-Cycle, 151.
73 Bartlett, "The Expansion and Decline of York," 1-3; W. M. Ormrod, "Competing Capi-
tals? York and London in the Fourteenth Century," in Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe,
ed. S. Rees Jones, R. Marks, and A.J. Minnis (Woodbridge, 2000), 81-88.
74 Goldberg, Women, Work and Life-Cycle, 39-81; Jennifer I. Kermode, Medieval Merchants:

York, Beverley, and Hull in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1998), 265-75.

208 Sarah Rees Jones

equally available to all kinds of women. If the ability of women "house-
holders" to earn a living was at least as good, and possibly even better, be-
fore the Black Death as after, then this has major implications for our un-
derstanding of the history of marriage. Goldberg's argument that
expanded work opportunities encouraged women to postpone marriage in
the period after the Black Death would also need to be considered in the
period before the Black Death, at least in York where we also now have
some evidence of numbers of moderately prosperous women apparently
renting houses independently on terms comparable to male tenants?5 This
evidence suggests that, whether married or not, significant numbers of
women took primary responsibility for the tenancy of their own homes,
both before and after the Black Death?6
The continued and substantial decline of the status and then the number
of female tenants over the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries can also
be placed in the context of the other social customs relating to the housing
of women that we have identified. The general fall in the status of women
tenants may reflect, for instance, the familial preference among wealthier
property-owning families for turning women into homeowners whenever
financially possible, in a legal climate that made it difficult for such women
to rent houses on secure leasehold tenancies. But this new legal develop-
ment may also, in turn, have actively contributed to the declining status
and numbers of women tenants on the Vicars' urban estate.
We can also use estate accounts as evidence for the choices that landlords
or female tenants made in maintaining properties rented by women. The
overall impression is that the status of a tenant was more important than
their gender in determining the amount of money that the vicars spent on
repairing their property (see table 1). As the status of female tenants de-
clined, however, the sums spent on their repairs may be perceived as more
gendered. Other than this, there is little clear indication that the kinds of re-
pairs to female-tenanted property were different from the kinds of repairs
made to the property of male tenants. There are two tantalizing features,

75 The proportion of female tenants prior to 1350 fits the model for a "northwestern" Eu-
ropean marriage regime if one assumes that most of them were single, especially since the
number of single women listed as tenants must have been significantly less than the number
of women without husbands. Maryanne Kowaleski, "Singlewomen in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe: The Demographic Perspective," in Singlewomen in the European Past,
1250-18oo, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia, 1999), 45· But see note
76 below.
76 The marital status of female tenants is rarely indicated in these accounts. A few are de-
scribed as widows, but usually only when a wife has taken over a tenancy from a recently
deceased husband. Others may also have been widowed, married, never married, or in
some less formal partnership. For some of the poorer women listed in the accounts it may be
unsafe to make assumptions about "marital" status based on an understanding of marriage
customs in wealthier sections of society. If the woman is named as the tenant, however, it
suggests that she was considered responsible for the rent, whatever her marital status.

Women's Influence on the Design of Urban Homes 209

 though, which suggest an agenda for future research. In 1399 the Vicars
spent a large sum on repairs, which was concentrated on upgrading their
tenants' houses with three items in particular: new barrel wells, tile and
plaster chimneys, and new locks for doors.77 The wells and chimneys were
constructed for tenants of both sexes, but the vast majority were built for
male-headed households. New locks on doors, a cheaper repair, were also
provided for both sexes but here the overwhelming majority were pro-
vided for women.78 Does this suggest that if we looked in even more detail,
female preferences in house building might emerge from the records?
The repair accounts also suggest that different levels of privacy were en-
joyed in different kinds of homes. The Vicars' estate contained both larger
homes, of the type likely to include a hall, and rows of cottages. Part of
their responsibility as landlords was to erect and maintain privies and
wells. The larger houses were equipped with their own privies and wells,
but the rows of cottages were usually provided with communal facilities
such as the communal latrines built for a row of small houses in Stonegate
in 1328-9, or the communal well constructed for another court of houses in
Goodramgate in 1364.?9 The tenants of such properties, who included a
large proportion of females after 1350, thus enjoyed less privacy and a
more "communal" way of life. Indeed, the desire to fit such houses with
locks may suggest a defensive reaction against this lack of privacy. so

Conclusion
Steven Rigby has convincingly suggested that we ought to consider
women as a fourth estate in medieval society, that "all women were infe-
rior ... to men of their own class." He further suggests that differences be-
tween women were derived entirely from their marital status and the status
of the men on whom they depended. Women's place within a "household"
further isolated individual women, preventing the formation of a common
identity.sl Rigby's conclusions are derived mainly from studies of female
labor. If we consider the status of women from the perspective of the built
environment, however, a slightly different conclusion may be drawn.
The rent accounts for the Vicars' estate in York suggest that relatively
large numbers of women were regarded as independent tenants both be-
fore and after the Black Death, although there was a significant decline in
their economic status after 1350 and in their numbers from the mid-fif-
teenth century. Until we have comparable data from other towns, it seems

77 YML, VC 6/z/38.
7s Of course this difference also reflects the simple fact that the landlord spent more on
improvements to expensive properties than to cheap ones.
79 YML, VC 6/2/10, VC 6/10.
so I am grateful to Maryanne Kowaleski for this observation.
s1 Rigby, English Society, 278-So.

210 Sarah Rees Jones

likely that these variations over time reflected variations in the local econ-
omy, with different kinds of women prospering in different periods, per-
haps depending on the kinds of employment available to them. We do not
know their marital status, but we do find that urban families who owned
property were willing to set up single women as well as widows as house-
holders. This desire of independent women to run their own homes may
be reflected in the high take-up of cheap tenancies by poorer women after
1350. The perceived lower status of female tenants in this later period, com-
bined with the obstacles independent women faced in entering secure
leaseholds, may have further increased the preference for home ownership
among slightly wealthier artisan and mercantile women and further re-
duced the numbers of such women appearing in rent accounts, especially
as overall demand for property diminished in the fifteenth century.
Women as homemakers were a significant feature of the later medieval
townscape whether they "owned" or rented their home, and whether they
were married or not. Despite a cultural preference for male heirs, families
seem to have been anxious to provide homes for female relatives as well.
Yet the type of house occupied would significantly affect a woman's poten-
tial earnings. Larger houses offered more opportunities for subletting and
for sustaining a greater variety of productive activities than smaller ones
did. This was equally true for both sexes. The occupants of small "rents"
were particularly disadvantaged, and indeed the occupation of such
houses may even have carried a social stigma that inhibited both business
and marital opportunities for men as well as women.sz In this respect, the
division of interest between larger and smaller householders created a so-
cial divide that was the product of a well-established and politicized hier-
archy of labor that inhibited the articulation of the common interests of
women just as it did those of men.
Certainly women's exclusion from political activity, strong cultural in-
centives to marry, and their role as mothers all substantially limited
women's economic potential, individually and collectively. The presence of
these other limitations, however, may have rendered the control of a home
even more important for women than for men. Homes provided security
and status and, for some, the means to earn a living. The independent con-
trol of that home thus empowered some women. It provided them with a
small alternative to economic dependence on a man. Yet just as their
homes, rather than their marriages, gave some women status, the design of
those homes also reinforced differences of power, wealth, and opportunity
among women. Class was more important than gender in the design of the
later medieval urban home.
82 Rees Jones, "Household and English Urban Government," Ss-86.

Women's Influence on the Design of Urban Homes 211

 CHAPTER ELEVEN

Looking Closely: Authority and Intimacy

in the Late Medieval Urban Home

Felicity Riddy

Public and Private Authority

A parliamentary decree of 1461, aiming to control the antisocial pastimes of
dicing and playing at cards, ordered that "noon Hosteler, Taverner, Vi-
tailler, Artificer or Housholder, or other, use any such Pley, or suffre to be
used any such Pley in their houses, or elleswhere where they may lette
[prevent] it." 1 Household heads, that is, were required by central govern-
ment to act as sources of public authority and agents of good order. In the
course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, English towns increasingly
placed obligations of this kind on householders. The ancient system
known as Frankpledge, by which groups of men stood surety for one an-
other's conduct, had been organized on a neighborhood basis; that is, peo-
ple's behavior was felt to be the responsibility of the locality. This
Frankpledge system remained in place in urban communities throughout
the medieval period. 2 However, with the development of craft guilds dur-
ing the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a new source of urban authority
emerged. Increasingly, individual guild masters were held to be responsi-
ble for the orderliness of their households and were answerable to the civic
authorities for the conduct of household members, which included wives,
children, apprentices, and servants.3 This authority extended even to the

1 Rotuli Parliamentorum; ut et Petitiones, et Placita in Parliamento, 6 vols. (London, 1832),

y448. I am grateful to Dr. Cordelia Beattie, University of Edinburgh, for this reference.
2 See W. A. Morris, The Frankpledge System (London, 1901).
3 Sarah Rees Jones, 'The Household and English Urban Government," in The Household in
Late Medieval Cities, Italy and Northwestern Europe Compared, ed. Myriam Carlier and Tim
Soens (Louvain-Apeldoorn, 2001), 71-87.

212
inside of the home, as the parliamentary decree shows. Looking at this
shift, we might say that by the late middle ages in England the government
of towns had brought patriarchal household heads into being, or at least
made them visible by giving them a public authority.
The fact that the English words "houshold" and "housholder" only
came into use in the latter part of the fourteenth century seems to confirm
this; the first recorded instances are from the 138os. 4 "Houshold" partly
displaces the older French-derived term "meinie," which was applied to
collectivities of people who were not necessarily linked to a place; by con-
trast "houshold" was from the first associated with a house, and thus with
the idea of co-location, if not co-residence. There is no single term used of
the person in charge of a "meinie," which suggests that "housholder" was
coined for a new function-perhaps the maintenance of order with which I
began. It certainly seems to have been most frequently recorded in official
contexts, as in "The Baillifs and the Comens have chosen ... xxiii worthi
Burgeys, receauntz [resident] housholders." 5 These worthy burgesses were
men of substance, who no doubt lived in the multiroom timber-frame
houses-with their own kitchens, parlors, business premises, and priv-
ies-that must have been so visible a feature of the late medieval urban
scene. 6 These were employers as well as family men, who mostly worked
from home alongside the other members of their households. Working
from home was a mark of status that distinguished the householder from
the day-laborer who, as Charles Phythian-Adams has pointed out, proba-
bly spent most of his waking hours working away from his one- or two-
room cottage and his family? Urban householders, then, were domestic
men and, from the civic perspective, figures of authority.
The civic requirement for visible forms of authority (also buttressed at a
national level, as the quotations above show), was lent intellectual support
by the assumptions of Aristotle's Politics and Ethics and Augustine's City of
God, which were the subject of extensive academic commentary from the
thirteenth century on.s For both Aristotle and Augustine the distinction be-
tween the oikos or domus (household) and the polis or civitas (political com-
munity) was fundamental to their analyses of social living. For Aristotle,
the household comes into being to supply the daily needs of the family for
survival; the state then comes into being when families band together, first

4 See Middle English Dictionary, Part H.s, ed. Sherman M. Kuhn and John Reidy (Ann
Arbor, 1967), 1010-12: "hous-hold n." and "hous-holder(e n."
s Rotuli Parliamentorum, 5:121.
6 See Jane Grenville, Medieval Housing (London, 1997), 157-93; John Schofield, Medieval

London Houses (New Haven, 1995), 51-53; Sarah Rees Jones, "Women's Influence on the De-
sign of Urban Homes," chap. 10 in this volume.
7 Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late
Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979), 80-81, 88.
8 SeeM. S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford, 1999).

I am indebted to Matthew Kempshall for advice on late medieval Augustinianism.

Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban Home 213

 in villages and then in larger communities for the sake of the good life,
which is a higher order of existence. Aristotle describes rule in the house-
hold, though, in terms of rule in the state: the household head, he explains,
exercises a constitutional rule over his wife, a royal rule over his children,
and a tyrannical rule over his slaves. 9 So although they have different func-
tions and although the state has precedence over the household, it is as-
sumed that authority within the home is analogous to authority in the pub-
lic sphere. Similarly, for Augustine the household is a microcosm of the
city: "domestic peace has reference to civic peace: that is, the ordered con-
cord of domestic rule and obedience has reference to the ordered concord
of civic rule and obedience." 1D And both writers assume that the head of
the household will be male; as Aristotle puts it, "the male is by nature su-
perior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled;
this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind."11
A modern master narrative of the home that also draws on the public-
private distinction is that of Georges Duby in A History of Private Life II:
Revelations of the Medieval World, published in English in 1987.12 Duby sees
the public-private distinction as demarcated by "different kinds of power":

Think of two realms in which peace and order were maintained in the name
of different principles.... In one group the purpose was to govern the res
publica, the populus, the group of men (women had no place here) who, as-
sembled, constituted the state, administered communal property, and
shared responsibility for the common good .... Its administration is the re-
sponsibility of the magistrate, ... of the king and the law.13

The other realm was that of the res familiaris, "the cornerstone of family life,
where family refers to a community distinct from the community of all the
people, defined by its natural meeting place, or perhaps I should say its
natural place of confinement, the house. This private community was gov-
erned not by law but by 'custom.' "14
In fact, A History of Private Life II forgets about the public sphere after the
introduction and focuses, as its title suggests it wilt only on the res famil-
iaris. Moreover, representing the household as a private community en-
ables the book to develop on sociological rather than political lines. The

9 Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge,
1996), I. 12: 27.
1o Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge,
1996), 945·
11 Aristotle, Politics, ed. Everson, I. 5: 17.
12 Georges Duby, "Introduction: Private Power, Public Power," in A History of Private
Life,vol. 2, Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 6-'7. Originally published as Histoire de Ia vie
privee, vol. 2, De I' Europe jeodale aIa Renaissance (Paris, 1985).
13 Ibid., 7·
14 Ibid., 7·

214 Felicity Riddy

overarching narrative is of the processes by which a convivial and sociable
kind of domestic living became increasingly individualistic and solitary,
both literally and metaphorically, in the course of the later middle ages. It
is about how, from the fourteenth century on, various new kinds of privacy
are discernible within the household, including an inner privacy of the self.
The strain of reconciling political and sociological models of publicness
and privateness is shown in a passage in which Duby talks about the limi-
tations of the customary authority of the head of the household, conceived
of typically as male. He suggests that various kinds of countervailing au-
tonomy were available to the wife and children; for example, canon law re-
quired a daughter to give her consent to marriage and so she could, theo-
retically, thwart her father's will. Wives, Duby argues, had other kinds of
autonomy: "Masculine power ended on the threshold of the room in which
children were conceived and brought into the world and in which the sick
were cared for and the dead washed. In this most private sanctum, women
rule over the dark realm of sexual pleasure, reproduction and death." 15
This view seems to be the result of trying to bring together the two differ-
ent kinds of privacy he has evoked: a spatial one to do with separateness
and a discursive one to do with power. It produces a bizarre variant of the
separate-spheres model familiar from the nineteenth century, with a
boundary between male and female zones drawn at the chamber door. I
find it hard to accept Duby's view that male power ceased in the bed-
room-as if this were not the quintessential domain of the phallus; as if
marital sex was never coerced by the husband, with the support of canon
legal thinking on the marriage debt; as if women's authority in relation to
medical care was not contested by male experts with their apprenticeships
or their university degrees; as if women's unpaid and therefore unregu-
lated work in the home was only a source of autonomy and not also of ex-
ploitation. Duby's line of argument seems to collude with ancient and me-
dieval ideologues by drawing the public-private divide in such a way as to
contain women within the home, at the same time representing their sway
over the dark realm of the chamber in terms that suggests they are a kind of
collective Morgan la Fee. This article attempts to demystify female auton-
omy by suggesting an alternative view: that the circumstances of everyday
domestic living-especially urban living-mitigated any simple model of
male power and female subordination.

Home and Intimacy

By stressing "the circumstances of domestic living," I want to draw atten-
tion to what it means for a group of people to live in close proximity with
one another. This is an area from which medievalists can learn from a

1s Ibid., 8o.

Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban Home 215

 strand of modern research into contemporary housing that has been influ-
enced by the "embodied turn" in sociology. 16 Urban domestic living is not
simply the close proximity of neighbors, which in the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries was to some extent, at least, governed by its own conven-
tions and laws, but the intertwined living of people of different genera-
tions who ate, slept, and worked alongside one another in the multiroom
houses to which I have already referred that were a marked feature of the
late medieval urban scene. Such houses were not particularly spacious;
they were multiroom only in comparison with the one- or two-room
houses of the poor and are characterized by modern historians of housing
as "medium-sized." 17 They ranged in size from around four to around
eight rooms on two or three floors. The habits of living that developed in
these houses, which might be characterized as bourgeois domesticity, can
be understood in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a process-al-
ways ongoing and always at risk of defeat-of ordering and giving mean-
ing to the messy and embodied involvement of people with one another in
the home. As Craig M. Gurney points out,

home (in various unique ways) accommodates bodies. The word accommo-
dating ... denote[s] compromise and reconciliation as well as ... dwelling
or residing. This is to draw attention to the fact that we train, manage, regu-
late, discipline and present our bodies at home in ways we cannot else-
where .IS

The multiroom urban homes I have in mind were places in which people
shared beds and bedrooms; in which trestle tables were ubiquitous, and
rooms rapidly rearranged for work, eating, and leisure; in which there
may have been separate privies but only partial privacy, at best, for at-
tending to personal hygiene. Poor families, crammed into one room, must
have lived much of their lives outdoors, buying ready-cooked food be-
cause they did not have kitchens, using public privies, and letting their
children play in the street. The larger houses of the gentry allowed space
between people within the home, so that close-up living-living on top of
one another-was probably not how everyday family life was experi-

16 See, e.g., Craig M. Gurney, "Accommodating Bodies: The Organization of Corporeal

Dirt in the Embodied Home," in Organizing Bodies: Institutions, Policy and Work, ed. Linda
McKie and N. Watson (Basingstoke, 2ooo), 55-78. I am grateful to Professor Janet Ford, Cen-
ter for Housing Policy, University of York, for alerting me to this work.
17 See Schofield, Medieval London, 51-53; W. A. Pantin, "Medieval English Town-House
Plans," Medieval Archaeology 6-7 (1962-63): 202-39. Pantin's right-angle hall house seems to
be reflected in Schofield's Type 3 house, as Jane Grenville points out; see Medieval Housing,
169. See also Rees Jones, "Women's Influence," chap. 10 in this volume.
18 Gurney, "Accommodating Bodies," 55·

216 Felicity Riddy

enced at the aristocratic level.19 The inhabitants of middling-sized houses
knew the embodiment of the people they lived with from very close up
and developed value systems relating to intimacy in order to deal with
this.
Intimacy is regarded by some historians, especially following Lawrence
Stone, as a marker of modernity. 2o This chronology does not seem to be
borne out by the medieval meanings of the word "homly," the native
equivalent of domestic, which suggest that the home, whether or not it was
also a workplace or a shop, was understood as an intimate sphere in which
private identities were formed. The meanings of "homly" cluster round
ideas of familiarity, closeness, affection, privacy, intimacy, and everyday-
ness. Its opposite is "strange"; in a passage in the Middle English transla-
tion of Suso's Orologium Sapientiae, written around 1400, this is brought out
explicitly: "Sumtyme ... pou art so homelye, so godelye and ... sumtyme
in contrarye maner so strange & so ferre." 21 The contrast here is not be-
tween home and work or home and the street, but between home and es-
trangement. If, as Richard Sennett suggests, the city is the place where
strangers meet, then home is where one is known.22 We might think of the
way Nicholas Love describes the Blessed Virgin at the marriage at Cana in
the early fifteenth-century Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: "she ...
was pe eldest and most worpi of pe pre sisters. And perfore she was not
byden nor cleped [summoned] pidere as opere strangeres weren, bot she
was pere in hir sistere house homely as in hir owne house, ordeynyng, and
mynistryng as maistresse perof." 23 Not a stranger or even a guest, she be-
longs there by right of close kinship, "homely as in her owne hous": she
does not have to be invited; she knows where everything is kept, and she
can tell the kids to shut up and play elsewhere as if they were her own (be-
cause this is what "ordeynyng and mynistryng as maistresse therof" pre-
sumably includes).
The intimacies of home were often specifically loving; The Book of Vices
and Virtues says, "l>e ~ifte of pite ... is swetnesse of hert, pat makep a man
swete and debonere [meek], homliche, ful of charite." 24 The mystic Julian
of Norwich talks of having "a gostly sight of [God's] homely louyng. I saw

19 See C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven and Lon-
don, 1999), 46-82; Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural
History (Harmondsworth, 1980), 29-So.
2o Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-18oo (London, 1977).
21 C. Horstmann, "Orologium Sapientiae or the Seven Poyntes of Trewe Wisdom, aus MS
Douce 114," Anglia 10 (1888): 323-89, at 332.
22 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, 1974), 48.

23 Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Critical Edition Based on Cam-
bridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, ed. Michael G. Sargent (New York,
1992), 81.
24 The Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. W. N. Francis, EETS o.s., 217 (London, 1942), 143.

Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban Home 217

 that he is to vs all thing that is good and comfortable to our helpe."zs In re-
ligious writings Jesus is the exemplar of an affectionate domestic familiar-
ity in his relations with his followers: "hou louely he spekes to hem, and
how homely he shewep him self to hem, drawyng hem to his loue within-
forpe by grace and without forpe by dede, familiarely ledyng hem to his
modere house, and also goyng with hem oft to hir duellynges."26 Here
"homely" is part of the complex of love, closeness, and domestic living.
Plainness and directness seem also to have been hallmarks of homeli-
ness. It quite often seems to be positioned against elegance, sophistication,
or fashion: Chaucer uses "homliche" to mean straightforwardly;27 Hoc-
cleve uses "hoomlynesse" to mean lack of manners; 28 it can collocate with
"boistous" and "rude."29 In the Alliterative Marte Arthure of around 1400,
Arthur meets Sir Cradock on the road to Rome, in pilgrim's garb "with
hatte and with heyghe schone homely and rownde" (3485).30 These are not
the pointy shoes fashionable in England at the end of the fourteenth cen-
tury, but serviceable walking boots with room for the toes to spread. Not
just shoes, but hairstyles as well, could be "homli": in his translation of
Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Trevisa tells the reader that "Such a wif is worthi
to be ipreised pat fondip more to plese here housbonde wip heer homlich
iwounde pan wip heer gailiche ipinchid."31 [Such a wife is more deserving
of praise who tries to please her husband with hair plainly wound than
with hair showily crimped.] Home was the everyday, where you were
among your own ordinary things: the worn cushions, the broken mazer,
the dog's chain, the birdcage for a thrush, the cloak trimmed with fitchew
fur, the piece of plate with the greyhound feet, the bedcover with stars on
it, the rat trap, the primer, the bronze jars, the child's cart, and the child's
chair. All these things are named in York domestic inventories of the four-

25 A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge and James

Walsh, Studies and Texts 35, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1978), 1:299.

26 Nicholas Love's Mirror, ed. Sargent, So.
27 Geoffrey Chaucer, "Boece," III, pr.12, 199: "And thise thinges ne schewedest thou

naught with noone resouns ytaken fro withouten, but by proeves in cercles and homliche
knowen"; see The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Oxford, 1988). All Chaucer
quotations are from this edition.
28 "Letter of Cupid," ll. 132-33: "But on madding he be so deepe broght, I l>at he shende

al with open hoomlynesse [a noticeable lack of manners]"; see Hoccleve's Works, vol. 2, The
Minor Poems, ed. I. Gollancz, EETS extra ser., 73 (London, 1925).
29 E.g., Nicholas Love's Mirror, ed. Sargent, 150-51: "men vsen in bodily fedyng and £estes,
first to be seruede with buystes [crude] and homely metes, and after with more delicate and
deyntepes"; A Dialogue Between Reason and Adversity, ed. F. N. M. Diekstra (Nijmegen, 1968),
13: "Homly folk and rude brou3t me in to pis worlde."
30 King Arthur's Death: The Stanzaic Marte Arthur and Alliterative Marte Arthure, ed. Larry
D. Benson (Exeter, 1986).
31 On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa's Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De Propri-

etatibus Rerum, ed. M. C. Seymour et al., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1975), 1:309.

218 Felicity Riddy

teenth and fifteenth centuries.32 We can begin to see from all this how
homeliness might offer a position for anticourtly critique; that is, the urban
home might offer a critical perspective on the public sphere.
It is worth considering the kinds of feelings and attitudes associated
more generally with the home in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Eng-
land. The word "home" in Middle English may be a town or a country, or
more generally the place where you were born, the place you go back to at
the end of your journey or at the end of the day. Home was both public and
private; kings and armies go home to England, while husbands go home to
their wives. Home in the private sense was a house, the house that seems
to have been central to the idea of the household; "house and home" often
collocate in Middle English, though they do not mean quite the same thing.
"House" is the building; "home" is the focus of feelings associated with
where you belong and what you are most attached to. So the thirteenth-
century Vices and Virtues can speak of those who, in hope of Christ, forsake
"fader and moder, wif and children, hus and ham, and alle worldes wele
and blisse."33 Family, home, and happiness are all wrapped up together
here in a bundle of feelings about what it is that the apostolic life forgoes:
settledness, intimacy, the most archaic forms of relationship, content. The
grim thirteenth-century poem, "The latemest day," warns the man who is
too attached to the things of this world that "al hit wole a-gon I Is lont and
is lude, is hus and is hom."34 [It will all pass: his land and his property, his
house and his home.] The seemingly stable constituents of identity-what
you own, where you live-are already on their way. These early examples
both come from the writings of clerics, men exiled from family life, who,
we assume, left the parental home young and did not replicate it them-
selves. So perhaps in clerical discourses "home" has a particular force as a
signifier of what is most painful to give up.
But of course it was not only clerics who left home: The thirteenth and
early fourteenth centuries were a period of massive urban growth sus-
tained by immigration. After the Black Death and the later recurrences of
plague, towns maintained their populations-insofar as they did-only
through a continual influx of incomers. Bearing this in mind may help us to
identify specifically urban senses of home. Whatever adventurousness or
desperation or longing it was that drove people from their birthplaces
must also have ensured that many never went back because what they
went to towns to find could not be found where they were born. Often the
more successful townspeople remembered in their wills the places they

32 Probate Inventories of the York Diocese, 1]50-1500, ed. and trans. P.M. Stell and Louise

Hampson (unpublished typescript, York, 1999).

33 Vices and Virtues: Being a Soul's Confession of Its Sins, ed. F. Holthausen, EETS o.s., 89 and
159 (London, 1888-1921), 1:35.
34 English Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford, 1932), 46.

Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban Home 219

 had come from and the people they had left behind. Their memories of
home seem to be not merely a matter of retrospection but of nostalgia,
structured on an awareness of loss, especially sharp on the deathbed when
you know that you will never take the road home again. The London mer-
chant Richard de la Pole, less notorious than his younger brother William,
left his native Hull in Yorkshire for London in 1329, made his fortune there,
and retired to a manor in Northamptonshire. When he died in 1345 he left
money in his will for mending the roads north out of London and west out
of Hull.35 This seems a strikingly ambivalent good work: it enables the am-
bitious and dissatisfied to take the same route out that he had taken years
before, but at the same time it enables the homesick to go home.

Authority and Intimacy

Turning to the home itself, we can find many examples that represent it
from the male point of view as the place where one's wife and children are.
It is the place where the woman is naturalized as the fulfiller of bodily
needs: not a question of academic theory or even of morality but a matter-
of-fact acceptance of the everyday state of affairs: "And so he went home
and sett hym down to his meatt, and his wife sett bread befor hym"; "And
pis done, onone hur husband come home fro huntyng and bad hur oppyn
hym pe chamber dure, and he wold lay hym down and slepe a while";
"Hur husbond come home passand seke and bad hur make hym a cuche
pat he myght lig on."36 In these passages the roles of wife and husband are
not transferable: she is not coming home, expecting him to have made a
meal for her; she does not tell him to open the chamber door or make up
the couch so that she can sleep. He is mobile, she is stationary; he gives or-
ders; she sees to the needs of the body: food and rest. These quotations
come from preachers' exempla-the stories used to enliven sermons-and
have an unusual engagement with the familiar and everyday, which is of
course why they are used. But we need to be most wary of the everyday;
this is where the discourses of domination and power are so familiar that
they can go unnoticed. So my point is not that women did not leave the
home, that men never opened chamber doors for women or gave them
food or looked after them when they were sick; it is simply that the lan-
guage of everyday life was saturated with a sense that women, home, and
bodily needs go together and that these are what make the pull of home so
strong for men. The same familiar scene is depicted in the late-fifteenth-
century poem The Castle of Labour, which is a dream-allegory about the
dangers of idleness and its consequence, poverty. Toward the end of the
35 Testamenta Eboracensia or Wills Registered at York, Part I, ed. James Raine, Surtees Society
4 (London, 1836), 8.
36 An Alphabet of Tales, ed. Mary Macleod Banks, 2 vols., EETS o.s., 126, 127 (London, 1904,
1905; reprinted as 1 vol., Millwood, N.Y., 1987), 26,393, 117.

220 Felicity Riddy

poem, the narrator leaves the nightmare castle of labor and enters the
house of rest, which also turns out to be his own home:

I sa we rest whiche clyde me abyde

Within his hous withouten blame,
And my wyfe, on the other syde,
Dressed my sou per without dyffame.
There rested I in goddes name,
Famylyarly, nat as a straunger,
Thankynge god of inmortall fame
That I escaped was that daunger.

Unto the table I wente that tyde,

Entendynge to soupe without outrage.
My wyfe sate on the other syde,
After my custome and olde vsage.
There had we brede, wyne and potage,
And of flesshe a smale pytaunce;
Without to any hurte or damage
We souped togyder at our pleasaunce.

My wyfe voyded the table clene

And vnto me aprochde nere.
Than on my shulder clyde she lene,
After hyr custome and manere.
There tolde I her of the daunger
Whiche I was in the nyght before,
How that she slepte with mery chere
The whyle that I was troubled sore.37

Home means the known place, rest, a wife preparing a simple meal and
clearing it away, familiar routines, small gestures of intimacy. The woodcut
that illustrates this moment in Pynson's 1505 edition adds an eager dog
watching his master eat while his mistress tends a pot on the fire.38 This
ideology has a powerful institutional underpinning: "Bracton," the great
legal systematization of the thirteenth century, writing of the age of legal
maturity for women of the propertied class says: "A woman may be of full
age whenever she can and knows how to order her house and do the things
that belong to the arrangement and management of a house, provided she
understands what pertains to 'cove and keye,' which cannot be before her
fourteenth or fifteenth year since such things require discretion and under-
standing."39 Understanding "what pertains to 'cove and keye'" means

37 Alexander Barclay, The Castle of Labour, 2d ed. ([London): Richard Pynson, 1505), sig.
Iii-Iiii. My punctuation and minor corrections.
38 Ibid., sig. liii.
39 Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, ed. George Woodbine, trans. S. E. Thorne, 4
vols. (Harvard, 1961), 2:250-51.

Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban Home 221

 how to run a household, so adult womanhood is defined by the common
law as housekeeping. Two hundred years later the fifteenth-century En-
glish political polemicist, Sir John Fortescue, had turned this into an ideol-
ogy of separate spheres, as part of an argument about women's unfitness
for public rule: "a man devotes his attention to affairs outside, the woman
hers to the internal business of the family. Whence it is the duty of a
woman ... to keep quiet at home, and to look after the concerns of the
household."40 Looking after "the concerns of the household" means servic-
ing the demands of the body: eating, sleeping, washing, getting dressed
and undressed, preparing the food and clearing it away; raising the chil-
dren; tending the sick and the dying. In the houses of the great these activ-
ities were mediated by servants; in the middling-sized urban homes they
were the direct responsibility of the wife and mother.
Home, then, was the "locus of care," as the title of a recent book has it. 41
Home understood the body as needy, vulnerable, hungry, cold, growing
up and growing old, and endlessly leaky. "The everyday body" is the term
I have coined for the body understood in this way-the body in the home:
not intellectualized or medicalized; not the lower half of a body-mind hier-
archy; but something more like what Simone de Beauvoir calls "the body
as situation."42 It is the material predicament in which we find ourselves:
"fundamentally ambiguous, . .. subject at once to natural laws and to the
human production of meaning." 43
This kind of embodiedness works against the hierarchical structures that
were assumed by urban and national lawmakers. Viewed from the per-
spective of the everyday body, even the patriarchal home is democratic:
after all, one tired and hungry man is much like another. He brings his
needs to the woman, and she satisfies them. Aristotle's analysis of domes-
tic authority seems to allow for this. In arguing, in a passage I have already
quoted, that the rule of the husband over that of the wife is "constitu-

40 Sir John Fortescue, "De Natura Legis Naturae," trans. Chichester Fortescue, in The
Works of Sir John Fortescue, ed. Thomas Fortescue, 2 vols. (London: privately printed, 1869),
1:191-333, at 257. I am grateful to Dr. Cordelia Beattie for this reference. Fortescue later re-
tracted the argument of which this is part. The aim of "De Natura Legis Naturae," appar-
ently written in exile in the 146os, was to deny the legitimacy of the Yorkist claim to the
throne, on the grounds that it gave precedence to a daughter over a brother. Deeply tenden-
tious though it is, it is evidence of a certain strand of conservative thinking about women
and public life.
41 The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions, and the Provision of Welfare Since An-
tiquity, ed. Peregrine Harden and Richard Smith (London, 1998).
42 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley (London, 1997),
68-69. Originally published as Le Deuxieme Sexe (Paris, 1949).
43 Tori! Moi, What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford, 1999), 69. Author's italics. I dis-
cuss the everyday body in "Temporary Virginity and the Everyday Body: Bourgeois Self-
Making in Le Bone Florence of Rome," in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Ro-
mance, ed. Nicola McDonald (Manchester, forthcoming ).

222 Felicity Riddy

tional," he acknowledges a fundamental equality: "for the idea of a consti-
tutional state implies that the natures of the citizens are equal, and do not
differ at all." 44 In the constitutional state the citizens rule and are ruled in
turn; in the domestic sphere, as Aristotle explains it, the wife just never
happens to get her turn at authority. Nevertheless, we should not neglect
her point of view, disenfranchised from power as she is, and yet daily and
routinely reminded within the home that "the natures of the citizens are
equal." It was the practice in late medieval towns for women to tend the
sick and dying in their homes and to wind the bodies of the dead: this is
clear from postmortem inventories that record payment for this work.45 Al-
though funeral rites, of course, aimed to construct social difference in
death, the women who wound the bodies knew something else: how dying
dethrones the patriarch. He cannot keep his food down; he befouls his
sheets; he cries out in pain. Margery Kempe of Lynn is represented as
knowing this about her husband when he became senile in his last years,
and that knowledge is shown as a source of power in her constant con-
frontations with ecclesiastical, civic, and state authorities. Certainly her
Book records its protagonist telling an extraordinary story to a hostile priest
in which she likens him to a bear that eats flowers and then "whan he had
etyn hem, turnyng his tayl ende ... voydyd hem owt ageyn at the hymyr
party [shameful part]."46 This is not so much a Rabelaisian grasp of the
body's grotesqueness, I suggest, as a reductively domestic one: eating and
defecating are central activities to be managed by household routines; they
are the business of the kitchen and the privy. Margery Baxter, tried for
heresy in Norwich in 1429, was accused of having denied the doctrine of
the Real Presence. A witness claimed that she had said that if the sacrament
is God, "a thousand and more priests make a thousand such gods and af-
terwards eat these gods and, having eaten them, discharge them through
their posteriors into foul smelling privies, where you can find plenty of
such gods if you want to look." 47 For Julian of Norwich, the slightly older
contemporary of these two Margeries, the humanity of Jesus includes defe-
cating as well: "And that it is he that doyth this, it is schewed ther wher he
seyth he comyth downe to vs in the lowest parte of oure nede. For he hath

44 Aristotle, Politics, ed. Everson, I. 12: 27.

45 Probate Inventories, ed. Stell and Hampson: John Cadeby, Beverley mason, 1439: "A
woman for wrapping the body of the deceased 2d," So; Thomas Gryssop, York chapman,
1446: "A woman for looking after the deceased during his illness 1s. 8d," 91; William
Duffield, York canon residentiary, 1452: "Isabel Snaw for washing the clothes of the de-
ceased, 6s 8d ... Alice Kendall and another woman for wrapping the body of the deceased
in sindone 1s. 8d," 118; Katherine North, York, 1461: "To a woman for binding her 2d," 232.
46 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1996), 127.
47 Women in England c 1275-1525, ed. and trans. P. J.P. Goldberg (Manchester, 1995), 292,

from Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428-31, ed. Norman Tanner, Camden Society,
4th ser., 20 (London, 1977), 45· I owe this reference to Sarah Rees Jones.

Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban Home 223

 no dispite of that he made, ne he hath no disdeyne to serue vs at the sym-
plest office that to oure body longyth in kynde."48 [And that it is he that
does this, is shown where he says he comes down to us in the lowest part
of our need. He does not despise what he made nor does he disdain to
serve us at the humblest task that belongs to the body by way of nature.]
Jesus excretes like us.
That death (like defecation) is a leveler is a medieval sermon cliche, but it
means something different in the home from in the pulpit. Patriarchal au-
thority is never absolute, and perhaps least so in the home where it is seen
from terribly close up. What the child learns in the intimacy of the home
without even knowing it is her parents' physical vulnerability. If we accept
what I have already suggested, that women, more than men, were in-
volved in the household tasks relating to the management of the body, then
we might also agree that, as a concept, the everyday body is gendered. It is
produced by the person who cannot afford to be squeamish, who just has
to get on with cleaning up the vomit on the floor or, as Margery Kempe is
represented as having to do, changing the linen of an incontinent husband.
The regulations for nursing in the infirmary at Syon Abbey include these
instructions for the sister in charge of the care of the sick:

Ofte chaunge ther beddes and clothes, 3eue them medycynes, ley to ther
piastres, and mynyster to them mete and drynke, fyre and water, and al
other necessaryes, nyghte and day, as nede requyrethe, after counsel of the
phisicians, and precepte of the soueryne, not squaymes [squeamish] to
wasche them, and wype them, or auoyde them [empty their bowels], not
angry or hasty or unpacient thof one haue the vomet, another the fluxe, an-
other the frensy. 49

The physician counsels, the sovereign-the person in charge-issues pre-

cepts: the nurse unsqueamishly gets on with the business of care that in the
home is carried out without need of formal instruction.
Peregrine Horden has written that the household was not a republic of
care. By this he means that throughout the medieval period there were lim-
its on the capacity of small domestic units to sustain their sick or enfeebled
members independently. Horden postulates support networks extending
from the home into neighborhoods and kin groups, particularly networks

48 Book of Showings, ed. Colledge and Walsh, 2:307. That this passage refers to defecation is
clear from what precedes it: "A man goyth vppe right, and the soule [nourishment] of his
body is sparyde [closed] as a purse fulle feyer. And when it is tyme of his necessary, it is
opynyde and sparyde a yen fulle honestly."
49 Quoted by Claire Jones, "An Assortment of Doctors: The Readers of Medical Books in
Late Medieval England," Journal of the Early Book Society 3 (2ooo): 136-51, at 140, from G. J.
Aungier, The History and Antiquities of Syon Monastery, the Parish of Isleworth, and the Chapelry
of Hounslow (London, 1840), 395·

224 Felicity Riddy

of women.so As a unit for the management of the body, it seems that the
household was porous rather than independent, and this is why Harden
says that it is not a republic of care. But in another sense it is a republic: care
is, I suggest, disruptive of hierarchies and unimpressed by status. In the
course of the fifteenth-century romance Le Bone Florence of Rome, which sur-
vives in an urban domestic manuscript, the heroine is subject to brutal and
gratuitous demonstrations of male power.s1 She has been hung up by her
hair, cast out into the forest, and embraced till her ribs crack; most of the
men she meets have tried to rape her, either singly or en masse. But all is re-
versed when they become ill or disabled and bring their damaged bodies
to her to be healed: one has a festering wound (1943); another has a terrible
skin disease (2021-2); another shakes with palsy (2024); while a fourth has
to be carried in a wheelbarrow (2029). Florence does not shrink from all
this: unsqueamishly, "Sche handylde pem wyth hur hande" (2110), and
they are cured.
The everyday body is not only visible in respect of care, however; it is
also the subject of the civilizing processes of the courtesy texts, those little
poems of advice for adolescents that were read in bourgeois homes. Mer-
cantile and artisan households employed servants as a matter of course-
or, rather, exchanged them, since they were often young people from
homes of similar status. 52 Practical texts like "Urbanitatis" or "The Young
Children's Book" aimed to teach these young people how to manage the
body that sneezes, burps, yawns, farts, spits, and itches: "Fro spettyng and
snetyng [sniffing] kepe pe also; I Be priuy of voidance [breaking wind],
and lette it go" (19-20); "When pou sopys, make no noyse I With thi mouth
as do boys [urchins]" (127-8); "At thi tabull no per crache [scratch] ne claw,
I That men wylie say pou art a daw. I Wype not thi nose nor pi nos-thirlys
[nostrils], I Then men wylie sey pou come of cherlys" (139-42); and so
on. 53 These poems are all about establishing conventions of behavior in the
conditions of intimacy that I am arguing characterized the urban home,
marking oneself off from those lower-status people ("boys" and "cherlys")
who intrude their bodies into other people's consciousnesses. Norbert Elias

50 Peregrine Horden, "Household Care and Informal Networks: Comparisons and Conti-

nuities from Antiquity to the Present," in The Locus of Care, ed. Horden and Smith, 21-67.
51 The manuscript is Cambridge University Library, MS Ff. 2. 38; see Le Bone Florence of

Rome, ed. Carol Falvo Heffernan (Manchester, 1976). References are to this edition.
52 SeeP. J.P. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life-Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York
and Yorkshire c. 1300-1520 (Oxford, 1992), 168-86; idem, "What Was a Servant?" in Concepts
and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew
(Woodbridge, 2000), 1-20; Felicity Riddy, "Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a
Courtesy Text," Speculum 71 (1996): 66-86.
53 The first quotation is from "Urbanitatis," and the second from "The Young Children's

Book." Both are cited from The Babees Book, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS o.s., 32 (London,
1868), 13-15, 17-25.

Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban Home 225

 argues in The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, another master nar-
rative of modernity, that texts such as these show that people of the middle
ages "stood in a different relationship to one another than we do .... their
emotional life also had a different structure and character."54 Elias regards
them as more shameless than moderns, these people who did not use
forks; "what was lacking in this courtois world ... was the invisible wall of
affects which seems now to rise between one human body and another, re-
pelling and separating."55 He seems not to have known about Absolon in
Chaucer's "Miller's Tale," the part-time barber-surgeon who "was sumdeel
squaymous I Of fartyng" (3337-8). Absolon's fastidiousness is often inter-
preted as effeminate, but perhaps we should see him as "civilized" in
Elias's sense. He curls his hair, wears shoes with fancy designs, and is
squeamish about the body. Alison, the carpenter's teenaged wife, by con-
trast, has not yet learned the lessons of the courtesy texts: she sticks her
backside out of the window for a laugh, intruding her body into other peo-
ple's consciousnesses, including the reader's.
In contemporary America and Britain huge amounts of money are spent
on devices designed to eliminate personal odors in the home; our super-
market shelves groan with room fresheners, carpet deodorizers, toilet per-
fumes, and all manner of commercial products relating to personal hygiene.
This may suggest that we have become, as Elias argues, fastidiously civi-
lized. It may also suggest that what we have done is to commodify the
"leaky and oderiferous" everyday body-that we have moved it into the
marketplace.56 The repulsion and separation that Elias values may them-
selves be a product of consumerism rather than of civilization. After all, me-
dieval urban homes, too, knew about room fresheners: in the "Miller's
Tale," the room where Nicholas lodges in the house of John, the Oxford car-
penter, is "Ful fetisly ydight with herbes swoote" (3205).57 One of John
Mirk's sermons alludes to the custom of spring-cleaning: at Easter the fire-
place in the hall is cleaned out and "arayde with grene rusches, and swete
flowers strawed all about ... For ... ~e wyll not suffyr no ping in your
howse pat stynkype or sauereth euell, wherby pat ~e may be dosesyd."58
The medieval courtesy texts, with their unembarrassed awareness of bodily
functions that need to be regulated, seem to suggest that people in the home
knew each other to be animals, or-to put it another way-that the idea of
common humanness generated by the domestic sphere was embodied.
54 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civ-

ilization (Oxford, 1994), 55· Originally published as Uber der Prozess der Zivilisation, 2 vols.
(Basel, 1939).
55 Ibid., 55-56.
56 "Our bodies are leaky and odoriferous containers": Gurney, "Accommodating Bod-

ies," 55·
57 I am grateful to Mary Erler for reminding me of this.
58 Mirk's Festial, ed. T. Erbe, EETS extra ser., 96 (London, 1905), 129-30. I am grateful to
Fiona Dunlop, University of York, for pointing out this passage to me.

226 Felicity Riddy

 One of the dominant models of humanness in the period was, of course,
the humanity of Christ. There is no need to rehearse the evidence for a
change in the representation of Christ's humanity in the late middle ages,
so that the hieratic figure of earlier times becomes a realistically depicted,
suffering contemporary. There is a complex medieval theology surround-
ing the idea of God made man, but as Jesus is represented among laypeo-
ple in the discourses of affective devotion-naked, suffering, vulnerable,
frightened of dying, bleeding, and in need of care-his is the everyday
body at home. And the way in which his body, alive and dead, is tended,
and by whom-Mary Magdalene washing his feet, Veronica wiping his
face, the Marys tending his corpse-fits into the medieval women's net-
works of care that I have already referred to. It is something of a cliche
now to call Christ's crucified body feminized. Perhaps the perspective of
home allows us to think of it somewhat differently: as the body the home
knows about, not in itself gendered masculine or feminine. Knowledge of
it, unsqueamishness in dealing with it, may be female, but the body is not.
What is transgressive about the body of the crucified Christ, then, might
not be that it dissolves the gender binary but that it dissolves the pub-
lic/private one.
Homeliness itself, however, is located at the point where boundaries are
breached or dissolved. One reason why the term occurs so frequently in re-
ligious writings is because God's intimacy with the devout soul is precisely
such a dissolution of boundaries: "Loo, what myght thys noble lorde do
more wurschyppe and ioy to me than to shew to me that am so lytylle thys
marvelous homlynesse?"S9 It is God's condescension-his ignoring of the
boundaries that separate the low from the high-that is so often remarked
on by devotional writers and that is a perpetual source of wonderment to
Julian of Norwich. Intimacy suspends differences of status. Lords were not
supposed to be "homli"; the public sphere was marked by proper distance.
So the Secreta Secretorum counsels the ruler not to "haunte the company of
his sugetis, and specially of chorlis and ruralle folke, for bi ouyr moche
homelynes he shalle be the lasse honourid."60 But the breaching of bound-
aries goes both ways, of course. The obverse of condescension is boldness
or presumption, speaking on equal terms, or behaving as if you are at
home even when you are not. An early fifteenth-century poem, "Why I
Can't Be a Nun," says this directly: "Than at the yates in we yede [went], I
Boldly as thowgh we had be at home" (188-9),61 while Margaret Paston de-
scribes an occasion in 1450 when "the seyd enmys ben so bolde that they
kom vp tope lond and pleyn hem on Caster sondys and in othere plases as

59 Colledge and Walsh, eds., Book of Showings, 2:313-14.

60 Three Prose Versions of the Secreta Secretorum, ed. Robert Steele, EETS extra ser., 74 (Lon-
don, 1898), 12-13.
61 Six Ecclesiastical Satires, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1991).

Authority and Intimacy in the Late Medieval Urban Home 227

 homely as they were Englysch-men."62 And the Promptorium Parvulorum-
a Latin dictionary in a manuscript from around 1440-glosses "Boldenesse
or homelynesse" as "Presumpcio." 63 The irritation of John Paston II with
Margaret Maltby, his uncle's widow, who had possession of some family
deeds and would only hand them over for cash, seems to have been occa-
sioned by what he saw as bourgeois effrontery: "It is a peyne to deele wyth
hyre .... She is in many thyngys fulllyke a wyffe off London and off Lon-
done kyndenesse, and she woll needys take advise off Londonerys,
wheche I telle here can nott advyse her howghe she scholde deele weell
wyth any body off worshyp."64 Margaret Maltby had brought four of her
neighbors to the meeting, and answered him back. Lynn wives seem to
have behaved in the same way: The Book of Margery Kempe is full of encoun-
ters between its protagonist and men in authority to whom she is repre-
sented as speaking as she would at home: "Than seyde the suffragan to the
seyde creatur, 'Damsel, thu wer at my Lady Westmorland.' 'Whan, sir?'
seyde sche. 'At Estern,' seyd the suffragan. Sche, not replying, seyd, 'Wel,
ser?' "65 Or before this, the encounter with the Archbishop of York, who
says to her: " 'I am evyl enformyd of the; I her seyn thu art a ryth wikked
woman.' And sche seyd ageyn, 'Ser, so I her seyn that ye arn a wikkyd
man.' "66 Nagging wives are proverbial; bossy wives get carved in miseri-
cords and drawn in margins; but the wife who holds her ground and gives
as good as she gets is perhaps something different: the product of the egal-
itarian discourses of intimacy within the bourgeois home.

62 Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis (Oxford, 1971-76),

1:237-8.
63 Promptorium Parvulorum, ed. A. Way, 3 vols. (London, 1843-64), 1:43.
64 Paston Letters, ed. Davis, 1:513-14.
65 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Staley, 132.
66 Ibid., 125.

228 Felicity Riddy

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 CONTRIBUTORS

DYAN ELLIOTT is Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Religious

Studies at Indiana University. She is author of Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Ab-
stinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton University Press, 1993), Fallen Bodies:
Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages (University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1999), and Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisi-
tional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (forthcoming).

MARY C. ERLER is Professor of English at Fordham University. She is the

author of Women, Reading and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge
University Press, 2002) and has written on devotional reading for the Cam-
bridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3, 1400-1557· She is interested in
vowed women, in female reading and book ownership, and in early print-
ing (she edited the work of the Tudor printer-poet Robert Copland [Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 1993]). Her essays have appeared in The Library,
Modern Philology, Renaissance Quarterly, Viator, and other journals.

KATHERINE L. FRENCH is an Associate Professor of History at State Univer-

sity of New York-New Paltz. With Beat Ki.imin and Gary Gibbs, she is edi-
tor of The Parish in English Life (Manchester University Press, 1997). She is
author of The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English
Diocese (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) and is currently working
on a book on women in English parish life.

HoLLY S. HuRLBURT received her Ph.D. in History at Syracuse University

in 2000 and is currently an Assistant Professor at Southern Illinois Univer-

257
 sity, Carbondale. Her research focuses on women, family, gender, and rit-
ual in medieval and Renaissance Venice. Her book on the dogaresse of
Venice, tentatively titled First Wives of Venice, will be published by Pal-
grave/St. Martin's Press.

MARYANNE KowALESKI is Professor of History and Director of Medieval

Studies at Fordham University. She is author of Local Markets and Regional
Trade in Medieval Exeter (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and articles on
medieval trade and maritime history, and editor of two volumes of me-
dieval account rolls. Her publications on medieval women include the co-
edited volume (with Mary Erler) Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Uni-
versity of Georgia Press, 1988) and articles on women and work, the
demographic history of singlewomen, and urban families.

WENDY R. LARSON received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at

Madison and is currently an Assistant Professor in the English department
at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. She is working on a history of the
cult of St. Margaret of Antioch.

Jo ANN McNAMARA was Professor of History at Hunter College for many

years with added instruction in the Ph.D. program in history at the Gradu-
ate Center of the City University of New York. She taught courses in me-
dieval history, including the medieval family and medieval women, and
ancient and medieval Christianity. Her books include A New Song: Celibate
Women in the First Three Christian Centuries (Haworth, 1983) and Sisters in
Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Harvard University Press,
1996). In her retirement, she is working on a gendered history of the first
millennium.

BARBARA NEWMAN is Professor of English and Religion at Northwestern

University. She is the author of God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Be-
lief in the Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) and From
Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), as well as three books about
Hildegard of Bingen. She has held fellowships from the American Council
of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Kaplan Center
for the Humanities at Northwestern, and is a fellow of the Medieval Acad-
emy of America.

SARAH REES JoNES is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the Centre for
Medieval Studies, University of York. She has completed several studies in
conjunction with the York Archaeological Trust that reconstruct sites exca-
vated in the city. Her publications include articles on the urban household,
the history of urban citizenship, and Margery Kempe, as well as co-edited

258 Contributors
volumes on such topics as the government of medieval York and "prag-
matic utopias." She is currently working on a monograph on medieval
York.

FELICITY RmnY is the author of Sir Thomas Malory and has edited Selected
Poems of Henryson and Dunbar (with Priscilla Bawcutt). She has published
many articles on medieval literature and is now working on a book on late
medieval urban domesticity. For three years she was Director of the Centre
for Medieval Studies at the University of York, where she is now Deputy
Vice-Chancellor and Professor of English.

PAMELA SHEINGORN is Professor of History at Baruch College, City Univer-

sity of New York, and Professor of History and Theatre at the Graduate
Center, City University of New York, where she is Executive Officer of the
Ph.D. Program in Theatre. She is co-author of Writing Faith: Text, Sign, and
History in the Miracles of Sainte Fay (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and
of Myth, Montage, and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine
de Pizan's Epistre d'Othea (University of Michigan Press, 2003), as well as co-
editor of Same-Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages (Pal-
grave, 2001), and the annual Studies in Iconography.

NICHOLAS WATSON has an M.Phil. from Oxford University, a Ph.D. from

the University of Toronto, and is Professor of English and American Litera-
ture and Language at Harvard University. He has researched extensively
on religious writing in England, with a particular focus on mystical works
and on works written by and for women. His books include Richard Rolle
and the Invention of Authority (1991) and Anchoritic Spirituality: "Ancrene
Wisse" and Associated Works (with Anne Savage, 1991). He is presently fin-
ishing an edition of the works of Julian of Norwich (with Jacqueline Jenk-
ins) and working on a companion volume to this edition. His long-term
goal is to write a history of vernacular religious writing in England be-
tween the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the Reformation.

JocELYN WOGAN-BROWNE is Professor of English at Fordham University

and has taught in the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and the United
States. Her most recent publication is Saints' Lives and Women's Literary Cul-
ture c. 115o-noo: Virginity and Its Authorizations (Oxford University Press,
2001). She is co-editor of The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle
English Literary Theory, 1280-1520 (Pennsylvania State University Press,
1999), Medieval Women: Texts and Context in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for
Felicity Riddy (Brepols, 2000), and other collaborative works and has edited,
translated, and published articles on literature for and by women in me-
dieval England. She is currently working on various projects in the French
literature of England, including a translation series.

Contributors 259
 INDEX

Note: Italic page numbers indicate illustrations.

Abou-el-Haj, Barbara, 132 scholarly study of, 91; and self-contain-

Adelheid (Holy Roman empress), 24, 25 ment, 69-70; and women's power, 5-6, 54,
Aelred of Rievaulx, 54-55, 61, 61 n. 21, 62, 59; and women's religious lives, 72
68 n. 31 Anglo-Norman Text Society, 74
Agency: forces determining possibility of, 3; Anglo-Norman texts, 9, 74, 91-92, 93
and power, 1. See also Women's agency Anne of Burgundy (duchess of Bedford), 121,
Agnes (German empress), 35 123
Alan of Lille, 135-36, 137, 140, 143, 150, 153, Anne, Saint, teaching the Virgin Mary: images
155 of, 108, 110,110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 119, 121,
Albert the Great, 47, 107 123, 124,125, 126,127, 128, 129,130, 1}1,
Allen, Prudence, 23 132, 133, 134; and Incarnation history, 110,
Amice de Haddon, 124 112, 113, 116; and literacy, 13, 106, 108, 124,
Anchoresses: and apocalyptic thinking, 62; 126, 128, 132-33; St. Anne Trinity, 112-13,
athletic coach-like approach toward, 59-61; 114,115, 116, 117,118,120,121,122, 123
and cult of St. Margaret, 95; and hagiogra- Annunciation, 107, 112
phy, 79-80; hermits compared to, 54, 55, 69; Antichrist, 48
instructions for, 54, 72; and interiority, 53, Antoninus of Florence, 44, 51
55, 58, 65-66; and lay spirituality, 62-69; as Aristocratic women: education of, 131; and
readers, So; and religious orders, 54, 56-57, Faith of Agen and Conques, 82, 82 n. 30;
58 and family /kinship networks, 7, 19-22,
Ancrene Wisse: athletic coach-like attitude of 24-29; and patronage, 86-87, 88; and politi-
author, 59-61; and communities of women, cal interests, 26, 175; and property rights,
So, 81; and confession, 55-56; geography 20, 198; and public power, 7, 18-19, 21,
of, So-81, 84; and hagiography, 7g-8o; and 25-26, 27; roles/responsibilities of, 188; as
inner self, 55, 63, 69-70, So; and lay spiritu- surrogates for husbands, 26-27. See also
ality, 56, 58, 62-69, 72; and misogyny, 54, Class; Elite women
56, 58, 59, 6o, 69; modem editions of, 73; Aristotle: concept of gender, 23, 26, 154; and
and nationalism, 9, 73; and religious or- dichotomy of form and matter, 144; and
ders, 56-57; and satire, 68-69, 68 n. 31; domestic authority, 213-14, 222-23
 Ascetic practices: and Ancrene Wisse, 55, 59, Campsey manuscript: and communities of
61-62; and lay spirituality, 66; and mysti- women, 10, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93; and elite
cism, 6 women, 14, 76, 78, 82, 88, 89, 90; and fe-
Ashley, Kathleen, 113 male authorship, 75-76,75-76 n. 15, 77; ge-
Aude,50 ography of, 81-82,83,84, 85, 86, 88, 89,
Audree of Ely, 77, 78, 79, 85, 90 92-93; and hagiography, 74-79, 81-82, 84,
Augustine, Saint (Canterbury), 32 86, 89, 92; and lineages, 86, 87, 88, 92-93;
Augustine, Saint (Hippo), 52,213,214 and master narratives, 91, 92; and net-
Augustus (Roman emperor), 28 works, 88, 88 n. 44, 92--93; and texts, 9-10,
77,81,87-88
Babington, Katherine, 92 Canon law, 157,215
Backhouse, Janet, 121 Carolingian period, 8, 19-20, 24, 25
Barbaro, Francesco, 178, 178 n. 13 Carrasco, Magdalena, 132
Barking Abbey, 71, 75, 86 Cassian, John, 53
Bartholmaeus Anglicus, 218 Castle of Labour, The, 220-21
Baxter, Margery, 223 Catherine de Westhusen, 49
Beau voir, Simone de, 222 Catherine of Alexandria, 77, 78, 79, So, 82, 89,
Becket, Marie, 75 100
Becket, Saint Thomas, 75, 77, 78, 79, 82, 90 Cecily de Chan ville, 89
Bedford Hours, 121, 123 Chambers, R. W., 73
Beguines: and Ancrene Wisse, 58; as commu- Chance, Jane, 7
nity of women, 72; and confession, 3, 32, Chanson de Roland, 74
34, 36, 37, 40-41, 42, 139; imitations of, Charlemagne, 24
38-39; and Jean de Meun, 139-40; and pa- Charles V (king of France), 184, 186, 187
triarchal status quo, 14; and penitential Chaucer, Geoffrey, 138, 139, 140, 195,218,
system, 35, 40-41; and purgatory, 35,35 n. 226
12; and scrupulosity, 46 Childbirth: and Christine de Pizan, 155; and
Beissel, Stephan, 113 communities of women, 174; and corona-
Bennett, Judith, 8-9, 22, 128 tion rituals, 185; and parish guilds, 169;
Black Death: and family /kinship networks, and St. Anne, 113; and St. Margaret, 12,
202; and tenants, 11,202,204,206,207, 208; 94-96,97,98,99,100-102,104
and urban senses of home, 219; and work- Children: and aristocratic women, 26; and
ing women, 8, 9, 11, 204, 206, 207-9, 210 class, 216; and home, 220; and inheritance,
Blanton-Whetsall, Virginia, 84 2oo-2o1, 200 n. 46; and intimacy, 217,224
Boethius, 150 Chocke, Margaret, 162
Bona of Savoy, 184, 184 n. 31 Christianity: and interiority, 52, 53; and mar-
Bonaventure, Saint, 34, 40 n. 27, 42 riage practices, 27, 28; and parish activities,
Bone Florence of Rome, Le, 225 172. See also Roman Catholic Church
Book of Vices and Virtues, The, 217 Christina Mirabilis, 39
Book to a Mother, 63, 64, 65, 68 Christina of Markyate, 71
Book to a Simple and Devout Woman, 68, 69 Christine de Pizan: Book of the Mutation of For-
Books of Hours: Hours of the Virgin, 128; tune, The, 148-52, 154, 155; City of Ladies,
Latin primer, 126; Little Hours of the Vir- The, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155; Epistle of
gin, 58; Primer of Claude of France, 128, the God of Love, 148; and female authorship,
129, 130; Sarum Book of Hours, 124, 126 75 n. 15; and female identity, 151; and Jean
Boudicca (British queen), 27, 28 de Meun, 137, 139, 148, 149, 153-54, 155;
Bozon, Nicholas, 75 Lavision-Christine, 140, 148, 152-55; and lit-
Braun, Joseph, 110, 112, 113, 116 eracy, 105, 134; and Nature, 14, 136, 140,
Bridget of Sweden, 35 148-50, 151, 152, 153-55; Querelle de Ia Rose,
Brown, Peter, 18 148
Brunhild (Merovingian queen), 25, 26 Church and state, separation of, 29
Burgage tenements, 201, 202, 203 Churchwardens, 157, 161, 168, 169
Burke, Peter, 172 Clanchy, M. T., 124, 126
Bury St. Edmunds monastery, 84, 86, 90 Class: and family /kinship networks, 19; and
Butler, Judith, 2 female patronage, 13, 104; and intimacy,
Bynum, Caroline Walker, 34 227; and literacy, 126, 128, 131; and marital
Byzantine empresses, 184-85, 186, 187, 187 n. status, 23, 210; and Nature, 143-44; as or-
38,188 ganizing principle of society, 8, 23, 24; and

262 Index
 parish guilds, 16S; and parish seating Damian, Peter, 35,55
arrangements, 164; and St. Margaret, Dante, 152
95-96; and transfer of power from aristoc- Davis, Isabel, 196
racy to clergy, 22; and urban horne design, Davis, Natalie Zeman, 170
211, 216; and women's parish activities, De planctu Naturae, 137
157-5S. See also Aristocratic women; Elite DeVere, Alice, S4, S4 n. 33
women DeVere, William (bishop of Hereford), S4
Clemence of Barking, So, S9 Demography: and communities of women,
Clergy: and attraction to holy women, 42-44, 12, 16; and gendering of domestic and
42 n. 35; benefit of clergy, 126, 126 n. 40; working space, 196; and marital status,
clerical celibacy, S, 23; as confessors, 31, 33, 11-12, 12 n. 26
34, 36-37, 43, 44, 49, 164; and female sub- Denise de Montchensy, 126, 12S
culture, 165, 172; and fraudulent female Domestic sphere: and Christine de Pizan,
raptures, 3S-39; and horne, 219; versus lay, 155; in eleventh century, 27; and gender, 5,
56; and parish seating arrangements, 164; 190-97; and house as status object, 204;
and power of absolution, 46; and St. Mar- and isolation, 21; and literacy, 12S; and
garet cult, 12, 98-100, 102, 104; transfer of mother's role as teacher, 131-32; and
power to, 22; women's exclusion from, 23; parish activities, 15S, 173; and parish sup-
and women's parish activities, 157, 171-72 port, 160, 161-62, 167; and public/private
Clothild (Frankish queen), 26 dichotomy, 213-14, 222-23; scholarly study
Clover, Carol, 24 of, 16; urban domestic living, 215, 216; and
Clovis (king of Salian Franks), 26 working women, 193. See also Horne
Coakley, John, 36 Dominican order, 33, 41, 42
Cornestor, Peter, S8-S9 Dorothea of Montau, 41, 49
Communities of women: and Ancrene Wisse, Dowry system, 20, 160, 1So, 1S1
So, S1; and Carnpsey manuscript, 10, S7, Duby, Georges, 1S, 20-21, 214-15
SS, S9, 90, 92, 93; and consorts, 175; and
coronation rituals, 1S7; and demography, Early English Text Society (EETS), 73
12, 16; and hagiography, 71; and political Economic conditions, and working women,
interests, 1SS; and rituals, 174-75, 177-7S, zoS, 209, 210-11
17S n. 12, 179, 1S3 n. zS, 1S7, 1S7 n. 39; and Edith (queen of England), 7S
spiritual experience, 6; and Venetian doga- Edmund, archbishop of Canterbury, 76, 77,
resse's entrance procession, 4, 10, 175, 7S, 79, Sz, ss, 90
177-79, 1S2, 1S7 n. 39 Education: and clergy, 23; and mother as
Confession: and Ancrene Wisse, 55-56; and teacher, 131; of Virgin Mary, 106-8, 109,
Beguines,3,32,34,36,37,40-41,42, 139; 12S, 134; women's access to, S, 15, 22, 105,
and communion, 34, 34 n. 11; as discourse, 105-6 n. 2, 131
15; and empowerment/ disernpowerrnent, Edward the Confessor, Saint (king of Eng-
3, 32, 40; frequency of, 9, 41-42, 41-42 n. 31, land), 77, 7S, 79
44; and heretical revelations, 3, 33, 40, 40 n. Eldersharn, Margaret, 164
27; and inner self, 52; institutional frame- Elias, Norbert, 225-26
work for, 50-51; and laywomen as confess- Elisabeth of Hungary, 75, 77, 79
ing subjects, 31, 34; and male-female rela- Elisabeth of Spalbeek, 37-3S
tionship, 3-4, 33, 35-36, 41-42, 4S, 51, 164; Elite women: and Carnpsey manuscript, 14,
and penitential system, 35, 37, 42-46, 4S, 76, 7S, Sz, SS, S9, 90; and housing practice,
49, 50-51; and scrupulosity, 45-49; tactical 11; and literacy, 13, 12S, 131; marriage ritu-
use of, 37, 3S als of, 1So-Sz, 1S1 n. 21; and parish guilds,
Consorts: influence of, 174-76; and political 16S; pilgrimages of, Sz; and public author-
interests, 25, 26, 175, 176, 177, 179, 1So, 1S1, ity, S; and Venetian dogaresse's entrance
1S4, 1S5; and rituals, 1S3-S4, 1S9. See also procession, 17S, 1S2; and women's parish
Queens; Venetian dogaresse's entrance pro- activities, 157-5S. See also Aristocratic
cession women; Class
Constance de Rabastens, 50 Elliott, Dyan, 3-4, 6, 9, 52
Constantine (Roman emperor), 27, zS Empowerment/ disernpowerrnent, 4, 32, 40
Corbet, Patrick, 26 Erler, Mary, 190
Cottages, 191 n. 6, 192, 194, 195 n. 22, 202, Errnengard (countess of Brittany), 36
204,210,211 Essentialism, 14
Council of Constance (1415), 4S Ethelburga, Saint, 71

Index 263
 Etheldreda of Ely, Saint, 75, 77, 78, 79, 84, 87 Gender relations: and housing practice, 11;
Evergates, Ted, 21 and lay spirituality, 5-6; and women's
Eyck, Jan van, 101-2 power, 5, 15-16
Gender roles: and communities of women,
Faith of Agen and Conques, 77, 78, 79, 82, 175; and Hocktide celebrations, 169-72;
82 n. 30,86 and home, 220; and parish activities, 4,
Family identity, and housing practice, 11, 202, 156-59, 156 n. 1, 172; and parish guilds,
203 168
Family /kinship networks: and aristocratic Gender system shift: and master narrative,
women's power, 7, 1<)-22, 24-29; and Black 7-8, 22, 29-30; and women's position in
Death, 202; changes in structure, 20, 21; marriage, 25, 28
and clergy, 23; and home, 217; and house- Germanic kings and queens, 26
holds, 201-2, 204; and property ownership, Gerontocracy, 180
198-201, 209; and public/private di- Gerson, Jean, 36-37, 40, 44, 45-47, 48, 50
chotomy, 214; and single-gender system, Gibson, Gail McMurray, 128, 131
24; and tenants, 202; women's detachment Gilchrist, Roberta, 190
from, 203; women's influence through, 2 Giotto, 106
Female spiritual writing, 6-7 Goddesses, 135, 149, 155. See also Nature
Female subcultures: clergy's fear of, 165, 172; Goldberg, Jeremy, 190, 196, 206, 209
effect on women, 13-14; and parish activi- Goody, Jack, 133
ties, 164-65; and parish guilds, 169, 169 n. Great woman model, 2, 16
73 Gregorian reforms, g, 22
Feminist history: and female subcultures, Gregory the Great, 32, 45, 47, 48, 49
13-14; Foucault's effect on, 2; and free sub- Grundmann, Herbert, 54
ject versus victimization, 3; and historical Guainerius, Anthonius, 94-95
recovery, 3, 10; and transformations, 9 Guglielmites, 50
Fertility, 11, 12 n. 26 Guiard de Cressonessart, 41
Feudalism, 18, 19 n. 6, 22 Guide for Anchoresses. See Ancrene Wisse
Fitzwarin Psalter, 122 Guilds: and cottages, 194; craft guilds, 10,
Fortescue, Sir John, 222 202, 212; regulations of working hours,
Foucault, Michel, 1, 2, 3, 27 192; and Venetian dogaresse's entrance
Fournier, Bishop, 50 procession, 177, 177 n. 10. See also Parish
Fourth Lateran Council, 3, g, 34, 40, 41, 54 guilds
Frances of Rome, 35 Guillaume de Lorris, 136
Francis, Saint, 42 Guillaume le Clerc, 84
Franciscan order, 33, 34,41-42 Gurney, Craig M., 216
Frankpledge, 212 Gy, Pierre-Marie, 40
Fredegund (Frankish queen), 26
French, Katherine, 4, 10 Hagiography: and becoming a man, 151; and
Freud, Sigmund, 52 Campsey manuscript, 74-79, 81-82, 84, 86,
Fulk (bishop of Toulouse), 32 8g, 92; and communities of women, 71;
contexts of, 87, 92; cultural functions of,
Gatenby, John, 199 113; and Katherine Group, 73, 74, 7g-8o;
Geary, Patrick, 87, 92 pictorial hagiography, 132; as romance, 81.
Gender: and Ancrene Wisse, 55, 56, 58, 59, 6o; See also Saints
Aristotelian concept of, 23, 26, 154; and be- Hahn, Cynthia, 132
coming male, 136, 147, 151, 152, 155; and Hall houses, 191 n. 6, 192, 204, 210
Christine de Pizan, 149-55; and dangerous Hanawalt, Barbara, 128, 190, 196
activity, 193; and domestic sphere, 5, Heldris of Cornwall, 136, 140-47, 149, 151,
19o-97; and everyday body, 224; and Na- 166; Roman de Silence, 14, 136, 140-48,
ture, 135-36,140,142,143-44,149,154, 155; 142 n. 19, 151
as organizing principle of society, 23, 24; Helena (Roman empress), 27
and parish support, 160-61; performative Henry of Freimar, 44
nature of, 2; and property, 191; and rituals, Heraclitus, 17
188-Sg; and Roman de Silence, 142, 142 n. Heretical revelations: and confession, 3, 33,
19, 143-44, 146-48; and scrupulosity, 4T 40, 40 n. 27; and inquisition, 49-50, 50 n.
and single-gender system, 24, 25-26, 28, 70,51
29-30 Herlihy, David, 18

264 Index
Hermits: anchoresses compared to, 54, 55, 69; Jacques de Vitry, 32, 34, 35, 41, 47, 54
and inner hermit, 65-68; and inner self, 53, James, Saint, 57
69; and medieval women's power, 54; and Jantzen, Grace, 6
physical mortification, 61, 62; and religious Jean de Meun: and Christine de Pizan, 137,
orders, 58. See also Ancrene Wisse 139, 148, 149, 153-54, 155; inventiveness
Hierarchical domination: and confession, 51; compared to Sybil's, 39; and Nature,
models of resistance to, 2; and organization 136-40, 150, 153, 155; and Roman de Silence,
of labor, 196, 211; and physical care, 5, 225 141, 145; Romance of the Rose, 14,136-40,
Hildegard of Bingen, 23 145, 148, 155
Hilton, Walter, 63 Jeanne (queen of France), 184-85, 185 n. 33,
Historical periods: and gender construction, 186,187
8, 9, 13, 15-16; and master narrative, 2?; Jesus Christ: Ancrene Wisse representation of,
placement in time, 17, 18; and women's re- 55; brides of, 28, 55, 78, So; and everyday
lation to power, 2 body, 223-24, 227; and horne, 218; and St.
Hoccleve, Thomas, 218 Anne Trinity, 112-13, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118,
Hocktide celebrations, 4, 165, 166-67, 168, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123
169-72 Joachirn of Fiore, 62
Holy Book Gratia Dei, The, 63, 64 Joan of Arc, 50
Holy Kinship, 121, 123 Judith of Bavaria, 24
Holy women: and attraction to clergy, 42-44, Julian of Norwich, 6, 52,217-18,223-24,
42 n. 35; and confession, 31, 36 227
Horne: and death, 223-24; and discourse, 15;
and everyday body, 220, 222-27; and gen- Katherine Group: and Ancrene Wisse, 72;
der relations, 5; and intimacy, 5, 215-20, Carnpsey manuscript compared to, 90; and
225, 228; and public authority, 212-14; communities of women, 81; geography of,
urban senses of, 219-20; women as horne 81-84; and hagiography, 73, 74, 79-80; and
owners, 197-201, 211. See also Domestic ideal target reader, 87
sphere; Urban horne design Kempe, Margery: and everyday body, 223,
Hornosocial bond, 25 224; and hagiography, 71; and inner self,
Horden, Peregrine, 224-25 69; and literacy, 128; and public authority,
Horsham St. Faith, 82 223, 228; and women's preaching/teaching,
Hospitallers, 58 6
Hours of the Virgin, 128 Kowaleski, Maryanne, 190
Howell, Martha, 21, 198 Kunegond (nun), 48
Hugh de Northwold, 84, 86
Hughes, Diane Owen, 20 Laon, bishop of, 37-38
Humanism, 8 Larson, Wendy, 12-13
Huot, Sylvia, 153-54 La tin primer, 126
Hurlburt, Holly, 4-5, 10 Lay spirituality: and Ancrene Wisse, 56, 58,
Hus,Jan,48 62-69, 72; and confession, 31, 34; and gen-
der relations, 5-6; and St. Margaret, 95-96
Inheritance: and Christine de Pizan, 149; and Leadership: and female subcultures, 14; and
economic conditions, 21, 22; and legal sys- fund-raising, 4, 172; and parish guilds, 4,
tem, 20, 198, 199-200, 200 n. 46; and mar- 167-68,169
riage practices, 21, 22; and Roman de Si- Legal system: canon law, 157, 215; English
lence, 142, 145; and single women, 201, common law, 197, 198, 200, 222; and every-
201 n. 51, 203, 211; and tenants at will, 204; day body, 222; and family /kinship net-
and Venetian dogaressa, 175 work, 19-20; and inheritance, 20, 198,
Innocent III, 48 199-200, 200 n. 46; law of coverture, 16o;
Interiority: and anchoresses, 53, 55, 58, 65-66; and women's adulthood, 221-22; and
and Ancrene Wisse, 55, 63, 69-70, So; and women's property ownership, 198-99
embodiments of inner self, 52-56; women's Levi-Strauss, Claude, 19, 146 n. 25
association with, 6 Literacy: and Christine de Pizan, 105, 134; ev-
Internalized oppression, 3 idence of, 105-6, 126; growth of, 124, 126;
Intimacy: and horne, 5, 215-20,225, 228; and mother's responsibility for, 128, 131; and
public authority, 220-28 St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary, 13, 106,
Isabella of Arundel, 76, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 108, 124, 126, 128, 132-33; uses of, 133, 134;
91 of Virgin Mary, 107
 Literary culture, 10, 74, 76, 79-80, 81, 87-88 23; as gendered beings, 22; and horne, 220;
Little Hours of the Virgin, 58 and marital status and housing, 194, 195;
Livia (Roman empress), 28 married, as second-class citizens, 23; and
Livingstone, Amy, 21 parish guilds, 165-66, 167, 168; and parish
Livre de Ia mutacion de Fortune, Le, 136 offices, 4, 156, 157; and parish seating
Lollardy, 63, 65 arrangements, 163; and parish support,
Lothar, 24 160; and public authority, 213,214, 215;
Louis the Pious, 24 and safety of work, 195, 196; as tenants,
Love, Nicholas, 63, 107,217 205, 206, 207, 209, 210; and women's parish
Lutgard of Aywieres, 42,46 activities, 159
Lydgate, John, 97 Menstruation, 47
Merovingian period, 25,26
Male-female relationships: and attraction be- Metaphrastes, Simeon, 98
tween holy women and clergy, 42-44, 42 n. Middle ages: as historical period, 18, 27, 29;
35; and confession, 3-4,33,35-36,41-42, as visual culture, 132; women's social role
48, 51, 164; and fraudulent raptures, 39-40; in, 36
and Hocktide celebrations, 172; and Millett, Bella, 57-58
scrupulosity, 47 Mirk, John, 158-59, 164, 226
Maltby, Margaret, 228 Misogyny: and Ancrene Wisse, 54, 56, 58, 59,
Margaret of Antioch, Saint: artifacts of, 6o, 69; and clergy, 172; and Jean de Meun,
100-102, 101, 103, 104; as childbirth advo- 139, 148; and Roman de Silence, 141 n. 17,
cate, 12, 94-102, 104; emergence from belly 142, 146
ofdragon,95,96,98-1oo;prayersto,97-98, Modwenna of Britain, Saint: and Carnpsey
102, 103 manuscript, 77, 78, 79; and communities of
Marguerite Porete, 40-41 women, 87; sites associated with, 82, 84,
Marital status: and class, 23, 210; cultural in- 84 n. J4, 85
centives to marry, 211; and demography, Monasteries: and Ancrene Wisse, 72; and
11-12, 12 n. 26; and guilds, 194; and house Carnpsey manuscript, 78; and copyists, 88,
as status object, 204; and joint title to prop- 88-89 n. 46; and female subcultures, 14;
erty, 200,200 n. 46; and parish guilds, 165, hermit's rejection of, 53; and manly
167, 168-69; and political activity, 5, 24, women, 28; opposition to, 65; women's ac-
27-28, 182, 188; and tenants, 194, 195, cess to positions of power in, 8
209 nn. 75, 76; and urban horne design, Moore, R. I., 22
195; and Venetian dogaresse's entrance Morality: and Christine de Pizan, 152; and
procession, 5, 179, 180; and women's prop- moral safety in horne, 193; and Nature,
erty ownership, 197-98; and working 143, 149
women, 209. See also Single women More, Sir Thomas, 6, 68, 69
Marriage practices, 21, 22, 23, 25-26, 27 Morgan, Nigel, 121
Martyrs,28,51,98,167 Muth, Hanswernfried, 116
Mary Magdalene, Saint, 48, 77, 78, 79, 82, 84, Mysticism: and confession, 36-37; and fraud-
89,227 ulent female raptures, 38-39, 38 n. 27; and
Mary of Brabant, 37 goddesses, 135; Jantzen redefinition of, 6;
Mary of Oignies, 32, 34, 35, 46, 54 and Mary of Oignies's life, 32
Mary Play from the N.town Manuscript, The,
106, 108 n. 12, 133 Na Prous Boneta, 50
Master narrative: and Carnpsey manuscript, Nationalism, 6, 9, 13, 73, 74,91
91, 92; and gender system shift, 7-8, 22, Nature: and Christine de Pizan, 14, 136, 140,
29-30; gendering of, 15; and historical peri- 148-55; and gender, 135-36, 140, 142,
ods, 27; and horne, 214; multiple meanings 143-44, 149-50, 154, 155; and Heldris of
of, 7; and power structure shift, 22; and re- Cornwall, 136, 140-47; and Jean de Meun,
liance on political and institutional themes, 136-40,150,153,155
9, 18, 29; and St. Margaret, roo, 104 Networks. See Family /kinship networks; So-
Maud (queen of England), 78 cial networks
McNamara, JoAnn, 7-8, 9, 13 Newman, Barbara, 14, 55
Meditationes vitae Christi, 107 Nicholas of Duns table, 86
Men: and Ancrene Wisse, 55, 62, 64-65, 66, 6T Nider, John, 44, 47-48
and egalitarianism of ecclesiastical society, Niezen, R. W., 133

266 Index
Norman conquest of England, 8, 73 Plato, 52, 153
Nunnery culture, 76 Pliny, 42
Plow Monday celebrations, 165
Old English Martyrology, 98 Plutarch, 27
Oostsanen, Cornelisz van, 121, 122 Pole, Richard de Ia, 220
Osith of Chich: and Campsey manuscript, 77, Political interests: and aristocratic women,
78, 79, go; and communities of women, 87; 26, 175; and burgage tenements, 202; and
sites associated with, 82, 84, 84 n. 33, 85 consorts, 25, 26, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181,
Otto the Great, 24 184, 185; and coronation rituals, 184, 185,
Ottonian empresses, 26, 27 187; and households, 213; and marital sta-
tus, 5, 24, 27-28, 182, 188; and public/pri-
Panuce, 77, 79 vate dichotomy, 215; and Venetian doga-
Paris, Matthew, 76, 78 resse's entrance procession, 177, 179, 180,
Parish activities: and gender roles, 4, 156-59, 181, 182-83, 182 n. 27, 185; and womens'
156 n. 1, 172; and leadership roles, 158, 168, economic interests, 211
172 Power, and agency, 1
Parish fund-raising, 4, 159-60, 162-63, Primer of Claude of France, 128, 129, 130
165-67,172 Primogeniture, 20, 21
Parish guilds, 4, 165, 166-68, 169, 172; and Privacy, 191, 210, 215, 216. See also
stores, 165-69 Public/private dichotomy
Parish seating arrangements, 4, 162, 163-64, Promptorium Parvulorum, 228
163 n. 32, 172-73 Property: aristocratic women's control of, 20,
Parish support: and fund-raising, 4, 159-60, 198; and Campsey manuscripts, 78; and
162-63, 165-67, 172; and gifts and testa- domestic status of tenants, 195; and gen-
mentary bequests, 16o-61, 172; women's der, 191; and house as status object, 201-4;
specific instructions for, 161-62, 172 and jointures, 200,200 n. 46; ownership/
Park, David, 112 management changes in, 202; and parishes,
Parker, Rozsika, 132 158; and single women, 201,201 n. 51,203,
Parsons, John Carmi, 76 211; and women owners of, 197-201, 211;
Paston, John, II, 228 and women as tenants, 204-10
Paston, Margaret, 227-28 Prosopography, 12, 16
Pater Noster of Richard Hermit, The, 63, 64 Protevangelium of ]ames, 106
Patriarchal authority: and Ascension Day fes- Pseudo-Kodinos, 187
tival, 183; and female gossip, 10; and Pseudo-Matthew, 106, 107
home, 224; and household heads, 213; and Public authority, 6, 20, 22, 212-14, 220-28
marriage rituals, 188-89, 189 n. 44; and Public/private dichotomy, 2, 5, 214, 219,
Venetian dogaresse's entrance procession, 222-23,227
178, 183, 186-87; and women's chastity, Purgatory, 35, 35 n. 12
178, 178-79 n. 14; and women's use of con- Pusey, E. B., 73
fession, 37 Pynson,Richard,221
Patriarchal equilibrium, 9
Patriarchal ideology, 134, 175, 178 Queens: and coronation rituals, 184-88,
Patronage: and Campsey manuscript, 86-87, 185 n. 33, 186 n. 35; and husband/wife
88; and cult of St. Margaret, 95, 100, 102, partnership, 27, 28; and patronage, 78; and
104; definition of, 12-13, 95-96; and prop- political interests, 25, 26; as regents, 185.
erty ownership, 20, 198; and queens, 78; See also Consorts
and St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary,
121, 122, 124; and St. Anne Trinity, n6; Radegund (Merovingian queen), 25
women's use of, 2, 16 Raymond of Pefiafort, 34, 44, 49
Paul, Saint, 27 ReesJones,Sarah,6,11,12
Paul the hermit, 77, 79 Reform movements, 8, 63
Pepys Rule, The, 65, 66, 66 n. 29, 67 Reformation, 4, 56, 172
Perpetua (martyr), 151 Reynes, Robert, 128
Peter of Broda, 37 Riario, Girolamo, 184
Peter, Saint, 48 Richard of Chichester, 76, 77, 78, 79, 82, 86
Philip III (king of France), 37 Richard of St. Victor, 89
Phythian-Adams, Charles, 213 Richer of Sens, 33, 38
 Riddy, Felicity, 5, 6, 10, 11, 196 88, 88 n. 44, 92-93; and everyday body,
Riemenschneider, Tilman, 116, 120 224-25; and parish guilds, 165; and Venet-
Rigby, Steven, 210 ian dogaresse's entrance procession, 179,
Rituals: and communities of women, 174-75, 186; women's influence through, 2; and
177-78, 178 n. 12, 179, 183 n. 28, 187, 187 n. women's leadership, 168
39; and consorts, 183-84, 189; coronation, Soly, Walter, 164
184-88, 185 n. 33, 186 n. 35, 187 n. 38; and South English Legendary, 99
gender, 188-Sg; marriage, rSo-8), 181 n. 21, Speculum Sacerdotale, 159
188. See also Venetian dogaresse's entrance Spiritual discernment, 44, 45
procession St. Anne Trinity, 112-13, 114, 115, 116, 117,
Robert le Bougre, 33, 38, 51 118, 120, 121, 122, 123
Robert of Arbrissel, 35-36 St. Denis, abbot of, 37, 38
Robert of Bedford, 89 Stephen of Bourbon, 49
Rogers, Nicholas, 124 Stevens, Martin, 133-34
Rolle, Richard, 53 n. ), 55, 61, 62, 62 n. 22 Stiller, Nikki, 133
Roman Catholic Church: and coronation ritu- Stoic writers, 27, 52
als, 185, 186, 187 n. 38; hierarchy in, 22; and Stone, Lawrence, 217
imperial power, 29; and indissoluble Stoss, Veit, 116
monogamy, 26; and penitential system, 35, Strensall, William, 199, 200
37· See also Clergy; Monasteries Stuard, Susan Mosher, 8
Roman Empire, 7, 18, 27-28, 29 Sumptuary laws, 179, 182
Rosser, Gervase, 170 Sybil (fraudulent mystic), 38-39
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 132 Sybil de Cheney, 82
Rous, Reginald, 92 Syon Abbey, 71, 224
Rubin, Gayle, 19
Tacitus, 27, 28
Saint Alexis, 74 Tateshal, Joan, 124
Saints: and fund-raising, 166-67; images of, Tenants: and Black Death, 11, 202, 204, 206,
4, 172-73; and parish guilds, 165, 166, 172; 207, 208; and cottages, 192, 194, 202, 204;
and women's parish support, 162, 173. See and farmed tenancies, 206-7, 206-7 n. 66;
also Hagiography; specific saints and free rents, 207, 207 n. 66; and marital
Sansovino,Francesco,rSr-82 status, 194, 195, 209 nn. 75, 76; and master
Santa Maria delle Vergini convent, 183 householder, 195, 202; tenants at will, 204;
Sarurn Book of Hours, 126 working women as, 11, 194, 204-10, 211;
Schiller, Gertrud, 112 and written leaseholds, 202-3, 202-3 n. 57,
Schofield, John, 191, 192 n. 8, 196 n. 32 204, 204 n. 59
Scriveners, 88, 88-Sg n. 46 Teutberga, 24
Scrupulosity, 4, 45-50 Theodosian empresses, 27
Searle, Eleanor, 19 Theophano (German empress), 25
Seinte Katerine, 73, So Thomas Aquinas, 23-24,45,48, 154
Sekules, Veronica, 122 Thomas de Pizan, 149
Selby, William, 199, 201 Thomas, Marcel, 121
Sennett, Richard, 217 Thomas of Cantirnpre, 34, 42-44, 42 n. 35
Sforza, Caterina, 184, 184 n. 31 Toky, Richard, 195
Sheingorn, Pamela, 13 Tolkien, J. R. R., 73
Sherman, Claire Richter, 184, 185 n. 34, 186 n. Town houses, 191, 192 n. 10, 194, 203
35,187 n. 38 Trevisa, John, 218
Silvestris, Bernard, 135-36, 140 Tristarn, E. W., 112
Simon of Walsingharn, 82, 86 Tristan, 74
Simple Tretis, A, 65, 66-68 Tron, Dea Morosini (dogaressa of Venice), 176
Single women: and demography, 12, 12 n. 26; Tunnock, Richard, 199, 200
and house as status object, 204; and parish Tyrel, Alice, 76
activities, 158; and parish fund-raising, Tyson, Diana, 87
165, 16T and parish guilds, 165, 168, 169;
and property inheritance, 201,201 n. 51, Urban horne design: and class, 211, 216; and
203, 211; as tenants, 209, 209 n. 75 flexible use of space, 191, 216; and
Skipwith, Adam, 199, 200 kitchens, 193-94, 194-95 n. 22, 216; and
Social networks: and Carnpsey manuscript, leasehold tenure changes, 203; and privacy,

268 Index
 191, 210; and safety, 192-93, 195, 196; and Wace, 97
social hierarchies, 195; trends in, 191, 191 n. Walter of Bibbesworth, 126, 12S
6; and space segregation, 191-92, 192 n. S, Watson, Nicholas, 5-6, 10, 14
193, 194, 194-95 n. 22, 196; women's influ- Wemple,Suzanne,7, 17,21,27
ence on, 190 Widows, 11, 57, 7S, 210
William of Auvergne, 49
Venetian dogaresse's entrance procession: and Wingfield, Anne, 92
communities of women, 4, 10, 175, 177-'79, Wiseman, Barbara, 71
1S2, 1S7 n. 39; coronation rituals compared Wives: brides of Christ, 2S, 55, 7S, So; guilds,
to, 1S4-8S, 1S5 n. 33; and doge's election, 166; house-, 11, 220-22; and power, 2S
176-'77; familial issues of, 1S2-S3, 1S5-S6; Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, 9-10, 13, 14, 104
and fertility references, 176, 1S5-S6; mar- Women's agency: definition of, 1-2; and de-
riage ritual compared to, 1So-S2, 1S1 n. 21, mography, 11-12, 16; and female subcul-
1S3; and political interests, 177, 179, 1So, tures, 13-14; and multiple narratives,
181, 1S2-83, 182 n. 27, 1S5; processional ele- 15-16; and patronage, 2, 12-13, 16
ments of, 177, 177 n. n; and real/symbolic Women's collective impact: and St. Anne
tension, 4-5, 1S2-83, 1S9 teaching the Virgin Mary, 13; and St. Mar-
Vesey, William, 200 garet cult, 12, 95, 96, 104; and working
Vicars Choral, 204-10, 206-'7 n. 66 women,11
Victorian era, ideologies of femininity, 13, 132 Women's public preaching/teaching, 6, 57,
Virgin Mary: education of, 106-S, 109, 12S, 66, 66 n. 29, So
134; and Hocktide celebrations, 166-67; im- Wooing Group, 72, 73
ages of St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary, Working women: and Black Death, S, 9, 11,
13, 1oS, 110, 110,111, 112, 113, 116,119, 121, 204, 206, 207-9, 210; domestic status of,
123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 12S, 129,130, 131, 195; and economic conditions, 20S, 209,
132, 133, 134; and St. Anne Trinity, 112-13, 210-11; and gendered nature of work, 193,
114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123 194; and safety, 195, 196; status of, S, 9, 210;
Voaden, Rosalynn, So as tenants, 11, 194, 204-10, 211
Voragine, Jacopo da, 9S, 99, 100-101, 102 Wyclif, John, 48
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