When she speaks of union, she speaks of the mystery: “Union is like the joining of two wax candles to such an extent that the flame coming from them is but one … but afterward one candle can be easily separated from the other and there are two candles … In the spiritual marriage the union is like what we have when rain falls from the sky into a river or fount: all is water.”125
Secular Life
But what of the lives of secular European women, those unattached to religious communities, in these several centuries?
The Crusades themselves, moving thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people across the continents, changed ways of life to help make transition from the very sedentary and isolated populations of the Dark Ages lifestyle, to one of increased commerce necessitated by feeding, nursing and marketing to the vast numbers on the move. By virtue of the traffic alone, new roads were forged, land cleared to enlarge existing villages, and entirely new towns built to accommodate visitors, pilgrims, tourists. Increased commerce required more skilled workers, tradespeople, and even some competition. No longer serving just the old feudal manor houses and lordly castles, the townspeople/tradespeople developed both a class of their own and cash commerce with which to prosper, for the first time in Europe.
As a result of so many men being regularly called up to serve the military purposes of the Crusades, there was both a shortage of men in the towns and a surplus of wives, daughters, and widows with their children who needed to provide for themselves during these multi-year absences.
Consequently, it was necessary to teach these women the trades required to survive. Because trades were passed along family lines, women generally took the trade of their absent husband, brother, uncle or father. They worked as brewers, (an ancient trade for women going back to the Neolithic and then Sumerian times when the priestess supervised brewing made from temple grain, and women were the tavern keepers), teachers, midwives (the most ancient of all professions for women), weavers (a skill invented by Neolithic women), barbers, fullers (felters), carpenters, saddlers, tillers, laundresses, lacemakers and seamstresses. This brought women into a new position: that of a paid worker with value to society based on the quality of her work. No longer the hidden laborer, she was now entering a new era with possibilities not dreamt for centuries. Women from this beginning were paid less than men for the same work, but they were actually paid. Because so many adult men died in these wars, women began to outnumber men during these 200 years, sometimes by seven to one. Yet another factor must be considered: Childbirth. With the men away, women were free from incessant pregnancies, which often endangered their health and led to premature death of both the woman and her infant. Without being constantly pregnant, women were also free to devote energy to paid work or creative pursuits.126
This does not minimize the concurrent fact that the state of women’s rights in the secular arena was not greater than those of their sisters in convents and cloisters who were engaged in religious life.
Professor of Medieval Studies and author of The Fourth Estate, A History of Women in the Middle Ages, Shulamith Shahir writes that “Distinctions were made in the rights of women on the basis of marital status and class. However, there were also restrictions imposed by law.” Shahir continues, to say that women, by law, could not participate in the government of kingdom or society. She could not hold public office, serve as military commander, judge or lawyer. She was prohibited either from filling any public office or participating in any governmental institutions, whether manorial courts, town or royal councils, or representative assemblies in other countries.127
Church law based this deprivation of rights for women on her ‘secondary’ place in creation (i.e. “Adam & Eve”) and on her part of Original Sin, a construct proposed by Augustine in the 400’s CE and carried forward by the Roman Church because it was so useful for them to do so. “Secular law justified its restrictions of the legal and civil rights of women on the basis of her limited intelligence, her light-mindedness (‘imbecilitas sexus’ literally translated as ‘imbecile’), her wiliness and avarice – reasons which had already been given in similar terms in the Roman period,” writes Shahir.128
In England, peeresses of the nobility were able to transmit the title and family prerogative of sitting in the House of Lords to the male members of their families (husband, sons) but were not permitted to take such a seat for themselves. However, in one of those disconnects between what is written and what is practiced, women did inherit fiefs (estate lands) when there was no male sibling as heir to either a father’s estate or that of a woman’s husband. Consequently, she performed all the duties a man would have done, such as heading assemblies, sitting in judgment, discussing political and economic issues. Abbesses, always members of the landed nobility, behaved much the same in their convents, and often with even more people in their direct service.
Therefore, in this unique period, 1100 to 1300 CE, “Women as Abbesses and titled nobility, in the Middle Ages, in utter contradiction of the law, wielded powers of government such as they never had in Roman or Germanic society nor in modern Western Europe before the twentieth century.”129
Interestingly, nobility of both sexes were exempt from taxation, except in England and the Northern Italian city states. But ordinary working women in town and country wage earning positions, despite denial of their civil rights, were required to pay taxes. Single women and widows were also required to pay taxes equal to their corresponding male contemporaries, even if they had absolutely no voice in how their taxes were to be allocated by the government. Husbands, however, were responsible for paying the taxes of their wives’ incomes as merchants or artisans. In London, authorities could seize the personal possessions of women who were in arrears in their tax payments, and then sell the confiscated possessions, benefiting town authorities if the taxes were not paid by a certain date.
As to the legal rights of women during this same period, they were also restricted. Women were refused opportunity to serve as judges, lawyers or witnesses, except on behalf of their own husbands or when as midwives testifying to births at which they worked, as regarded matters of inheritance and property of the child.
In civil law, single women could bring suit; married women could not, unless their husbands gave permission. Single women could draw up contracts and borrow money. Married women could not do either.
In criminal law, single and married women were treated alike; however, their rights were extremely limited. Shahir writes, “Any woman could press charges for bodily harm, for rape and for insult. A married woman could press charges for murder of her husband, as specified inter alia in Article 54 of the Magna Carta. No woman, whether married, single or widowed could press criminal charges in any other matter.”130 Nevertheless, women of any marital or non-marital status could be sued in the same way as men.
Before the thirteenth century in Europe and most Western countries, individuals pressed charges. Later, this became the function of the public authority.
Different countries dealt with the perpetrator of rape on an uneven basis. In England and France it was a criminal act, and punishment ranged from blinding to castration and even death. In Sicily, under Frederick II, the law required the death sentence for convicted rapists. In Germany the penalty for rape was just flogging, with the victim on occasion permitted to carry it out. In Spain the rapist was fined and exiled. Most often, in all countries, the penalty was a monetary fine followed by forced marriage if the female victim were unmarried. However, if the woman became pregnant by rape before coming before the English courts, the rape case was dismissed. Why? Because
According to the medieval concept of a woman’s sexual and physiological nature, she needed to secrete certain seed to enable her to conceive, and this did not happen unless she was sexually satisfied. Pregnancy meant that she had enjoyed the rape and had no right to press charges. This interpretation … was no more absurd than the (later) interpretation based on psychological concepts, which also maintain th
at women also enjoyed rape.131
Few women committed murder, and of those who did, 77.6% of the crimes were for killing a man. And the number of men convicted of killing women was higher than the number of men murdering men. Fifty percent of men who killed women were executed. Fifteen percent of men who killed men were executed. But men and women did not pay the same criminal penalty nor were they executed similarly when found guilty and sentenced to the death penalty.131
In the Middle Ages, as well as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, more women were accused of witchcraft than men, and both (when found guilty) were burned at the stake, but women were less often strangled or hanged before the flames began to reach their bodies, a procedure which was perceived by the executioners to be quicker, less painful and, therefore, the more humane method. Sometimes men were burned at the stake for sodomy, but “it would appear that women were never prosecuted for lesbian relations, and even manuals for (catholic) confessors describe homosexual relations between women as lesser sin that between men.”132 Women were executed at the stake for murdering their husbands.
Under the rule of Frederick of Sicily, a married woman found guilty of adultery had her nose cut off, but the same fate did not befall a man similarly accused. In Germany, her ear was cut off if she were found guilty of perjury a second time but torture of other sorts was not permitted, so they were not subjected to being “broken on the wheel” but rather confined to house arrest. In France and Holland, pregnant women were not tortured, nor could they be executed while pregnant. France did not permit a woman to be held in chains when in jail. And when confined, women were separated from male prisoners and supervised by a female guard. By the fourteenth century, the city of Paris had separate jails for women, while at the same time in England there were separate wings in the same facility.
Professor Shahir states,
Where women were plainly discriminated against in legal penalties was in the method of this execution in France, Germany, Italy and Barabant (Netherlands, Belgium), there women were either burned at the stake or buried alive, whereas men were usually hanged. Throughout the Middle Ages this was the manner in which women were put to death for murder, infanticide, vicious pandering which lead to rape, and even for theft. This was in addition to the crimes of arson, heresy and witchcraft, for which men and women alike were burned at the stake.… burning at the stake was thus reserved for what were held to be the very worst crimes.133
Medieval society was aware of the woman’s agony when she died by being burned alive or when she was left to die by suffocation being buried alive, because men were executed by those methods by their peers only for the most grievous, unforgivable and dangerous behaviors. Moreover, these acts of sadistic ritualistic executions of women were created as public spectacles through laws written without the participation of women, in courts ruled without women judges or lawyers. In descriptions by chroniclers of the time, descriptions that verge on the ludicrous, these methods are attributed to the maintenance of modesty. In later centuries, when women were more frequently hanged, their long skirts were tied around their ankles, so as not to permit any peeking!
How women of the European Middle Ages lived rather than how they died was impacted greatly by the rising population of the towns, which expanded to meet the needs of the additional travel and commerce created by the Crusades.
Women were divided into three categories with different legal rights: Unmarried girls, until the age of eighteen, were minors with no legal rights and subject always to a male family member or guardian. Women over the age of eighteen who were unmarried were called spinsters. They had independent legal status, could own and manage businesses and/or property in their own right. But in courts, they had only the same small share of rights as any other woman, even though they could be sued and were required to pay their own taxes. Married women were subjugated to their husbands, without whose specific permission they had the same legal status as a minor. However, when a woman was widowed, everything changed: She was no longer subject to the wishes of her husband; she could remarry if she chose, but many women did not remarry. A widow might chose to enter a cloister/convent if she had the money and was of upper-class birth, or as a townswoman she might take up her deceased husband’s trade or business and run it as successfully as possible. In the countryside, if a widow had property she could manage it, collect rents from it and support herself, even raise new children born while she was a widow if she were young enough.
As a townswoman, many trades were available to her, and some belonged to guilds, the forerunners of trade unions. In these early years, perhaps because men were constantly being called to serve in the wars of the Crusades, women were paid wages nearly equal to men and engaged in a wide range of skills. While some worked at home doing piece work, others worked in town workshops alongside the men in their family and with the apprentices, mainly men also. Spinning on broad and narrow looms was work done by women in their homes. The craftsman had the right to teach his craft to his wife and daughters, even in the guilds that prohibited women, and sometimes to females unrelated to the family. There were some guilds which were exclusively women and other guilds which were a mixture of male and female members. These exclusively female guilds made fashionable fabrics, clothes, headdresses, hats, and did embroidery. Spinsters (those women who had never married) mostly worked for wages. If they were independent financially, they enjoyed the same legal rights as widows.
Other than clothing production and the textile industry, women worked in many other, less domestic jobs: sharpening tools and producing needles, pins, buckles, scissors and knives; goldsmiths producing jewelry; making crystal vases; and, as barbers. There were workers in leather, producing belts, straps, gloves, shoes and pouches. In Paris, two different women were granted a monopoly by two separate monarchs in succession. Women help to make decorations for caskets. Widows are listed as merchants, even wheat dealers, which was a prestigious occupation. Being merchants gave them status over and above other women in the towns. Throughout time, and in various places under various forms of governance, women had been brewers of beer and ale, which they did now as well. In England, the brewing was done at home and still considered primarily the work of women. Everywhere throughout Europe, women worked as washerwomen, gatekeepers and bathhouse attendants at the public baths, which were fairly numerous and utilized by both sexes in separate sections. Women were book illuminators of reputation. As entertainers, women were guild members of singers and players, particularly popular in Paris. As landladies, women rented out houses, ran hotels and taverns (inns), were money changers and money lenders, and were merchant sellers of foodstuffs both in small shops and central outdoor market stalls. They were considered strong willed and entirely capable citizens.
Finally, there were women, widows of some of the wealthiest and powerful overseas merchants, who upon the death of their spouses, took up management of their cargo ships, represented themselves in court, were able to exact payments and past due debts and successfully continue running the business. And these were not isolated cases. There is evidence on tax rolls of hundreds of such women, all widows, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries in England, Scotland, and on the continent.
It was not until after the Black Plague in 1348 and a subsequent economic depression that the guilds began to restrict women’s admission in order to reduce competition for jobs and provide for males. Women’s wages were once again lower than men’s. After 1376–1400 demand for labor rose at the same time as the population had decreased. At that time, women’s wages were 75% that of men’s wages.134 In the fourteenth century, economic recession hurt working women. The Guilds increased their protectionism, excluding women from membership because women were seen as threatening the livelihoods of men. Even though women were expected to work, expected to help support their families, their opportunities for work and the wages they were paid began to decline substantially, creating poverty for women and their children. Very poor women of Fland
ers and Germany joined the Beguines and lived in communes together because they had little work and no places to live independently. Then the Guilds imposed restrictions on the Beguines in trades. It was becoming an impossible situation for more and more ordinary women.
Not so ordinary women were those who practiced medicine during the thirteenth century and, not content to be midwife or barber/surgeon, adopted methods of the academics, who were college educated physicians. While women were not admitted to universities, women had always been midwives and herbal healers. Now there were a few women who belonged to the Guild of Surgeons and apprenticed as apothecaries with fathers, taking up the trade.
Where did the information in the newly formed universities come from, since the information seems to have been so guarded from wide dissemination? Dr. Achterberg says that during the eleventh century in the near East, Arabs translated the ancient works of Galen, Aristotle, and Hippocrates in their own universities. Arabs had ruled most of the Mediterranean and the Iberian peninsula since the eighth century, interacting with Jewish scribes who could read Arabic because they lived alongside the Arabs in many countries, including Africa and the Middle East. These scribes then translated Arabic texts into Latin, the written language of the educated and literate clergy of the Roman Church. Thus, the Arabs with their emphasis on higher education, in contrast with the early Roman Christians who boasted that they had destroyed all ancient Greco-Roman documents of learning and praised the state of ignorance for the civilian population, created not only the basis for a renaissance of medical practice but also the foundations for a later movement called the Renaissance centered in Italy. New institutions for teaching medicine were then created, the most famous and earliest in Salerno, Southern Italy, opening in 1000 CE and continuing until it was closed by Napoleon in 1811. This site of Salerno was already known for its ancient healing baths and served as a port of entry for pilgrims from Palestine. At its inception, faculty was drawn from Greeks, Jews, Arabs and Latins, of both sexes. Even though all of the text material was translated from “pagan” traditions originating in ancient Greece and Rome, the university was considered a Christian institution.135
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