Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  Because women have an ancient inheritance of being physicians, healers, midwives and diviners of psychic healing, it is not surprising that at this moment the most distinguished teacher (among many other female instructors) at Salerno was a woman. Her name is Trotula, and she has been portrayed in art as Goddess of healing and in history as the author of the most enduring book on gynecology and obstetrics, with parts of her manuscript in museum collections in Europe. Her written work speaks to her understanding of the diseases and conditions of women, and basic principles for managing health problems. As did generations upon generations of herbalists before her, Trotula elaborates specific rituals for the digging, gathering and preparations of medicinal plants to be used as prescriptives. She was also a skilled diagnostician, used pulse and urine analysis as well as careful patient records. She treated vulval abscesses, prolapsed uteri, caesarian sections and beauty prescriptions, all crucial to women’s health. Trotula used opiates for pain (as had been prescribed by women for the same purposes since Neolithic times) and was skilled in the use of inhalations of hyoscyamine, hemlock and mandrake for anesthesia. As a dermatologist, she was able to prescribe the Aloes, almond oil, orris root, silver and mercury to treat skin problems and was the first to describe manifestations of syphilis on the skin. In kinship with her ancient sisters of medicine, Trotula urged cleanliness, hygiene, baths, cleansings, and antiseptic lotions. Her teachings on the absolute need for cleanliness in surgery would have prevented thousands of deaths later, had it been followed.

  Achterberg concludes, “Trotula represented the woman healer of the far distant future (and the not so distant past). She personified the balance that is so critical to the advancement of woman as a health care professional; a knowledge of science, attention to the magic that is embedded in the mind, a mission of service, awareness of suffering and the gift of compassion. She also had the courage to speak, write and teach with conviction.”136 Trotula would be one of the last of her kind for hundreds of years because the Church of Rome intervened.

  The great European universities grew out of monastic scholarship traditions, most sponsored directly by the Church and some by crowned monarchs in the same way that the Church of Rome managed its constellation of Prince Bishops and Holy Roman Emperors, a marriage of church and state with the state as subordinate to the church.

  Professor Shahar details what happed to women in this process:

  As the universities developed, medical knowledge became an academic subject, but universities remained closed to women, and their (male) medical faculties jealously guarded their privileges. They issued regulations aimed at protecting the monopoly of their graduates and, on their initiative, various (secular) rulers forbade the practice of academic medicine by any person who had not studied at a medical facility and been licensed by it’s teachers. These regulations and decrees were directed against all those who were likely to practice medicine: barbers, apothecaries, surgeons, both male and female.137

  But it was only women who would not be admitted to any university, so the decrees were prejudiced against them alone. The academic, university educated, and licensed medical practitioners lived in towns and cities, required cash payment for services, and were, therefore, out of reach for the vast majority of patients who might have needed them. As a consequence, at least until the middle 1300’s, many women continued to practice medicine in the villages and rural areas. Some were taken to court, tried, found guilty, and told not to continue their practice. The women seem to have paid their fines and returned to practice, particularly to treat other women.

  These women are noted in court records: Jacoba in Paris, 1322; Clarice de Rotmago a married woman; Johanna the convert; Marguerite of Ypre, the surgeon; Belota the Jewess. All were excommunicated by the Church, the only authority capable of doing that, and fined by the secular authorities for practicing without a university license.138 Church and State openly and consciously collaborated to disenfranchise women healers without regard to the consequences suffered by the people who were then left with two unpleasant and dangerous choices: as patients they either went without medical attention or risked going underground to healers who were required to practice in secret.

  Prostitution

  No discussion of medieval professions for European women could be complete without inclusion of the sex worker, called prostitute. Who were prostitutes? The answer is many women of all walks of life, social standing and economic status at various times, either in their own lifetimes or over time in historical context.

  Why were there prostitutes? The answer is quite simple: Men demanded them. Men also paid them, encouraged them, profited from them, and enjoyed experiencing their sexual expertise.

  Prostitutes are often called the “oldest profession,” which is not true because midwifery is more likely to be the first. But, prostitution has often been confused by men outside the ancient Goddess worshipping systems with the sacred union performed by priestesses, for which in gratitude, men gave offerings of value, sometimes in the form of coins, for the privilege of being united with the sacred and experiencing the nature of the divine.

  The Roman Christian Church had a major psychological disconnect on the issues of both sex and prostitution. Over the centuries, the leaders had become pathologically concerned on the issue of chastity. It is chastity that they elevated beyond any other female virtue and without which they saw little female virtue at all. Sex was a sin. Women were responsible for the original sin of all humanity, according to their church dogma. Only complete and total abstinence from sex could begin to redeem women. Marriage was tolerated only if it prevented sexual activity between unmarried people and only if sex were engaged in for the purpose of procreation and never, never for purposes of pleasure.

  In today’s world, this sounds ludicrous. But it was just as ludicrous then; the problem was that it had the rule of church law behind it. This male churchman’s issue of preserving female chastity and sexual modesty was then used as vindication for burning women at the stake rather than hanging them, for excluding women from entering trade guilds on the basis of the risk of sexual behavior between women and men in the work place, for preventing women from participating in public life and discourse, from being educated–for “fear” if they can read and write they will take lovers, from participating in church life, from being priestesses-and the endless list of exclusionary excuses goes on and on.

  But when the issue of prostitution arises, the church and its puppet states’ reactions are light years different from the reasoning applied to all other activities engaged in by women in medieval society, regardless of class or status. While the practice of prostitution is ancient, existing in nearly all civilizations, the prostitute of the Middle Ages who resided in towns was treated as a member of a professional class of women.

  The attitude of the Roman Church was predetermined by the writings of Bishop Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century: “If you expel prostitutes from society, prostitution will spread everywhere … the prostitutes in town are like sewers in the palace. If you take away the sewers, the whole palace will be filthy.”139 It is well to remember that Augustine, before he was a churchman, led a very worldly life, complete with concubines, women he paid to live with him in sexual relationships. Nevertheless, it became view of the church that prostitution was preferable to adultery, or to the seduction of young girls. But the allegory of the sewer reveals the contempt and revulsion in which the profession is held by the churchmen.

  In this same context, the women’s profession, which elevated human sexuality, put her in a perpetual state of eternal sin and by association, endangered all her clients.

  But, no matter how reviled by churchmen, medieval prostitution was legal and officially recognized by secular authorities.

  Sicilian legislation forbid any acts of violence against the women themselves but also forbid them to live among “decent” women. Part of the underlying reason for this unusual, if sometimes uncomfortable, tolerance by both secul
ar and church males was the unending and enormous demand for the services of the profession, a situation also, ironically, created by laws.

  The inheritance laws of the Middle Ages called primogeniture, which permitted only the eldest son to inherit the entire estate, also encouraged prostitution. Many men were never married at all because, in a feudal society based entirely on incomes from the land, they had no means of supporting a wife, children and household. In the towns, male apprentices to tradesmen and artisans had to postpone marriage until they graduated to ownership of their own workshop, which have taken a period of up to twenty years.

  Married men regularly used the services of prostitutes, partly because their wives were kept constantly pregnant and partly because sexual pleasure was not supposed to be part of the marital relationship. Sometimes the reason was just proximity: Men traveled to towns on business of trade and were away from home for long periods. Another endless stream of customers was generated by university students: all males in a totally male environment. “Churchmen who could not marry also frequented prostitutes, as can be learned from the oft-reiterated regulations banning acceptance of churchmen as clients of brothels and forbidding monks to bring prostitutes into monasteries.”140

  For the prostitutes who lived in towns there was a steady supply of men from all walks of life and marital status. A short list would include visiting merchants, pilgrims doing penance and sent on crusades, people banished from their own villages, wandering musicians, jesters, the farmers and vagabonds. But there were also the clergy, and despite prohibitions, prostitutes visited monasteries regularly; they traveled as camp followers of armies, and plied their trade at markets, fairs and at any large gathering.

  The reason women became prostitutes then is much the same as now: Money. Married women made extra money. Unmarried women with no financial independence and no trade, needed to make money to support themselves. Some were fleeing abusive families or vicious husbands or were the result of abject poverty for many different reasons. And in the fourteenth century, women were the first to be affected by the protectionism of guilds which discriminated against them to the point of exclusion, at a time of economic recession.

  Because the Roman Church sidestepped the question of sin with regard to prostitution, considering the practice neither fornication nor adultery, the ecclesiastical courts claimed no jurisdiction over either the profession or its practitioners. That left regulation entirely to the secular courts and to local jurisdiction or governments, which had conflicting agendas, but deemed the profession legal if regulated. After all, the regulated brothels in town centers paid taxes directly to the local coffers. In twelve French and Italian towns, there were official brothels. From the thirteenth century these are recorded also in England, Germany and Spain. The regulators decided which streets were permitted and which were not. The women who were prostitutes had organized guilds in which they set internal governance.

  In a manual for twelfth century confessors, Thomas Cobham writes, “Prostitutes should be counted among wage earners. They hire out their bodies and supply labor. It is wrong for a woman to be a prostitute, but if she is such, it is not wrong for her to receive a wage. But is she prostitutes herself for pleasure and hires out her body for this purpose, then the wage is as evil as the act itself.”141

  Successful prostitutes rented and owned their own houses, ran businesses and became influential women through intimate association with the rich and powerful men who frequented their brothels. Nevertheless, they were required to wear clothing which immediately identified the women by their profession. These town requirements included wearing red hats, ribbons on their sleeves, or sleeves of contrasting color to the rest of the garment. However, in order not to render insult to noblewomen wearing the latest fashions, prostitutes were forbidden to wear fur-lined or quilted garments. Many prostitutes protested these dress codes, but if they were caught disobeying the rules in public, they were fined and the offending clothing confiscated. The proceeds of the sale of those garments went directly to the town treasury, increasing the police attention to these details. Less fortunate, less successful prostitutes were relegated to working under bridges, near or outside the town walls, and were considered among the outcasts of society along with beggars and criminals, which they often were reduced to being.

  Medieval Peasant Women

  As we move out into the countryside, where the vast majority of medieval people lived, we encounter the peasant woman. Women were literally the backbone of the rural agricultural areas, as they had been since they invented the system millennia before in the Neolithic. Daughters and wives worked on family farms, and women who were widows or spinsters managed their own households and/or properties. Peasant women hired out to work on the farms or in the households of the ruling class. Pasturing animals was the domain of men, but the field work and the gardens were handled by women. Children at an early age were also employed: they were the ones who held cart reins and drove on the animals, the work that required little physical strength but lots of energy. All clothing production was in the hands of women: growing, harvesting, shearing, washing, spinning, weaving and seamstress. Women were the traditional ale brewers, ran country taverns and served the drinks inside, while also running the inns usually associated with the taverns. Some became prosperous enough to be able to lend money at interest to the merchants and businessmen who were their clients. In the wine growing regions, women worked harvest and did vine pruning.

  Herds were managed by men, but women were the only ones attending pigs and poultry, perhaps because neither animal required pasture, but rather were penned near homesteads and fed household scraps. Women made cheese and butter and sold these products along with eggs at the fairs and local markets.

  Peasant women, as women in every society at all previous times, served as midwives. Many were considered wise women, herbalists, and practiced healing medicine along ancient and traditional methods, passed from woman to woman verbally.

  Academic male physicians never reached these rural areas, and they would not have been welcomed by the female population anyway because they would have been considered foreigners, strangers who did not speak the local language and were of a different social class. In addition, their services would have required payment in cash, an unlikely element to garner enthusiastic welcome.

  Although technically the people of continental Europe had been converted from their own ancient and indigenous religious practices several hundreds of years previously, it was mostly by the use of force. At this time it is still true that the vast peasant populations held deeply to their own customs and sacred ceremonies, even if they paid lip service to the Church of Rome for the sake of personal safety. Many areas retained their matrilineal lines of succession and inheritance, with both males and females taking the family name of their mother for identification purposes and enabling daughters to inherit directly. This is evidenced by the celebrations, following the ancient agricultural traditions, little changed from their ancestral roots millennia before, throughout the countryside of Medieval Europe. There were about eight separate weeks of these holidays, all following the old ways. The festivals were directly linked to the growing seasons, the phases of the moon and lunar calendar, and the rites involving the fertility of the Earth. Some were daytime celebrations; others were nocturnal, involving the moon and stars. The solstice and equinox celebrations continued, unaltered from times long ago, and the May Day dances where boys and girls danced together bedecked with flowers and brightly colored ribbons, around the phallic pole, was a yearly event. Despite continuous disapproval by churchmen, the people persisted, faithful to those rituals which had previously ensured their prosperity and happiness. These were rites to assist bountiful harvest, health of the people, animals and plants and trees, and their circular, cyclical relationship with all the Earth.

  Women had a network formed by work, social projects, midwifery and commerce that was always the means of communication and teaching. Nothing so fa
r had proved strong enough to break those ancient bonds between and among females. Nevertheless, peasant women were not formally educated and were not permitted to sit on councils, even though they provided most of both management and skilled labor for the entire rural community. What was not obvious at all, and has been overlooked by most, is the extreme difference in the ways children of peasant class women and those of the nobility were raised. Most crucial is the fact that peasant women nursed their own infants. Why is that important? Mostly for the health of the child, when infant mortality was high, because the babies received all the immunization needed in their mothers’ milk. Secondly, for the psychological nurturance, loving warmth and bonding was engendered by their own mother’s caring. Peasant women nursed their children for between two and three years, which had the additional benefit to the mother of being a natural contraceptive, spacing the woman’s pregnancies with births then occurring perhaps every three or four years instead of every twelve to eighteen months. Peasant women were additional sources of nursery labor for women of the nobility and for wealthy townswomen who sought to emulate the nobility, becoming wetnurses paid to feed the infants of nobility from the milk of peasant breasts. Noble women almost never nursed their babies, sending them immediately to wet nurses who were paid better wages than most workers, particularly if the wet nurse cared for the child in her own home, somewhat similar to modern foster care.