Unquiet Women

by Adams, Max;

  …had cast some sort of spell on me, because I loved him so much and I wished too much to be with him, to the point that when I made his acquaintance, my periods ceased.5

  Béatrice was no martyr. With refreshing rationality and a strong desire for self-preservation she willingly abjured all heretical ideas, promised to be a good Catholic and submitted to whatever penance and punishment the court should impose. She stuck it out, held her nerve and learned a key lesson for a defendant: deny the accusations simply, without repetition or caveat. She appeared before the Inquisition on several occasions between June 1320 and March 1321, when she was finally convicted of heresy at the age of about forty-six. Instead of being sentenced to death by burning at the stake, she was imprisoned in Carcassonne. In 1322 she was released on licence, subject to the display of a yellow cross on her clothing, and, because she ceased to be of interest to Jacques Fournier’s inquisitors, she passes out of all knowledge.

  The survival of Béatrice’s testimony is fortuitous, the result of an obsessive persecution of heretics by the Inquisition and the equally obsessive preservation, through seven centuries, of ecclesiastical archives. Her story may, in fact, typify the experience of many women who found themselves exposed to the whim of authority and the exploitation of powerful individuals when the protections afforded them by society – marriage, laws on widowhood, family approbation – failed. That she was by no means alone is clear from sketchier accounts of other women who were forced, or who chose, to adapt to challenging circumstances in sometimes surprising ways.

  Begin the beguines

  In the Low Countries of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, large numbers of women were drawn to thriving new towns and cities to earn money; to escape arranged marriages; to live independently because they were orphans, or alienated from their families or because they wished to pursue a spiritual life. The great abbeys, those unworldly enclosures for wealthy refugees, widows and visionary zealots wanting to follow a strict rule, were too exclusive or too few in number to accommodate them. Besides, an emerging intellectual climate that promoted vernacular learning, religious dissent and the virtues of hard, honest work was at odds with the crushing orthodoxy of what had become thoroughly patriarchal, elitist institutions. Disgust with materialism, usury and social exclusion and compassion for the sick, elderly and starving prompted some to reject a life of privilege. Women were marrying later and having smaller families; they needed a new focus for their energies, or were desperately poor and needed support outwith the family or village. In the cities they found common cause and opportunity.

  A very few of their stories give the general picture: the daughter of a tax collector, forced into marriage at the age of thirteen, bearer of three children, who was widowed by her nineteenth year and who, four years later in the 1180s, went to tend lepers in a community outside the walls of Huy, southwest of Liège. Another, an orphan who miraculously recovered from a near-fatal illness and was drawn to Liège as a sort of wandering prophetess. One woman was said to have persuaded her husband to join her in a life of celibacy and abstinence, like St Cecilia;# several were said to have rejected their families through disgust at their fathers’ commercial greed, while one precocious girl was taught to read at the age of five before her encouraging mother died and her father sent her away into the care of a beghinarum collegio, a community of beguines,∫ so that she might be taught a virtuous life.

  What might have been remembered as no more than the personal narratives of a number of special holy women instead became a movement, as one of its champions, James de Vitry, recalled:

  Many holy maidens had gathered in different places… They scorned the temptations of the flesh, despised the riches of the world for the love of the heavenly bridegroom in poverty and humility, earning a sparse meal with their own hands. Although their families were wealthy, they preferred to endure hardship and poverty, leaving behind their family and their father’s home rather than to abound in riches or to remain in danger amongst worldly pomp.6

  Another admirer captured the novelty of these new communities, the beguinages, in the essence of their contradictions…

  Although these [holy] women, whom we know to be very numerous in the diocese of Liège, live among the people wearing lay clothes, they still surpass many of the cloister in the love of God. They live the eremiticalΩ life among the crowds, spiritual among the worldly and virginal among those who seek pleasure. As their battle is greater, so is their grace, and a greater crown will await them.7

  Two sorts of all-women lay communities were established: those calling themselves convents, often of a dozen or fewer women wishing to live together under voluntary rule, sometimes devoting themselves to the care of the poor and sick; and those that became known as court beguinages, endowed communities constructed close to towns and frequently sited on previously unproductive land. Some became very large indeed, housing several hundreds of women in walled, self-contained suburbs comprising a church, hospital, workshops and living quarters. The largest were established at Mechelen, Ghent and Liège. They attracted wealthy patrons – King Louis IX of France founded a beguinage in Paris – and were governed under magistrae, literally ‘female teachers’, the word reflecting a strong vocational drive to educate young girls. Their sainted exemplar was Mary, the mother of Jesus, an equally paradoxical figure who was at once married and chaste, virginal and a maternal paragon.

  The women of the beguinages supported themselves by manual work, as nurses and domestic servants, or by growing produce on smallholdings; but primarily through the production, treatment and trading of cloth. The beguines moved among their wider communities mixing with townsfolk, sometimes only returning to the security of their courts at night. They adopted a semi-public function in hospice care and in the holding of wakes for the dead. Many wealthier women owned their own houses within the walls, took in the poor or disadvantaged, sought and distributed alms.

  The beguinages were initially unsupervised by higher ecclesiastical authority; but after about 1230 they began increasingly to adopt regulations, perhaps sensitive to charges of irregularity, even of heresy – one woman’s charismatic prophesying and sermonising being another man’s uncanonical preaching. In an era when the first stirrings of Catharism and vernacular puritanism were being felt across the Holy Roman Empire, virtuous eccentricity might easily be read as a threat to orthodoxy and papal authority, to the exclusive preserve of a Latinate male clergy.

  In the beguine life, heterodox as it was, one can detect echoes of the yearning for seclusion, separation and independence voiced so powerfully in the story of Christina of Markyate.≈ The beguinages might also, in some respects, be seen as an evolution of the chambres des dames,∂ the gynaecea of earlier times. Women’s traditional roles in the production of wool cloth had been curtailed by the introduction of the heavy loom, by international wool trading disputes and by the increasingly restrictive practices of men’s guilds. The beguines learned to specialise in linen.

  The fortunes and workings of the beguinages are difficult to study. Many existed without records, lasted fleetingly or were absorbed into larger, more formal communities whose historians found no room for them in their annals. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, many were suppressed by an increasingly nervous and defensive church. Beguinages and their women seemed to many professional religious as if they were bent on the triumph of the laity – constituting a sort of democratising and socially inclusive movement quite at odds with institutional fundamentalism. But among reformers and liberals they won admirers and defenders and, ultimately, the movement sustained itself.

  The beguinages, some few of which survived persecution and opprobrium to last into the modern era, prefigure exclusive women’s colleges and the need for women to foster discrete cultural, social and intellectual solidarity. In their women’s desire to pursue a life of simplicity, of hard-earned profit and charitable works, the beguinages anticipate elements of Calvinism. They – some 300 of them across
what are now Belgium, Artois and the southern Netherlands – were a remarkable phenomenon, virtually unknown in England but paralleled in Germany, and in Italy by the Humilitate movement.π Some of the best preserved of their buildings can still be visited, at Ten Wijngaerde, Bruges∆ and the Groot Begijnhof in Leuven.

  Margery Kempe: Alewife, miller, mystic

  Margery Kempe (1373–after 1438) is one of the most celebrated spiritual icons of medieval England, despite never having taken holy orders. The full text of her Book otherwise known only from excerpts, was not recognised by scholars until 1934** but it is now regarded by many as the first English autobiography: of a complex, conflicted middle-class secular woman blessed, if that is the right word, with profound visions, revelations and kinaesthetic sensations.

  According to her own testimony, Margery was widely reviled by ordinary folk for her outpourings of emotion: weeping, wailing and moaning during church services in sympathy with the sufferings of Christ. She was accused of Lollardy,†† heresy and hypocrisy, condemned for preaching – against the much-quoted proscriptions of St Paul – and often expelled from fellowships of pilgrims and church gatherings. She was arrested and tried before senior clergy at least twice. She bore fourteen children – one of whom, an émigré to the Baltic coast of Germany, seems to have been the scribe who took down the bulk of her story, not in clerical Latin but in Middle English, the language of Chaucer. She visited the renowned anchoress Julian of Norwich and made several long-lasting friends and supporters in the priesthood. But her own testimony tells of a life of social and emotional conflict, played out in both the public gaze and in her manifold conversations with God.

  When this creature‡‡ was twenty years of age, or some deal more, she was married to a worshipful burgess [of Lynne in Norfolk] and was with child within a short time, as nature would. And after she had conceived, she was belaboured with great accesses till the child was born and then, what with the labour she had in childing, and the sickness going before, she despaired of her life, weening she might not live… This creature was out of her mind and was wondrously vexed and laboured with spirits for half a year, eight weeks and odd days.

  And in this time, she saw, as she thought, devils opening their mouths all inflamed with burning waves of fire, as if they would have swallowed her in, sometimes ramping at her, sometimes threatening her, pulling her and hauling her, night and day during the aforesaid time… And also she rived the skin on her body against her heart with her nails spitefully…8

  This account, which modern readers will instantly recognise as a vivid and expressive description of postnatal depression, precipitated a crisis of conversion in Margery:

  When this creature had thus graciously come again to her mind, she thought that she was bound to God and that she would be His servant. Nevertheless, she would not leave her pride or her pompous array, which she had used beforetime, either for her husband or for any man’s counsel. Yet she knew full well that men said of her full much villainy, for she wore gold pipes on her head, and her hoods, with the tippets, were slashed. Her cloaks also were slashed and laid with divers colours between the slashes, so that they should be more staring to men’s sight, and herself the more worshipped.9

  Margery was, then, very much a secular woman of her class and time. I am particularly intrigued by her account of two commercial ventures, rare and precious first-person evidence for medieval professional women’s view of themselves.10

  Then for pure covetousness, and to maintain her pride, she began to brew, and was one of the greatest brewers in the town of N… [Lynne] for three years or four, till she lost much money, for she had never been used thereto. For, though she had ever such good servants, cunning in brewing, yet it would never succeed with them. For when the ale was fair standing under barm [froth] as any man might see, suddenly the barm would fall down, so that all the ale was lost, one brewing after another, so that her servants were ashamed and would not dwell with her.

  Yet she left not the world altogether, for she now bethought herself of a new housewifery. She had a horse-mill. She got herself two good horses and a man to grind men’s corn, and thus she trusted to get her living. This enterprise lasted not long, for in a short time after, on Corpus-Christi Eve, befell this marvel. This man, being in good health of body, and his two horses sturdy and gentle, had pulled well in the mill beforetime, and now he took one of these horses and put him in the mill as he had done before, and this horse would draw no draught in the mill for anything the man might do…

  Anon, it was noised about the town of N… that neither man nor beast would serve the said creature.11

  After the apparently providential failure of these two ventures, Margery began negotiations with her husband – which must have lasted many years, since they produced such a large clutch of offspring – to accept a celibate relationship. She took to wearing white robes, which many thought offensively hypocritical for such a productive union.

  In about 1413, at the age of forty or so, Margery set off, as the nun Egeria had a millennium before,§§ on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. She visited Venice, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, returning via a long and troublesome stay in Rome. It is intriguing to compare her brief, highly emotional account of a visit to the Holy Sepulchre with Egeria’s more observational description; intriguing, too, for the aftermath:

  When this creature with her fellowship came to the grave where Our Lord was buried, anon, as she entered that holy place, she fell down with her candle in her hand, as if she would have died for sorrow. And later she rose up again with great weeping and sobbing, as though she had seen Our Lord buried even before her…12

  First when she had her cryings in Jerusalem, she had them often, and in Rome also. And when she came home to England, first at her coming home, it came but seldom, as it were once a month, then once a week, afterwards daily, and once she had fourteen in one day, and another day she had seven, and so on, as God would visit her, sometimes in church, sometimes in the street, sometimes in her chamber, sometimes in the fields, whenever God would send them, for she never knew the time nor the hour when they would come. And they never came without passing great sweetness of devotion and high contemplation. And as soon as she perceived that she would cry, she would keep it in as much as she might that the people should not hear it to their annoyance. For some said that a wicked spirit vexed her; some said it was a sickness; some said she had drunk too much wine; some banned her; some wished she was in the harbour…13

  Margery must have been a difficult woman to know. She had friends and admirers but alienated many of them, either by taking money from them to give away or by seemingly courting public conflict. She was uncompromising in her outpourings, in her dress, her manners and her denunciations of ecclesiastical authority. By her own admission, most of her travelling companions found her unbearable. But history is much the richer for the survival of her rare and honest testimony.

  The Book of the City of Ladies

  I first came across the name of Christine de Pizan (1364–c.1430) a decade ago in an old library book by Enid McLeod called The Order of the Rose, inherited from my mother, who had bought it in a sale. I was trying to organise bookshelves in a new flat; I wasn’t sure whether this was ‘travel’ or ‘history’ or, perhaps, something on art. It turned out to be a charming biography of Christine de Pizan. It had nearly become the immediate neighbour of The Name of the Rose under ‘fiction’. I was amazed that I had never heard of this extraordinary medieval writer.

  Taken from her birthplace in Venice at the age of three to join her father at the court of Charles V in Paris, Christine experienced both faces of fortune. Her father, Tommaso, was wealthy, influential, indulgent and a humanist; her mother loving. The former insisted on his daughter being educated, against the objections of the latter. At the age of fifteen Christine was married to an apparently perfect man: gentle, chivalrous, intelligent and faithful. She was raised among the courtiers of the admirable King Charles V, mixing comfortably with the
great nobles of France at its most glorious medieval height, towards the end of a tumultuous century of persecution, inquisition, warfare, plague and revolt.

  The deaths of Charles in 1380 when she was sixteen, her father by about 1385 and her husband, Étienne, in 1389, and a decade of devious machinations by venal lawyers, reduced Christine and her family – a daughter, who chose life in a convent, and two sons, one of whom took service with the Earl of Salisbury in England – to poverty, misery and a long period of self-reflection that turned her, first, to poetry…

  Like the mourning dove I’m now all alone,

  And like a shepherdless sheep gone astray,

  For death has long ago taken away

  My loved one whom I constantly mourn.

  It’s now seven years that he’s gone, alas

  Better I’d been buried that same day.

  Like a mourning dove I’m all forlorn.

  For since I have such sorrow borne,

  And grievous trouble and disarray,

  For while I live I’ve not even one ray

  Of hope of comfort, night or mourn.

  Like the mourning dove I’m now all forlorn.14

  From such beginnings, Christine built a thirty-year career in writing, campaigning and self-education, which has produced one of the outstanding corpora of medieval literature, moral philosophy and political theory. Her targets were weak governance, moral laxity and men’s failure to treat women as equals, the fruits of which were warfare and social instability, misery and unhappiness. She was not the last to argue that women’s lack of education and accomplishment was a matter more of nurture than of nature; nor was she unique in attracting opposition to her views. She was quick to fight back. When told that it ‘did not become a woman to be learned, as so few are’, she replied that ‘it did not become a man to be so ignorant, as so many are’.