Women in Medieval Europe:
 As a general rule, women were subservient to men in all parts of Medieval
Europe.
 How much freedom or how many rights a woman enjoyed depended mainly
on her social status and where in Europe she lived.
 Women of lower classes performed domestic labor, caring for the household
and assisting in the farm work.
a) They bore children and raised them.
b) In this era of poor hygiene and limited medical knowledge, many women
– as many as 10 to 15 percent – died in childbirth.
 In most parts of medieval Europe, women did have property rights.
a) They could own and inherit land and property.
b) They often received dowries (although in some places and times, it was
the woman’s family that had to provide a dowry to the husband-to-be).
 Women could separate from their husbands, although obtaining divorces
and annulments was difficult, especially for women of the upper classes.
 Women had protection, although not always equality, before the law.
 Except in Orthodox Byzantium, women could enter religious life.
a) Women could not become clergy (especially priests) in either the Catholic
or Orthodox Church.
b) They could, however, join religious communities (convents) and become
nuns.
c) During the High Middle Ages, the majority of nuns were from the upper
classes, drawn from the families of the landed aristocracy.
d) To marry off daughters, noble families often had to provide potential
husbands with land, money, or a title.
e) This meant that an aristocratic family with a large number of daughters
often found itself unable to pay for all of them to get married.
f) The most common solution was to place younger daughters in convents.
g) Women who preferred intellectual pursuits sometimes found a safe have
in nunneries.
h) For example, Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179), celebrated for her
mystical writings and songs, became an abbess of a German convent in
the twelfth century.
 Aristocratic women, while not legally the equal of men, could exert a great
deal of political and cultural influence.
a) If an aristocratic woman was heir to rich property or even a kingdom, she
was an extremely desirable match.
b) Noblewomen often managed their husbands’ estates and financial
accounts in their absence.
c) Not infrequently, the mothers of young kings whose fathers had died
early served as regents and advisers until their sons came of age.
 Some women ruled in their own right, as queens.
a) This was not common, and countries whose legal systems were based on
tribal Germanic (Salic) law, such as France and the Holy Roman Empire,
did not allow women to inherit thrones.
b) But women would come to rule England, parts of Spain, Russia, and
elsewhere.
c) Perhaps the most famous example of a politically important woman
during the High Middle Ages was Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1122 – 1204),
one of the richest heiresses of France.
1- A dynamic, intelligent woman, Eleanor was married to Louis VII of
France, then, more famously, Henry II, the great centralizer of
medieval England.
2- She had a great deal of influence over politics in both countries.
3- She was also a great patron of art and music.
The Roman Catholic Church in the Medieval Period:
 The most important single factor shaping medieval culture was the Catholic
Church.
 Most institutions of learning – monastery schools and later, universities –
were wholly or partly administered by the Church.
 The Church was the largest employer of artists, musicians, and architects.
 Art, literature, music, or poetry that was not in line with Church doctrine
could be banned and the people who produced it punished severely.
Classicism in the Medieval Period:
 Another key influence on medieval culture was the learning and literature
preserved from the Roman and Greek, or classical, eras (mainly by the
Church, another measure of its cultural importance).
 For several centuries, the Latin manuscripts left by the Romans were more
familiar to the Europeans, and during the Middle Ages (and long afterward,
Latin was the language of learning, culture, and intellectual life.
 The Europeans had much less knowledge of Greek until later, when
interaction with Arab and Jewish translators mad materials in that language
(such as the writings of Aristotle) more accessible.
 Eventually, the increased familiarity of European artists and scholars with
Greek and Roman texts led to the great classical revival that helped bring
about the Renaissance.
 Scientific thought was dominated by the theories of the ancient Greeks,
especially Aristotle (who was overwhelmingly important to the medieval
Europeans), Ptolemy (whose geocentric, or earth-centered, view of
astronomy argued that the sun revolves around the earth), and the physician
Galen (whose writings on anatomy, though somewhat flawed, remained
standard wisdom in Europe for centuries).
Scholasticism:
 The principal school of philosophy in medieval Europe was Scholasticism,
which attempted to reconcile reason (logic, the senses, and the scientific
learning of Greek and Roman authorities such as Aristotle) with faith in God
and Christianity.
 The greatest of the Scholastics was the Italian monk Saint Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274), whose Summa Theologica is considered the most brilliant
attempt to integrate logic with Christian belief.
Ave Generosa
I behold you,
noble, glorious and whole woman,
the pupil of purity.
You are the sacred matrix
in which God takes great pleasure.
The essences of Heaven flooded into you,
and the Great Word of God dressed itself in flesh.
You appeared as a shining white lily,
as God looked upon you before all of Creation.
O lovely and tender one,
how greatly has God delighted in you.
For He has placed His passionate embrace within you,
so that His Son might nurse at your breast.
Your womb held joy,
with all the celestial symphony sounding through you,
Virgin, who bore the Son of God,
when your purity became luminous in God.
Your flesh held joy,
like grass upon which dew falls,
pouring its life-green into it,
and so it is true in you also,
o Mother of all delight.
Now let all Ecclesia shine in joy
and sound in symphony
praising the most tender woman,
Mary, the bequeather/seed-source of God.
Amen
- Hildegard of Bingen