Gender Roles in Medieval Society
• Marriage practices varied between Italy and
England (even within England) from the
11th to 14th centuries.
• Marriages practices varied based on social
and economic (birth) status; gentry (about
1% of the population) had different
practices than the common class
• In general, most women had no public
social role.
– Marsilius of Padua in estate lists defines the
people of the estate as everybody except the
children, slaves, aliens, and women.
– Since the role was overwhelmingly private, it
was asocial, internal, and emotional. The only
way these women had to define themselves was
in relation to their husbands. 92% of women
married at this time.
– The only exception was women with religious
callings. They could use service to Christ as a
means of self-fulfillment.
• In England the nuclear family becomes the social
unit, unlike in Italy or southern Europe where it
was still more of a clan system.
• The Church taught by the beginning of the 12th
century that marriage was not validated by a
service but by the consent of two parties.
– Words of the present
– Words of the future
• The Church wanted to be assured that these
agreements were not coerced, especially as the
legal age for girls was twelve and for boys
fourteen.
• The two could not be too closely related
• The two could not already be married
• Parents did not give up authority easily, so
preferable marriages were public ones
– The banns were read for three weeks prior to
the ceremony.
– The service was performed at the church door.
– The property arrangements were made at the
church door, as priests were among the few
educated enough to actually write the contract.
• Exceptions to this were the nobility where
the primary concern tended to be
transmission of patrimony
– Children could be betrothed at birth
– Children could be married by proxy
These practices were motivated out of the fear of
the father’s death, which would leave the child
as ward of and the property at the discretion of
the lord, who could, in turn, sell the marriage
rights.
• There was tension in the conflicting
views that one should choose a
spouse carefully for the economic and
companionship concerns and the idea
that one should choose a spouse
based on love or true love.
• This led to two conflicting views of
marriage
– That marriage traps men into an unholy
alliance with a sexual being, so that the
husband should be constantly vigilant to
retain his authority
– That husbands and wives were “equal
and partners,” sharing a “social love” of
mutual friends. Each has a duty to
satisfy and fulfill the other.
• Was marriage
satisfying to
medieval women?
– Only about 50% of
widowed women
remarried
– Women were in a
sense brainwashed
by the culture into
believing that
marriage could
ideally provide
happiness
• Religious women saw their union with God as the
ideal marriage (only barely asexual).
• The visionary union between male deity and
female holy woman was imagined with
remarkable physicality. Christ joined with women
mouth to mouth and heart to heart, sometimes
fusing with them.
– Catherine of Siena says she married Christ not with a
ring of gold or silver but with the ring of his foreskin,
the circumcision being a symbol of accepted suffering.
– Margery Kempe found her marriage intolerable as it
interfered with her relationship with Christ, finally,
after twelve children, getting her husband to commit to
a life of abstinence
The Medieval Sex Life
• The Church governed sexual practices throughout
most of Europe during the Middle Ages
– Sex between married couples was illegal on Sundays,
Wednesdays, and Fridays
– Sex was illegal for the 40 days before Easter and
Christmas
– Sex was illegal within the three days prior to one’s
acceptance of communion
– Only one sexual position was allowed (missionary), and
penalties would be prescribed for any variations
– Sex was not to be enjoyed; it was for procreation only
Woman’s Place in Medieval Society
• Many women worked domestically growing and
harvesting grain, spinning wool, making ale, etc.
• Their husbands controlled their earnings because
they were, largely, femme couverte de baron. If
they were married they had no legal status of their
own.
– Husbands were responsible for legal suits brought
against their wives
– Men were allowed to inflict “moderate chastisement”
upon their wives to keep them in their place. A civil
law allowed that a husband could “beat [his wife]
violently with whips and chains.”
• A few women could
be legally declared
femme soles, whether
married or not, which
allowed them
financial control of
their businesses.
Courtly Love
The Idea of Love
in the Middle Ages
• From the 5th to 11th centuries, the
frontier age of western Europe, women
played a vital and expanding role in
laying the foundations of our modern
society.
• In the era following the end of the
Roman Empire in the West, invading
Germanic tribes intermarried freely with
the conquered Romans, forming
families that united different cultures.
• Recognized marriage alliances eased the
process of social integration, and
women’s roles in the family helped
speed assimilation.
• Women held positions as
administrators, educators, and religious
leaders.
Early Christians did not want to offend
contemporaries by maintaining an equal social
position for Women. There is the attitude that
the Weaker Sex requires restriction and support
in the Early Christian writings.
In the 6th century, Roman Empresses still had a
great deal of power and could come from
humble origins (like Theodora).
In the 9th century, status and wealth begin to lose
ground to prejudice against the sex, and women
are given important legal rights in their familial
capacities--but they begin to be limited socially.
While these patterns were always in flux, the
social distinctions were becoming more rigid,
and upward mobility (for both sexes) began to
become more difficult, if not impossible.
• Courtly Love developed during the 1100s in
France, and it became an ideal, both literary
and real, throughout Europe for the rest of
the Middle Ages.
• It celebrated an intensely idealized form of
sexual passion in a highly elaborate,
sophisticated, and aristocratic code of
behavior.
Map of France
•The relative peace and prosperity
and the continued contact with
Moorish Spain nurtured a civilized
culture, based around the courts of
Aquitaine, Auvergne, and Poitou.
•At these courts, from the twelfth
century onwards, troubadours and
trobairitz performed, combining
the skills of poets, musicians, and
singers.
• What they wrote about rather than
how they wrote about it was new.
• They wrote about love, and about
the women they loved.
– They celebrated their love in a quasireligious way.
– They venerated the women they
loved, showing them as objects of
worship.
– They emphasized the torments
suffered by the lover.
• They invented a religious cult of love,
with Venus and Cupid as deities.
• Courtly Love was
revolutionary because
it placed women, who
had no real legal
power in medieval
society, in a position
of power over their
lovers.
• The goal could be
spiritual (platonic) or
earthly (physical
consummation).
• The goal could be
spiritual (platonic)
• Or earthly (physical
consummation).
• Both the noblewomen and
their lovers benefited by
this situation.
– The women found status
and fame in the songs and
stories and received
affection from their lovers,
which may have been
lacking in their arranged
marriages.
– The male lovers got status,
money, and patronage.
• While cheating on one’s lord with that lord’s
wife would be treasonous in feudal society,
because legitimacy of the heir was important,
during this time in Southern France it was
tolerated, after the birth of the heir, because these
liaisons produced more sons to be knights and
daughters with which to make alliances were
beneficial.
• In fact, a way to ensure a neighbor’s
loyalty was to make them aware that you
harbored their illegitimate child.
The troubadours were soon imitated in
Northern France and Germany
• They wrote in many forms,
such as
– The Breton Lay, a short
story often based on Celtic
tales and energized by
magical happenings
– The knight-hero tales, longer
stories in which the knight
would perform his deeds to
show his worthiness of his
lady, to improve himself ,
and to achieve his potential
as a man and as a knight.
• There was great appeal
in the idea that relations
between aristocratic
men and women could
be determined by an
irresistible mutual
passion rather than by
the dynastic, territorial,
and financial
imperatives that led to
arranged marriages.
• During the entire
period of the Middle
Ages this new idea of
romantic love was
seen as a humanizing
and refining influence.
• The knight-hero’s
quest for love and selfactualization was
contrasted to the
traditional knight’s
function as a warrior
fighting for lord,
comrades, or society.
• For the first time in postclassical Europe a man’s
status as a civilized
being, a member of
courtly society, was
judged by his behavior
toward women.
•By the later decades of the twelfth century,
the ethos of courtly love was codified and
written down.
History of the Rules of Love
• In the first century
B.C.E., Ovid
composed The Art of
Loving.
• This was a how-to
book on seduction of
women written to a
male audience.
• Ovid admits that
people “fall in love” as
the result of strong
sexual attraction
• Between 1184 and 1186,
Andreas Capellanus composed
On The Art of Honorable
Loving.
• Andreas’s book may have been
an elaborate intellectual joke, for
he takes Ovid’s themes of
adulterous love and subjects it to
the medieval methods of
scholarly analysis.
• Andreas sees falling love as a
spiritual exercise, almost a duty.
While medieval readers found the text amusing, they
also found it useful.
They co-opted it and used its ideas to structure
their society, their literature, and the behavior
expected by its noblemen and women.
• Medieval people were
fond of codes and rules
and lists.
• They left treatises on
–
–
–
–
Chivalry
Hunting
Table manners
Courtly life
• The code’s existence tells us that they enjoyed debating the
rights and wrongs of romantic love and that the society
needed it in some way.
-To make sense of something potentially chaotic and destructive
-To impose order on experience
-To provide meaning to life
Characteristics of Love
• 1. Love was both happily painful and
deadly joyful
• 2. The pursuit of love was dangerous but
necessary.
• 3. To be worthy of love one had to be
discreet, faithful, obsessive, generous, and
courteous.
Characteristics of Love, continued
• 4. One must seek, suffer, and submit to
prove worthy of love.
• 5. For love to remain there must be some
obstacle.
• 6. Consummation is the desired goal of
love, whether it is spiritual or earthly.
• 7. Jealousy is an indispensable part of love.
Characteristics of Love, continued
• 8. Love is worth dying or insanity.
• 9. By definition, true love may not
be able to exist within marriage.
Conclusion
• The culture that nurtured the troubadours was
destroyed in the first half of the thirteenth century.
• Pope Innocent III proclaimed a crusade against
heretics in 1209.
• For the next thirty years the impoverished from
the North had license to wage war on their
wealthy neighbors.
• In 1244 the last stronghold of the heretics,
Monségur, was taken; all inside were killed.
• The society, laws, language, culture, and the
poetry of the Occitania were silenced.
• By then it was too late, however, to stop the
spread of the religion of romantic love.
• The troubadours vision of love had spread
across the whole of western Europe, and it
is has been found in literature and human
consciousness ever since.