47. ATTITUDES IN POPULAR CULTURE ABOUT THE SEXES AND MARRIAGE (FOURTEENTH CENTURY)
INTRODUCTION
It is common to encounter in medieval literature a wide range of attitudes about women, men, and marriage. Some of these are deliberately satirical; others are designed as moralistic warnings about maintaining proper behavior. Although it is more common to read texts that are critical of women than those in praise of women, medieval attitudes were not entirely misogynistic, as the phrase “A woman is a worthy wight” (person)—used as the title for a collection of sources about medieval women—demonstrates.
Beginning in the fourteenth century, a series of texts began to be produced that formed a collection known as the Querelles des femmes: the Debate about Women. In these stories, moralistic fables, and poems, the relative merits of females were weighed against their presumed defects. Some of these texts were incredibly misogynistic, while others presented women as the sum of all virtues; almost all were written by men. At the end of the century, and in the early fifteenth, three texts in this so-called debate stood out: Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women), Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women, and Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies.
KEEP IN MIND AS YOU READ
It is very hard to gauge the degree to which medieval people accepted the ideas about women embedded in the “Debate.” It has to be assumed that writing both admiringly and satirically about women and men was a popular pastime because so many of these texts survive, and the structure of the querelles des femmes persisted well into the eighteenth century. The deliberately extreme contrasts in these kinds of texts might have shaped social and cultural attitudes about the sexes through the years, but the personal experiences of individuals with their families, neighbors, and friends had to influence day-to-day attitudes as well.
Document 1: Praising and Damning Women
In Praise of Women
I am as swift as any roe [deer]
To praise women where’er that I go.
To unpraise women it were a shame,
For a woman was your dame [mother];
Our Blessed Lady bears the name
Of all women where’er that they go.
A woman is a worthy thing—
They do the wash and do the wringing;
“Lullaby, lullaby,” she does to thee sing,
And yet she has both care and woe.
A woman is a worthy wight [person],
She serves [her] man both day and night,
To serve them she puts all her might,
And yet she has both care and woe.
The Trials of Marriage
What, why did you wink [blink, or shut eyes] when you a wife took?
You never had your eyes more wide open to look!
A man that weds a wife when he winks,
Will stare afterwards, I do now think!
The Bawd and the Adulterers
A woman there was some time ago, who was a bawd between a farmer and another man’s wife, and often since she brought them together in the sin of adultery; and they continued for a long time through the help of this bawd. At last this woman, the procuress, fell sick and was about to die. She thought in her heart as how she had been a sinful wretch, and was sorry in her heart that she had offended God, and thought she would make amends, as holy church decreed. She sent for her priest [to receive communion] and confessed [her sins] and took her penance, … and swore never to turn again to sin; and wept profusely and prayed to Christ, for the virtue of his blessed Passion, that he have mercy on her, and also prayed to his blessed Mother and all the saints; and so she passed out of this world. And soon after, the man and woman who lived in sin died without repentance.
The bawd’s husband prayed profusely for his wife, that God would show him how his wife fared [in the afterlife]. Afterward on a certain night, as he lay in bed, his wife appeared to him and said, “Husband be not afraid, but rise up and go with me, for you will see marvels.” He rose and went with her, until they came into a fair plain. Then she said, “Stand still here, and be not afraid, for you will have no harm [come to you], and wisely behold what you will see.” Then she went a little ways from him until she came to a great stone that had a hole in the middle; and as she stood before the stone, suddenly she was a long adder [a snake], and put her head in the hole in the middle of the stone, and crept through, but she left her skin outside the stone, and soon she stood up a fair woman. And soon after came two devils yelling and bringing a cauldron full of hot boiling brass, and set it down beside the stone; and after them came other devils, crying, and bringing a man; and after them came other devils, with great noise, and bringing a woman. Then the two devils took both the man and the woman that they had brought, and cast them into the cauldron and held them there, until the flesh was boiled from the bone. Then they [the devils] took out the bones and laid them beside the cauldron; and soon they were made man and woman [again]. And the devils cast them again into the cauldron; and thus they were treated many a time. And then the devils went from where they had come.
The woman who had crept through the stone went again to her husband and said, “Do you know this man and this woman?” He said, “Yes, they were our neighbors.” Did you see, though,” she said, “what pain they experienced?” He said, “Yes, a hideous pain.” “This pain,” she said, “will they have in hell forever, for they lived in adultery and did not make amends. And I was the bawd between them, and brought them together; and I should have been with them in the cauldron forever, had I not amended my life with contrition, confession, and satisfaction [penance], through the mercy of God; and I crept through the stone and left my skin behind.”
“The stone is Christ; the hole his blessed wound on His side; and the skin is my sins that I left behind me, through the merits of Christ’s passion; and therefore I will be saved. Go home now and beware of sin, and make amends for you will live but a short while; and do charity for you[rself] and for me.”
Then the husband went home and did as she told him, and within a short time after he died and went to the bliss [of Heaven].
Source: The Trials and Joys of Marriage. Edited by Eve Salisbury. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002. Pp. 247, 249, 177–178. Text translated from Middle English and/or modernized by editor. Reprinted with permission.
AFTERMATH
As the literary conceit of the “Debate about Women” expanded in the following centuries, the misogynistic elements began to outweigh the works praising women; moreover, those that did praise women usually took the form of historical minibiographies, such as found in Christine de Pizan’s works about women, that presented women of the past as noble and self-sacrificing, but did little to present women of the day as worthy of respect for their abilities, rather than for their willingness to be martyrs to religion or to their families. Indeed, one of the most popular texts concerning a “woman worthy” was the story of “Patient Griselda” who suffered unspeakable tortures from an abusive husband and thereby “won” his love. The presentation of women’s personalities as constituting a rigid dichotomy—virgin/whore; martyr/hedonist—was challenged by only a few authors over the centuries between the Middle Ages and the modern era.
ASK YOURSELF
How do you think medieval people—male and female—reacted to the ideas about women in the satirical texts about them?
What is the moral of the story about the bawd and her husband?
What activity do you think would be socially more unacceptable: engaging in adultery or helping adulterers succeed in cuckolding their spouses?
TOPICS TO CONSIDER
Compare the presentation of women in these texts with the character of Noah’s wife in the Play of Noah (see below).
Consider how modern-day cultural notions about women and the sexes might have been influenced by medieval notions as expressed in these texts.
Further Information
Kelly, Joan. “Early Feminist Theory and the ‘Querelles des Femmes’, 1400–1789.” Signs 8, no. 1 (1982): 4–28.
Meale, Carol M., ed. Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.