Not all women stayed home, and the most famous woman of the entire Middle Ages actually went to war, with brilliant success. Unlike Margherita Datini and Margaret Paston, however, Joan of Arc is no prototype, and whatever her male comrades-in-arms and male enemies thought of her, her image remained unique. Women nearly always, if not always, stayed “inside,” and men went “outside.” The sense of the division was stated in uncompromising terms in the Libri della Famiglia. Writing in the 1430s, in the very aftermath of Joan’s exploits, Leon Battista Alberti blandly observes that women are occupied with “little feminine trifles,” men with “high achievements.” “You are entirely right,” declares one of the protagonists, “to leave the care of minor matters to your wife and to take upon yourself… all manly and honorable concerns.” His friend replies, “I believe that a man … not only should do all that is proper to a man, but that he must abstain from such activities as properly pertain to women. The details of housekeeping he should commit entirely into their hands.”1
During the thousand years of the Middle Ages, Western society made historic strides, technological, commercial, political. Medieval innovations revolutionized industry, architecture, agriculture, and intellectual life, while alleviating and enhancing daily living with the spinning wheel, water mill, windmill, wheelbarrow, crank, cam, flywheel, lateen sail, rudder, compass, stirrup, gunpowder, padded horse collar, nailed horseshoe, three-field system, Gothic engineering, distillation, universities, rhymed verse, Hindu-Arabic numbers, the modern theater, movable type, and the printing press. The Commercial Revolution of the high Middle Ages, led by merchants like Francesco Datini, opened the new age of capitalism, as feudal political fragmentation gave way to new national states.
The technological, economic, and political surge could not fail to have its impact on women—on the work they did, the clothes they wore, the food they ate, the houses they lived in; the health, security, stability, and intellectual enrichment of their lives.
Margherita Datini and Margaret Paston were beyond question better fed, dressed, housed, and educated than their earlier class counterparts, and probably than earlier queens and countesses. Even the chance of survival had improved. Life expectancy for women, lower than for men in the early Middle Ages, seems to have increased by the fourteenth century to the point where women outnumbered men.
In status, on the other hand, the record of women through the medieval millennium is more equivocal, and in fact can be charted as a series of advances and retreats: relatively high in Romanized Europe at the end of the Empire; relatively low in the early centuries of the barbarian kingdoms; advancing with the civilizing influence of Christianity and of contact with Roman culture; cresting at the end of the Dark Ages when women assumed economic and legal responsibilities to free men for military action; leveling off or possibly declining under the new restrictions of feudalism, which yet permitted women to act as regents, command castles, work side by side with men in the fields and city shops, and form the main audience for the new romantic poetry, basis for the future salon; finally, at the end of the Middle Ages, turning downward as bureaucratized government and commercial capitalism eroded woman’s role in politics and the economy.
Even the gain in life expectancy produced some negative effects by creating economically superfluous women who were a burden to their families. Dante, in Paradiso (1315–1321), lamented the good old days of his great-great-grandfather when “the birth of a daughter did not yet appall/The father, for the marrying age and dowry/Were not immoderate on either side.”2 Giovanni Villani (d. 1348) wrote with a similar nostalgia for earlier times when “a hundred pounds was the usual dowry of a woman, and two or three hundred were considered excessive in those times.”3 In the 1420s Saint Bernardine of Siena claimed (with considerable hyperbole) that there were twenty thousand girls unable to find husbands in the city of Milan. Some of the unmarriageable women swelled irregular or heretical religious movements, while others created the pressure on monasticism which alarmed the Cistercians and Cluniacs.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the concentration of literacy in the ranks of the clergy, the professions, and the business community ensured that far more men than women could read and write. Among the women in this book, only Hildegarde of Bingen can confidently be described as highly educated. Although Blanche of Castile, Eleanor de Montfort, and Margaret Paston were almost certainly literate, only in the case of Margherita Datini do we have hard evidence that she could both read and write with competence, and then only as an adult.
A curious footnote to the political role of medieval women, disenfranchised and excluded from political councils and public office, as women had been from ancient times and would be for another half-millennium, was the unique case of a referendum in the Italian Piedmont village of Cravenna in 1304 decided by majority vote of all the inhabitants, including the women.4
Two general observations are appropriate to the picture of medieval women throughout the period. One is the significance of widow power. Unmarried girls and wives had little control over their destinies. But queens like Blanche of Castile, peasantwomen who took over their dead husbands’ fields, craftsmen’s wives who inherited shops, tools, and apprentices, were able to discover the opportunities, as well as the problems, of management responsibility. At least in the late Middle Ages, widows often profited from marriage contracts that, in place of the traditional widow’s third, gave them far more of their husbands’ land, even, on occasion, all of it. Some widows used their wealth to attract youthful suitors. Others, more materialistic or less romantic, used remarriage to increase their wealth. Still others remained widows, often keeping the property from the ultimate heirs, male or female, for decades. Margaret, Countess Marshal, heiress to the Earl of Norfolk, was married to Lord Seagrave by a contract which made her joint tenant of his lands. When he died in 1353, Margaret was left in possession and furthermore survived their heir (a daughter) and her own second husband. She died in 1399, and after some delays her great-grandson finally inherited.
A second important generalization is that status with respect to men varied roughly in inverse ratio to wealth and social standing. At the pinnacle of the hierarchy, men married to produce heirs and to conclude political and economic alliances. With the significant exception of the surrogate function performed when their husbands were absent, royal and baronial wives had little to do, since even the management of their households and care of their children were confided to stewards and nurses. Ruling-class male attitudes reflected this lack of female purpose. On the next level down, middle-class women like Margherita Datini and Margaret Paston earned respect as trusted managers of the difficult medieval household, and even as its doughty defenders against enemies. But only within the peasant and artisan classes, where toil was demanded of all, did the numerous Alice Benyts and Agnes li Patinieres share work and responsibility with husbands and brothers on a nearly equal basis.