Normal Women, page 8
Marriages for love took place – especially when there were no great fortunes to be settled. A church deacon in England met a young Jewish woman in Oxford while he was being taught by her father, a Jewish scholar. The two fell in love and the deacon proposed marriage and promised to convert to her religion. He took circumcision and converted to Judaism to marry the woman he loved. He was accused of apostasy by the church and burned at the stake at Osney in 1222.207
Agnes Nakerer fell in love with a travelling minstrel, John Kent, and married him in secret in the early 1300s. Her parents forced her to the altar with a more valuable son-in-law, but John the Minstrel took them to the church court at York and won his wife back.208
Common women tended to marry after they had worked for some years. Some Lincolnshire women married after 21 years of age, or even later in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when both husband and wife had saved enough money to start a home.209 Women at Wakefield, Spalding and in some manors in Huntingdonshire were required to pay a feudal fee to the lord of the manor for the right to marry the man of their choice, and they often used their own money.210
Marriages among the upper classes were made by parents and guardians for young people, as they were used to transfer property between families, resolve quarrels and even end local wars. The old Anglo-Saxon word for wives was ‘peace-weavers’.211 Any happiness that might follow the wedding proved a lucky bonus. Considerate and loving parents might choose a partner likely to suit their child; but others might be only concerned with the finances.
Most marriages ended in an early death: one in 40 medieval women died in childbirth in England in the 1500 and 1600s.212 The average age at death for medieval men and women was 40 years. There was no divorce but a marriage might be declared invalid because the spouses were closely related or the marriage forbidden by canon law. Causes for annulment could be leprosy, flagrant adultery by the wife, malicious abandonment, the couple being of different faiths, or a forced wedding. A marriage could be annulled if either of the couple were unable to conceive children or the man was declared impotent. The judgment of experienced women was called on in such cases. A jury of 12 Canterbury women in 1292 examined Walter de Fonte and testified – after trying and failing to arouse him – that his ‘virile member’ was ‘useless’.213 Neither husband nor wife could refuse sex, having given consent at their wedding day once and for all – but there were many days off: the church ruled no sex on saints’ days, nor on feast days, holy days and days of penitence. Altogether, no-sex days took up about a third of the year, and sex was discouraged during menstruation or breast-feeding.214
Misbehaviour in marriage was punished – but the marriage would not be dissolved. In Rochester in the 1300s, any wife guilty of adultery was whipped three times around the churchyard and three times around the market – the same punishment as for an adulterous husband.215
Roman Catholic churches in Europe hosted same-sex marriages of women to women in the eighth century. These were legitimate marriages undertaken by parish priests who recorded the marrying women’s names in parish records in the usual way. As England came under the same papal jurisdiction, women-only marriages probably took place in English churches too. The wording of English marriage services from the tenth century speaks of a ‘wife’ and a ‘bride’ and blesses future children of the marriage but does not define the marriage as heterosexual. The wedding service used in the twelfth century, the Bury St Edmunds Missal, refers to a bride and bridegroom, but not specifically to a man and woman. It was not until the sixteenth century that the Sarum Manual wedding service specifically referred to a man and a woman in the marriage vows.216
Women’s Love and Sexual Desire
In medieval England it was widely believed that women had an active sexual appetite for both male and female partners, sought sexual intercourse and experienced orgasm – the ‘Eve’ view of women as creatures of strong sexual desires. Since medical practitioners believed that orgasm released a female seed – just as it released male seed – a husband who wanted heirs had to give his wife sexual pleasure.
Sexual intercourse, with the intention of conceiving a child, was to act with God. It was a sin to try to prevent this in any way – including masturbation and nocturnal emissions, or contraception and abortion. Low pregnancy rates in the early medieval period suggest that people sought sexual pleasure without penetrative intercourse. ‘Bundling’ – erotic cuddling, and non-penetrative sexual touching, was a tradition, especially among unmarried lovers – and herbal contraceptions and practices were so widespread that the church included advice to parish priests in the handbook on suitable penances. Aborting before the baby had ‘quickened’, or been felt to move, was considered an equal sin to contraception, since the fetus had no soul before quickening. Women who confessed to causing a miscarriage by taking herbs would be given a 40-day penance – the usual punishment for a minor sin.217 Wise women and herbalists had recipes for spermicides and herbs that were supposed to cause abortions. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), the mother superior and future saint, recorded recipes for abortion and instructed that abortions should be performed if the mother’s life was endangered by a pregnancy.218 Unwanted babies were sometimes killed by a risky surgical abortion with a knife or needle, and reported as still births. Newborn babies were killed or abandoned to die and this was defined as the greater sin of murder, and the mother was always the first suspect; she had to prove her innocence and might be hanged if found guilty.
Church leaders were opposed to any form of sexual intercourse other than penile penetration, face to face, with the husband on top, for the sole intention of conceiving a child. Orgasm was essential but sexual pleasure for its own sake was a sin. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas provided a helpful list of sins, from the bad to the worst: masturbation, bestiality, sodomy and – worst of all – heterosexual intercourse using contraception or in any position other than male dominant. Masturbation was a worse sin than rape, since it prevented God giving a life.219 Sodomy, at this time, was defined as any act that put a penis into anywhere but a human vagina, or put anything but a penis into a human vagina.
Both church and manor courts could hear evidence against women accused of fornication or adultery, and both set penances and punishments. Occasionally men were tried and punished. Three women in Worcestershire in 1270 were fined for ‘fornication’ – with no accusation against their male partners. In 1247 in Norfolk, a group of five women paid fines for losing their virginity, but no men were accused or fined.220
Concern about the chastity of nuns led Pope Boniface to issue a decree in 1298 that all nuns should be strictly enclosed in their religious houses and forbidden from receiving guests or entertaining. This was supposed to encourage the women ‘to serve God more freely, wholly separated from the public and worldly gaze and, occasions for lasciviousness having been removed, may most diligently safeguard their hearts and bodies in complete chastity’.221
But the new rules were not welcomed by women. In 1300, Bishop John Dalderby visited Markyate Priory with the new regulations and reported that the nuns ‘hurled the said statute at his back and over his head’. Meaux Abbey nuns rejected the new rules, claiming they were not bound to obey anything stricter than their original vows.222
In any case, the building of walls and gratings in convents was irrelevant – the few nuns who were having sex with men had lovers inside the enclosures: co-sited monks, religious visitors, workers or guests. The raising of walls and the bolting of doors and the installing of grilles in convents showed the deep-rooted fear of women’s ‘propensity for sinful behaviour’. Not even women who had taken vows to be ‘Brides of Christ’ could be trusted to control their sexual desires. Nuns pointed out that imprisoning them elevated the vow of chastity above the other vows of poverty and obedience. Surely, praising God was more important than making sure that nuns did not have sex?223
Nuns who sinned with men were assigned penances of diet, or beaten by their superiors or peers, or imprisoned. In the story of the Nun of Watton, as told by Aelred of Rievaulx in 1160, a young nun who had been enclosed from childhood in Watton Priory, in Yorkshire, met a young monk from the co-sited monastery and conceived a child with him. The nuns beat her, tore the veil from her head, had to be restrained from flaying and branding her, and chained her in her cell, feeding her only bread and water. The co-sited monks captured her lover and forced the nun – his lover – to castrate him, and his severed genitals were pushed into her mouth. The young man was returned to his monastery, and the young woman imprisoned in her cell. There she had a vision of Henry Murdac, Bishop of York, who took away her baby and cleansed her of sin. Next morning the nuns found her alone in her cell, without her baby and with no signs of pregnancy. Church fathers agreed that this was a miracle, and the young woman was forgiven. There is no indication in the story that the life-threatening punishments for the young man and woman were excessive or inappropriate.224
Penalties for same-sex relationships in the convent were far less harsh than those for heterosexual intercourse. In the seventh century, Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, published a ‘penitential’ – a list of possible sins and their appropriate punishment. A woman who ‘practices vice with another woman’ should be given a penance for three years. This was a lesser penance than that recommended for a married woman who committed adultery with a married man.225 Historian and theologian the Venerable Bede agreed: there should be a penance of three years for women lovers, but ten years if the women used a ‘device’.226
In the eighth century, the punishment was reduced. Nuns who had participated in ‘intimacy’ (Constantine V’s word) were ordered a brief penance of a diet of bread and water. This punitive diet was to be extended for 40 days if one woman ‘rode’ another, but there was no suggestion that the nuns having sex with other nuns should be beaten.227 The papal ban on ‘intimacy’ was not concerned with emotional relationships between nuns. When, in the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen acknowledged her intense feelings for her assistant Richardis, this was seen as a problem of favouritism, damaging the discipline of the convent, not a sin of sexuality.228
Sexual activity between women had been known and named in the Christian world since the second century. The word ‘lesbia’ for a woman marrying a woman was recorded in the margins of a manuscript from the time.229 St Paul had described both female desire and perversity as God’s punishment for idolatry: ‘For this cause God gave them up to vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.’230
Since medieval theologians named the penetration of anything but the penis into anywhere but the vagina as ‘sodomy’, women using a fake penis for penetration would be guilty of sodomy: a sin and a serious crime that could be charged in a church or civil court. In reality this was very rare – there are only 12 known trials of women using objects to penetrate other women in medieval Christendom, and none in England.231
Women kissing together are shown as an example of the ‘sin of the mouth’ – not as a sin of same-sex intimacy – in a French illustrated Bible of the thirteenth century. There are men embracing nearby. The illustration to a poem from The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (1200–40) shows two girls kissing in an imaginary garden of pleasure, an idyllic scene of women’s happiness, where women dance, argue, do handstands and kiss.
A thirteenth-century female troubadour, the trobairitz Bieiris de Romans, described her passionate love for a woman in her poetry:
Lovely woman, whom joy and noble speech uplift,
and merit, to you my stanzas go,
for in you are gaiety and happiness,
and all good things one could ask of a woman.232
Centuries of scholarship have been devoted to explaining that Bieiris de Romans is adopting a male voice or writing in the tradition of male troubadours to a non-existent woman, or that since women are not erotic lovers it is a poem about sentimental affection and not physical.233
Or maybe she was a woman writing a love poem to a woman she loved.
The Nature of Women
Medieval male philosophers learned from Aristotle (384–322 BCE) that there was one basic human body type, with the same sexual organs – external in men and internal in women, one human form, differently arranged, though men were more visible, understandable and healthy than the mysterious and hidden female. All the classical texts since Plato, from about 400 BCE onwards, agreed that there was an ideal wholeness, in which all the possible variations of genders were unified and united in one: a spectrum of sexes, with highly masculinised men at one end and highly feminine women at the other, and a vast variety between the two extremes.234
Later, in the second century, Aurelius Galen proposed that every human body was controlled by ‘humours’ that were combined differently in each individual. Where an individual sat on the spectrum depended on the mixture of the humours: women should be moist and cold, men dry and hot; but individuals differed in their composition and could be adjusted to the desired mixture. Because a person’s nature depended on the mixture of the humours, an infinite variability was possible inside the one sex; cold and moist caused femininity in men and women, hot and dry caused masculinity.235 The classical model of one sex, one flesh dominated thinking until the seventeenth century.236
Both theories were clear that there was one human body shared by men and women. Hermaphrodites – with both male and female genitals – were believed to be a normal and frequent occurrence.237 A woman could turn into a man. If she masturbated, her clitoris might grow into a penis;238 or a penis might pop out of its normal position tucked inside as a vagina through physical exertion, such as jumping a ditch.239 It was generally understood that exertion, sexual activity or excessive heat frequently turned women into men, and both Greek philosophers and church fathers agreed that would be an improvement.
Medieval churchmen believed that to be ‘in Christ’ was to be gender free, in a state of spiritual awareness, above bodily differences, beyond biology. St Paul said: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’240
Changing from one sex to another is described in the apocryphal gospel of St Thomas. The last ‘saying’ of the collection is from Jesus, of Mary his mother: ‘I, myself, shall lead her, in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’241
Although women dressing as men was banned in the Bible, there were warmly approving medieval ballads, poetry and stories about women acting like men or transforming into men.242 An early medieval heroine in the song ‘Yde et Olive’ performed chivalric quests dressed as a knight and at the end was rewarded by transforming into a fully functioning man capable of fathering children.243 More than thirty-five legends named cross-dressing women saints where holy women dress as men as a permanent choice.244
Womanhood was not a different and opposite sex to men, it was a different status to men. Medieval male philosophers who spent their lives pondering the question ‘Why are we so superior to women?’ answered that inferiority was the ‘nature of women’. They spoke of the ‘female defect’: the law cited the lack of female existence unless specifically defined, the church banned women from the priesthood, the crown preferred male heirs, and the culture knew of the natural inferiority of women.
The church council of Mâcon in 585 discussed whether women could be considered as ‘man’ in the sight of God and concluded that they could. This was mischievously misreported through the centuries as a synod decision that women did not have souls.245 They certainly did not have status. St Paul wrote that women should be ‘under obedience’: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.’246 Henry de Bracton, the legal expert, defined female inferiority in 1235: ‘Women differ from men in many respects, for their position is inferior to that of men.’247
But a new definition of female nature was emerging from the art forms around ‘courtly love’. A literary tradition in the Arab world, the idea of ‘courtly love’ had been introduced to France from Muslim Spain, and when Eleanor of Aquitaine came to England in 1152, to marry Henry II, she brought this new version of the ‘nature’ of women with her. The poems were love stories about a closely guarded heroine and the noble young man who adores her. Their love, expressed in poetic dialogue and courageous acts, attains a high level of spirituality and, finally, union with God. The woman of the courtly love stories was nothing like the earthy, fallible woman that philosophers said was naturally inferior to man. The woman of the courtly love stories was perfect, without sin, capable of a deep and sinless passion modelled on Mary, mother of Jesus, whose cult was developing in every European country, with great cathedrals and shrines such as Our Lady of Walsingham in England. Courtly love provided the secular version of the cult of Mary, with a heroine whose nature was nearly divine.
The hero was often a poor poet, free to love, without ties, able to dedicate his life to her service. She was always a noble or royal wife, in an arranged and loveless marriage – available for fin’amor, ‘fine love’.
The theme of courtly love expanded from the patrons of travelling poets – male troubadours and female trobairitz – into other forms: paintings, plays, jousts and masques, spreading countrywide, far beyond the great houses. The popular masques – performed by professionals and nobility before huge audiences of common people – retold the courtly love stories; the tales were referenced during jousts, which were often dedicated to courtly love romances. ‘Courts of Love’, hearing interesting dilemmas of love, loyalty and courtesy, were said to be judged by noble ladies sitting in authority over men. Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter may have held such tribunals, and the rulings of the women judges – fictional or real – were published, describing how courtly love should be expressed and regulating the behaviours appropriate to the lowly lover and his demanding lady-lord. Marie de France’s ‘lais’ were enjoyed by Eleanor of Aquitaine and her court. They told of aristocratic ladies suffering for love.
