Eleanor Janega - The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Womens Roles in Society

GOING MEDIEVAL ON WOMENS
ROLES IN SOCIETY

ELEANOR JANEGA

Copyright 2023 by Eleanor Janega

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ISBN: 978-0-393-86781-7

ISBN: 978-0-393-86782-4(ebk.)

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For my mother

In late fourteenth-century Prague, Archdeacon Pavel of Janovice embarked on a tour of the grand imperial citys parish churches to see if locals had any religious issues that they wanted addressed. In the parish of St. Andre the Greater, in the Old Town, the archdeacon was alerted to the presence of a certain woman called Domka. According to her fellow parishioners, Domka was living with, and even heading, a group of suspect women in the house of a man called Henry, even though she was married to one of the kings chamberlains. To make a living, the women were selling blessed herbs to customers who complained of head ailments. This arrangement was a suspect religious emergency for several reasons: first, Domka was living outside her husbands control, while the others didnt seem to be attached to any man at all other than their landlord; second, while their herb business was technically licit, the fact that a bunch of women were participating in it made it seem to be pushing the bounds from standard herbal medicine into magical remedies; and third, a group of women living together like this meant that they must be running and working in an unlicensed brothel.

The community concern about Domka and her roommates shows us that women in medieval Europe had it bad, but not in the way most of us think they did. We know they had a difficult time, because our society was built by theirs, and women are still at a disadvantage with men. Today women face, among other things, lower wages in return for the same work; a disproportionate workload at home; disbelief from medical professionals about our pain levels; an expectation that we will always look sexually attractive but engage in sex only with our correct and designated partners and in exactly the right amount ; and sexual harassment and huge risks of sexual and physical assault while we go about our daily business. If we are still going through all this now, in the era of feminism, it stands to reason that medieval women had it worse, lacking the benefits of the Pill, the Equal Rights Act, and Dolly Partons Nine to Five. Yet we seldom take the time to learn how medieval women were considered and treated in their own time and why, instead assuming that they just faced a more draconian version of our same issues. This is somewhat true, as Domka and her pals were reported to the archdeacon, who had the power to excommunicate them from the Church and have them driven from their homes. In this case, however, nothing seems to have happened at all. Were these women suspect and the subjects of communal monitoring and gossip? Yes! Was the Church going to do anything about it? No. After all, these women seemed just to be doing what women naturally didsuspicious stuff. There was no real way to stop that.

When we ignore history like this and assume that women have always been treated in one particular way that we are only now beginning to overcome, we accept that our society has always been this way and indeed should be this way. Our world, as a collective, is simply responding to the natural deficiencies of women and is organizing itself to adjust for them. We tend to agree that our society is beginning to address such shortcomings now. Yet we assume that women in the past were treated as we are treated, for the same reasons, just without the benefits of the modern world to help them make up for their own innate and natural deficiencies.

The fatalism of the such assumptions is rage-inducing. The idea that this is how things always were, and that our societal expectations of women have developed as a result of some immutable truth about over half of the worlds population is just too convenient. More to the point, it is also wrong and has no historical basis. Whatever problems we may have with women now, we dont generally agree that they are so sex-crazed and heretical that when left to their own devices they will start a brothel with a nice little side racket in magical herbs. Clearly some things have changed.

If we want to understand how Western society got its current attitudes about women, we have to retrace its steps back to medieval Europe. Sadly, we often treat medieval European history as the ultimate in obscure or unnecessary knowledge. We use the term medieval as shorthand for backward or barbaric, as something that we have learned from, moved past, and bettered ourselves as a result of. We are so sure of what we would find if we took a look at medieval history that we often dont bother. But this attitude is not only incorrect, it is also one reason our society is not moving toward an equitable future.

Medieval literally means middle time. It describes a span of about eleven hundred years, from the fall of Western Rome in 476 to sometime in the sixteenth century, the interval between the ancient period and our modern period. In other words, it acts as a kind of bridge, explaining how modern society moved from the ancient world to its current state, or rather it would if we paid attention to it.

Because of the periods placement between two eras, studying its gender norms allows us to see where some of our ongoing assumptions about gender come from. Our consideration of women as naturally weak and inferior, and therefore requiring protection and guidance, is an ancient and medieval holdover. Understanding that allows us to interrogate why we still believe it. If we think medieval people are so backward, why do we agree with them about this?

Moreover, studying medieval gender norms allows us to see that many assumptions about women have, in actuality, changed drastically since the medieval era. When we realize that gender expectations have massively shifted in a number of ways, but our worst and most parochial behaviors have not, we can reject them. The only unbroken tradition in terms of gender norms is treating women as inferior. And we can stop doing that at any time.