Belle S. Tuten - Daily Life of Women in Medieval Europe

DAILY LIFE OF

WOMEN IN
MEDIEVAL
EUROPE

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DAILY LIFE OF

WOMEN IN
MEDIEVAL
EUROPE

BELLE S. TUTEN

The Greenwood Press Daily Life Through History Series

Copyright 2022 by ABC-CLIO, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tuten, Belle S., author.

Title: Daily life of women in Medieval Europe / Belle S. Tuten.

Description: Santa Barbara, California : Greenwood, [2022] | Series: The Greenwood Press daily life through history series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022026259 | ISBN 9781440872341 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781440872358 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: WomenEuropeHistoryMiddle Ages, 5001500. | WomenEuropeSocial conditions. | WomenEuropeSocial life and customs. | WomenPolitical activityEuropeHistoryTo 1500.

Classification: LCC HQ1147.E85 T87 2022 | DDC 305.420940902dc23/eng/20220622

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026259

ISBN: 978-1-4408-7234-1 (print)

978-1-4408-7235-8 (ebook)

262524232212345

This book is also available as an eBook.

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CONTENTS

Women make up approximately half the population in every human society, but sources to explore their experiences in the distant past are not abundant when compared to sources by and about men. When we think about women in the Middle Ages from our vantage point in the twenty-first century, we fill in what we dont know with our imaginations. Our imaginations provide us with both horrors and fantasies; its sometimes hard to separate our fictional views of knights and ladies from our ideas about the real dangers, filth, and hardships of everyday medieval life. This book attempts to clarify what we know and what we do not know about womens daily lives in the Western European Middle Ages, between approximately 500 and 1500 CE.

It is important to realize that people of the time never called themselves medieval or called their era the Middle Ages. Scholars in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries invented the term, which comes from the Latin words medium aevum, the middle age. They wanted to distinguish themselves from what they saw as the backward and violent dark ages in between the Roman Empire and their own time. This viewpoint has persisted into our own era. Calling something medieval todaya technology, a person, or a point of viewis not a compliment. We imagine medieval women as oppressed and miserable, locked into drudgery, constant pregnancy, and domestic abuse. However, this book will show that women in the Middle Ages, although significantly different from us, had experiences that are familiar to us today: living good lives, working within economic systems, bearing and raising families, and contributing to the larger culture of the period. This book is arranged topically, but the topics are mainly organized chronologically. There is also a timeline of major moments in medieval womens history and a bibliography of secondary sources. Boldface terms in the text are included in the Glossary at the end of the book.

The introduction provides some basics about the Middle Agesa quick review of the history, trends, and events of the period. This chapter also discusses some long-standing stereotypes about the Middle Ages, particularly with regard to life span, hygiene, and cultural values. We pick up with two of the issues most pertinent to medieval societys understanding of women in survive. This chapter ends with five primary document excerpts of these womens works.

I would like to acknowledge debts of gratitude to my colleagues in the Department of Art and Art History at Juniata College and my readers, Jim Tuten, Tom Stoddard, Madison Caso, and Mara Revitsky. I dedicate this book to my mother.

This book explores womens daily experiences in the European Middle Ages, a period that lasted about a thousand years. Scholars generally divide the Middle Ages into three periods: the early Middle Ages, lasting from the year 500 CE to the year 1000; the High Middle Ages, from 1000 to 1300; and the late Middle Ages, 1300 to 1500. These dates are approximate, and we use them chiefly to help us understand a long and complex period. The Middle Ages took shape when the western Roman Empire declined in power and organization, during the period of roughly 200500 CE. In 476 CE, a Germanic king deposed the Roman emperor in the west, while the Byzantine empire, centered in Constantinople, endured. The map of western Europe was broken up into kingdoms based on various Germanic groups. For conveniences sake, scholars sometimes use 476 CE as the beginning point for the Middle Ages in the west, but the process was gradual and took several centuries.

The conflicts of the fourth and fifth centuries CEsome of purely Roman origin and some involving migrating Germanic tribeshad left the populations of western Europe diminished and Roman control greatly lessened. The three major successors of the Roman Empire in the west were the kingdoms of Gaul, Italy, and Spain, each ruled by a different Germanic ethnic group: Gaul (France) by the Franks, Italy by the Ostrogoths, and Spain by the Visigoths. Over time, each Germanic group succeeded in making political and social connections with the Roman populations of the lands they occupied and gradually converted to Roman Catholic Christianity. The societies they created, just like the Roman societies before them, were centered on agriculture. Royal power was weak. Latin survived as the language of the highly educated, particularly those in the church, and it eventually became the language of Christian religious ritual. Everyday spoken Latin also contributed to the development of what we call Romance languages, such as French, Spanish, and Italian (Tierney 1999, 7172).

The Franks, under King Clovis (ca. 466511), were traditionally the first Germanic people to convert to Roman Catholic Christianity and the first to succeed in a major expansion. Frankish expansion allowed for a kingdom with imperial ambitions. Under the Frankish king Charles the Great, or Charlemagne (ca. 742814), the Franks entered an important relationship with the popes in Rome that enabled their kings to claim the title of Roman emperor. The time of Charlemagne has sometimes been called the Carolingian