Women in the Days of the Cathedrals

While researching my novel set in medieval France, I was recommended  Women in the Days of the Cathedrals by Régine Pernoud. Written in a scholarly but uncomplicated prose, the book is a response to the recurring modern accusation that the Roman Catholic Church suppressed women. Although the facts of history prove the reverse to be true, the myth continues to be promoted, which is why the work of Madame Pernoud is invaluable. The book opens with a discussion of how women had virtually no legal status in pagan Rome; girl babies were routinely murdered at birth. (p.19) Daughters were rarely given a first name but usually were called by a feminine form of the family name. When Christian virgins such as Agnes and Cecilia asserted their personalities and their chosen vocations of being Brides of Christ, preferring death to unchastity or faithlessness, then the Roman world was shaken to its core. (pp. 18-20) The fact that the Church recognized the dignity of the immortal soul regardless of gender gave women certain rights and protections under ecclesiastical laws, increasing the dignity of women in the civil sphere as well.

Madame Pernoud demonstrates how repeatedly throughout the West the Faith was introduced to a country through the efforts and perseverance of devout queens, from Bertha in England to Clotilda in France to Olga in Kiev. (pp. 15-16) Monasteries of nuns were founded throughout Europe where women from all walks of life were educated. (p.61) The monastery at Fontevrault received both genders although a widow was always chosen to govern. (p. 113)

Improvements in the construction of chimneys and fireplaces made the hearth a central place for the family to congregate, strengthening family life. As the author states:

The advent of the chimney and hearth has certainly played its part in the renewed role that women held within the family. It meant that they were integrated in communal life. This was the reverse of life in the former women's quarters or present day harems, which confine women in a place apart and are symbols of exclusion. The fireplace also obviously simplified domestic tasks and consequently lightened the workload of women....

Family solidarity, already paramount in Northern and Celtic cultures, took on its full expression at that point. It was forged around the fireplace.... there was one place that a woman could feel to be her own domain and where she was the lady, the domina: it was the hearth. (pp.69-70)

Particularly fascinating is the exploration of women and political power. It is known how heiresses such as Eleanor of Aquitaine wielded great authority in their lands but other women as well, including Adela of Blois, Anne of the Ruthenians, Queen of France, and Mathilda of Tuscany. There is much we can learn from them, as the author explains:

The exercise of supreme political power did not impede them from being women to the full. They had no desire to imitate or copy masculine models. In their behavior, they remained essentially women even when they acted in a military or political field. They did not renounce being admired or loved. Furthermore, they brought to their activity a certain quality of attention to people and even essentially feminine solutions which would have escaped a lord or captain. (pp. 185-186)

How did society come to change? Madame Pernoud describe how certain factors, such as the Black Death in the fourteenth century, caused the monasteries to decline. Women were not permitted to study at the rising universities, which replaced the monasteries as centers of higher learning, thus gradually altering the educational level of women in general. (p.231)

The book concludes by discussing the lives of Catherine of Siena and St. Joan of Arc and how the medieval culture made possible such phenomena which would have been unthinkable at any other time.

But about Joan, we cannot conclude without remarking on a feature of the mentality prevalent in the nineteenth century, which still lingers nowadays among a few obstinate people. At that time, the question was asked and that surprised people was how could this peasant's daughter be received by the king or how could this girl be allowed to lead an army?...But after completing this study on the status of women in the period that preceded her, we may think this problem has already been resolved....The Order of Fontevrault, which still existed in the fifteenth century, bears witness to a time when women were trusted and when the memory of Eleanor, Blanche, and so many others was far from having disappeared. (p.247)

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