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Quotespam, medieval women, courtly love [x]
Huge tracts of land quoteage, ahoy. Bolding is mine, for emphasis or whatever.
From Women's Roles in the Middle Ages, by Sandy Bardsley (2007).
From The Medieval Noble Lady and the Peasant Woman: Who should we envy, who should we pity? by Dena L. Moore (NOT an academic source, but it's ummm documented?).
From various internet sources, links provided where applicable.
Christine de Pizan is cool, I will have a quotespam post ALL ABOUT HER sometime.
I've always felt incredibly bad for Guinevere. <3 BTW ever wondered where George R.R. Martin got the name Jenny (she of Oldstones fame)?
I want to read this.
There'll probably be more later, hahah. Woo also I made my font bigger yay.
[DW | LJ ]
From Women's Roles in the Middle Ages, by Sandy Bardsley (2007).
Women's history is still being reclaimed. The geographical and chronological scope of the Women's Roles through History series contributes to our understanding of the many facets of women's lives. [...] Librarians noted the need for new treatments of women's history, and women's roles are an important part of the history curriculum in every era.
Medieval women were divided from one another in many ways: by their social class, their religion, their age, their marital status, and by the place and the period in which they lived. Yet, as historians look back at the experiences of medieval women, they cannot help but see common patterns that transcend the barriers of class, religion, age, time, and place. Two patters in particular emerge in this study of medieval women. First, women as a group were virtually always viewed as inferior to men as a group. In other words, medieval societies -- like those that preceded and followed them -- were patriarchal. Second, individual women could sometimes overcome this inferior status and break the rules assigned to their sex. The fact that some women were able to break these rules did not, however, mean that all women were able to do so.
When a medieval person thought about his or her identity, class status may often have been more important than gender. The life of a medieval noblewoman was certainly different from that of a nobleman in terms of work, responsibilities, and behavioral expectations, but it was arguably less different than the gap between a noblewoman and a peasant woman. Class changed over time and place, too: in some regions of Europe in the early Middle Ages, class distinctions were less entrenched. In later periods, people became acutely conscious of social class and strove to improve their families' place in the social hierarchy. Women became important in their families' class strategies, whether as potential marriage partners, useful in forging alliances, or as more active participants in gift giving, fostering of children, and exchanges of favors.
Age and marital status also affected the lives and roles of women in important ways. Behavioral expectations and social norms for girls and maidens, for instance, were quite different from those of married women and widows. A minority of women remained single throughout their lives. Others saw themselves as married to God and thus do not fit neatly into any marital category.
Medieval women can easily be separated into the various groups outlined above: noblewomen, townswomen, or peasant women; Christian women, Jewish women, or Islamic women; girls, maidens, wives, widows, or lifelong single women. What, then, did these various groups have in common? What justifies our regarding them as a distinctive category? In each case, the main thing that these women had in common was their relationship to men. Whether Jewish, Islamic, Christian, noble, peasant, single, married, widowed, old, or young, women were regarded as inferior to men of the same category. A noblewoman could trump a peasant man in terms of social power, but medieval society understood that she was almost certainly subject to a man who occupied the same social status as she did. Medieval societies -- whether Frankish courts, Jewish ghettoes, peasant manors, or one of many other subcultures -- were patriarchal. Although each society contained women who were able to transcend the generally inferior role assigned to their sex, the majority of women were kept firmly in their place by a network of expectations and attitudes.
Clare's Rule, in fact, acknowledges that only some of her nuns were literate: those who could read were responsible for reading the religious services aloud; those who could not were given extra prayers to say instead. Indeed, Clare did not think it worthwhile to teach nuns to read: instead, everyone should work and worship according to the talents and skills they possessed. Clare's Rule emphasized obedience and humility, exhorting her nuns to wear cheap clothing, speak seldom, and obey their abbess. Documents such as those of Hildegard and Clare lend insight into the everyday lives of religious women and the relationships among them.
Hildegard walked a narrow line: she and fellow visionaries had to avoid carefully any claim of spiritual authority over men. Consequently, much visionary literature and much advice literature written by women was specifically directed toward other women [...] women were also among the authors of poems and plays, although few of these survive.
Letters written by medieval women provide another important female-authored source. Noblewomen often wrote or dictated letters to be sent to their husbands when the latter were away from home in order to keep them updated on matters of family business. They also used letters to family members and friends as part of their participation in family politics. Such was the case in a letter written by Joan, princess of Wales, to her half-brother Henry III of England in the early thirteenth century. Joan's letter shows her intervening in the relationship between her half-brother and her husband, the Welsh prince Llewellyn the Great:
To her most excellent lord and dearest brother, Henry, by the grace of God, King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and Count of Anjou, Joan sends her own greetings.
Know, lord, that I am grieved beyond measure, that I can by no means express, that our enemies have succeeded in sowing discord between my husband and you. I grieve no less on account of you than on account of my husband, especially since I know what genuine fondness my husband used to have, and still has, for you, and how useless and dangerous it is for us, with due respect, to lose true friends and have enemies instead. Thus on bended knee and shedding tears, I beg your highness to alter your decision, as you may easily do, and do not fail to be reconciled to those who are joined to you by an unbreakable bond and learn both to love friends and oppress enemies.
As Joan's letter demonstrates, she occupied a vital role in the relationship between these two important men, and she did not hesitate to use emotive writing to try and achieve peace between them. Llewellyn the Great might have found it undignified or unmanly to appeal to Henry III 'on bended knee and shedding tears,' but Joan had no such scruples. Letters such as these tell historians about the important role played by women in politics [...] and about women's use of rhetoric [...]
Yet one must note, once again, that female-authored texts were written by a very small fraction of the medieval female population.
Thus historians must look to other sources. Comments by male authors on the lives, nature, and status of women convey much useful information, yet these comments must -- as with any other source -- be taken with a grain of salt. St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, for instance, insists that women should be silent in the churches and subordinate to their husbands. Yet elsewhere he greeted and acknowledged female leaders within the church. St. Jerome insisted that virginity was the worthiest state for a woman, yet clearly most of his contemporaries disagreed, or the population would have died out. Comments on the nature and status of women are frequently misogynist, but this does not necessarily mean that all medieval men hated women.
Conversely, positive depictions of women did not mean that they were necessarily admired. Chivalric literature of the high and late Middle Ages that placed women on a pedestal did not translate to idealization of real women, for instance. The chaste, beautiful and remote 'lady in the tower' served as an object of devotion for fictional knights, who admired her from afar. Yet little evidence exists that such attitudes were carried over to real noblewomen, who remained hardheaded household managers. Glimpses of strong female characters can also be found in Scandinavian tales: the Danish Alvild, for example, becomesa pirate, although she is ultimately tamed by her suitor; Sigrid the Strong-Minded of Sweden (perhaps a real queen, though one whose legends were distorted by time) was renowned for wisdom and defiance against the bullying of King Olaf of Norway. Yet real Scandinavian women were seldom allowed such license.
In other words, women were not necessarily excluded from owning important town assets, but they were far less likely to do so than men. [...] The higher fees paid by butchers [a male dominated trade], however, suggest that this trade was more lucrative, and the low fees paid by food sellers indicate that this was a low-status trade.
From The Medieval Noble Lady and the Peasant Woman: Who should we envy, who should we pity? by Dena L. Moore (NOT an academic source, but it's ummm documented?).
The noble lady and the peasant alike were considered to be less valuable than a man who shared the same status as she did in society due to the belief that men were morally superior to women, and the fact that the work of a woman, particularly the work of a noble woman, was less evident than that of her husband, brother, or father and rarely received recognition.
She was the person who made sure everything ran smoothly, from the provisioning of the keep to the defense of the estate while her husband was absent. Depending on her family's rank, the noble woman could also be in charge of many of the household chores in addition to her supervisory role. The rank of a noble corresponded accordingly with the actual amount of physical and mental labor a woman put into the household, with the highest ranking women supervising officials who, in turn, directed the rest of the staff. The management position held by many noble women wasn't a visible one in comparison with the men in her family, who could be seen traveling to, or holding, court, riding about the estates checking with the officials, or engaging in battle during war.
The married peasant woman worked very hard to help support the family. She kept the house, cooked, did the wash, made the cloth and clothes, milked the cows, tended the fire, cared for the children, and basically took care of any other task her husband did not have the time for, and, on top of all this, she often earned extra income outside of the home. There were numerous opportunities available to the peasant woman to make money, including the making and selling of cheese, butter, and ale, as well as offering to do odd jobs for others who were more prosperous. The chance to earn extra money through labor was not an option for the noble lady, but the noble lady usually had no need to earn money, as she was generally well provided for by her husband and dowry. Despite all the duties of the peasant woman, she did not attend court, join tithings, or hold any manorial office, much as the noble lady didn't attend the feudal court, or hold any office in her own right.
This notion placed women on a pedestal with Mary, claiming that noble women were pure, innocent, and good, while baser women were wicked and enjoyed luring men from their duties. Troubadour poetry, which often represented noble women as being able to awaken men to higher aspirations, and courtly chivalry helped to set the unrealistic ideal of the "perfect" lady, an ideal impossible for any real woman to live up to. The medieval model of female perfection made it even more difficult for noble women to compete with men, and kept them hidden in their secondary roles. Taken in this context, the peasant woman cannot be pitied over the noble lady; the noble woman was thrust from one facet of the medieval mind to the other, never knowing where she stood in the world and trying to climb up the pedestal without falling. The peasant woman knew she was viewed as evil and, because she knew that she was not, went about her business of surviving.
When the peasant woman married, she became mistress of the house and took up her position as a wife, but marriage did not necessarily put an end to the woman's wage earning, nor did the peasant woman have to marry. The noble lady, however, had no place in the world if she did not marry or enter a nunnery. Society dictated that it was her responsibility to marry and bear as many children as possible, and if she choose not to, then she had to enclose herself.
Despite the opportunities offered by the convent, most noble women were not allowed to make any decisions regarding her future, and many were betrothed from a very early age, even from birth. The women usually had no say in who was chosen to be her husband because her marriage was arranged by her parents or guardians for social, political, or economic gain. The marriage contract was drawn up upon the noble lady's betrothal and specified the dower, dowry, and the disposal of property if the marriage was barren. The peasant woman's marriage could bear similarity to the noble's, an arrangement made by the family, or it could be remarkably different. Some peasants were allowed to marry for personal reasons, such as compatibility or love, but more often marriage was for financial gain for both families and involved the entire family, church, lord, and the community as a whole due to the collective nature of the manor.
Children were viewed as assets by the nobility because they were useful in forging future alliances, however, the noble lady was advised to put her husband before her children, which often led to an absence of emotional bonding with her children. There were many other reasons for this lack of bonding, the most important being the short life expectancy of children. Other explanations include the idea that reproduction was a male function (that the man sowed the seed and the woman was merely the field in which it grew), the bearing of heirs was seen as a duty, the legitimate offspring of the marriage was rarely the result of love, and the fact that the children were often cared for by nurses when they were young, and, at about the age of seven, were sent into other households to learn skills and to further their education. Because, in many circumstances, there was little attachment between a mother and her children, medieval noble women were rarely depicted as mothers in contemporary art or literature.
Unlike the noble woman, peasant women were expected to love their children and to personally care for them most of the time. The neighbors in the community generally disapproved of neglect and abuse, and could use their voice in the village and at manorial court to rectify the situation. Due to the personal time put into caring for her babies, most peasant women formed a loving relationship with their offspring.
In fact, noble ladies weren't expected to feed their young. Breast feeding in general ties a woman to her baby for extended periods of time and, thus, a noble lady gained greater freedom and mobility by not breast feeding. She had more time to pursue her other roles in life, particularly the role of the household manager. A significant drawback to not breast feeding, other than the lack of bonding between mother and child and the child's loss of the immune effects of colostrum (not recommended in medieval times because it was believed to be unhealthy) , was the loss of breast feeding's contraceptive effect; therefore, noble women became pregnant much more often than the peasant and had to contend with the risks of childbirth and the high rate of child mortality, risks which were heightened by the close spacing of pregnancies.
Unlike the noble, the peasant woman was tied to her children for many hours a day during breast feeding, and it was not uncommon to breast feed for the first two or three years of a child's life. Breast feeding robbed the peasant of free time to earn extra money and made it much more difficult to fulfill her obligations to the Lord and her family, but the resulting effect of fewer, and healthier children, with pregnancies typically spaced two or more years apart, more than made up for the sacrificial years of breast feeding.
When a peasant woman's husband dies, the Lord of the manor took heriot and the Church took mortuary. The heriot often consisted of a large part of the household, usually all the metal objects, the best beast, uncut cloth, and all the pigs. Sometimes other payments were required in addition to the heriot, usually a fine for the privilege to take over the husband's holding.
A lady was as desirable as her dower, and upon her husband's death, she became a ward of the court, and, depending on her status, was given in marriage by her Lord or the King. The noble lady was not usually given the choice of her future husband, and to make matters worse, she had to pay a fine to the Lord or King in order to remarry. To escape remarriage, she could often pay an exuberant fee, and due to the fact that the fee was often higher than the worth of her dower, she was prevented from remaining single or controlling any property in her own right.
Noble women had very few good personal relationships. Her husband was often a stranger, her children were more often than not cared for by another, her own parents were usually distant, both physically and emotionally, and she had great difficulty in making and maintaining friendships. The noble lady had trouble making friends because she was often sent to distant lands to fulfill her marriage treaty, and she lived on an isolated, rural estate with few, if any, women of her own class around, and she could not cross class lines to become friends with her servants. This contrasted sharply with the peasant woman, who ordinarily had not only her children, but her husband and both of their extended families surrounding them as well. The peasant woman could also make friends with other women, although her social ties were limited to her equals within the village.
In the case of widowhood, the noble woman and the peasant were both treated poorly, but the peasant woman usually took over her husband's property upon his death if she could satisfy both the heriot and the mortuary. The noble woman usually lost vast amounts of her husband's property, excluding her dower. One could say that the noble's dower likely far exceeded that of the peasant's land, but the reduction in her status was dramatic compared with that of the peasants. The only way the noble lady could retain her status was to remarry. The peasant woman, by comparison, usually lost possessions, not land, and she could, by hard work, gain back all she had lost and possibly even increase her holding.
The peasant woman's life had more meaning because she had more recognition, and she had more sense of herself, something the noble lady failed to do so often because of the pressures dictated to her by society. The noble lady rarely had a self; she lived for her place in the world, however superficial and prescribed it may have been.
From various internet sources, links provided where applicable.
Within the first two pages, the passage defining love contains the words "suffering" and "fears" numerous times, with one instance of "no hope" and one "burns" (28-29). That's the language of hell, and while love may be hell, to a chaplain that means something rather serious. We quickly find out that to be fit for love, you cannot be blind, poor, too old, too young, too passionate, impotent, gay, self-confident, trusting, or self-actualized. You must be an anxiety-ridden type-A personality. You have to be a mature adolescent perpetually. And anyway, Andreas tells "Walter" to abstain from the "heresy" of love in the retraction -- so he's sort of fessing up that his perspective has not been presented straightforwardly in the preceding pages.-- Michael Delahoyde, Assc. Professor @ WSU
None the less, the work was taken as an historical witness to the hot new fad and scholars have taken it at face value. treating Andreas' work as history or sociology more than as literature (Donaldson 158). Why would this have been so mistaken, if it was?
What do you suppose would have motivated this codification of something as untamable as love? Andreas even lists 31 rules of love. What is the effect of codifying conduct? [Admittedly, even Dodd notes that what is described is an art practiced, not a passion felt (2).]
How are the guidelines still well known and used today? What changes have evolved since the 12th century? What implications does this overall survival have?
The physiology of love is as Andreas describes: love enters through the eyes, and soon it will wound and lodge in the heart. The lover both "chooses" and is "seized by" love. And the initial impulse is that of the id: to seize! pluck! grab! One doesn't though, since the ego mediates between this impulse and the superego (fear of the "owner"). So the rose is an object, a possession. (It's not impossible that Guillaume was immortalizing a woman whose name was Rose -- so that the entire poem is based on a world-play!) There's no respect for the rose really, just fear of the father figure, the soon-to-be previous "owner." Courtly love from the start is deceptive in its insistence that the woman has power and control and the man is subservient. And later, once the rose is plucked, the game will be over.-- Michael Delahoyde
The God of Love, Cupid, is sinister and armed: pain is an important part of love. Each of his darts represent various features of the love experience, as we learned before. Now he pursues the dreamer and shoots him. The Pains of Love are listed as insomnia, lack of appetite, erotic dreams, anxiety, burning, emaciation. Commandments are also listed: reputation to be guarded; attention devoted to fashion sense, good grooming; cut a dashing figure on horseback, learn the bassoon. Get to know the object of one's love on a personal level? No. Have a real relationship? No.
This is "fin amour" -- refined love -- so it's based on exclusivity, elitism, and artifice. A general ritualism pervades with rules, a set number of darts, etc. So love here is a style, a manner, not an emotion. Love is a pose.
Christine de Pizan despised this poem (but mostly Jean de Meun's portion).
Christine de Pizan is cool, I will have a quotespam post ALL ABOUT HER sometime.
Women cannot claim superiority, or even a heightened degree of position, for their role as the objects of worship. The woman, like the Rose, is secondary to the dance, the sport, the crusade of love. The primary relationship is in fact between the lover and the chase, the player and the game, not the trophy. In The Romance of the Rose, the dreamer falls for his rose only after being moved by dreams of martyrdom to love, his total personal surrender to Cupid, and a pledge to live by "the Rules." A woman is the target, but not the goal. She cannot claim to be loftier than the man for resisting his charms because the man has in fact placed her beyond his immediate reach in order to increase the caliber of his play.-- Erica Theckston
As we discussed, love in this case is narcissistic -- the charm, beauty, or inaccessibility of the woman is not a credit to herself but a reflection upon the character or greatness of the suitor. This woman is a supporting actress in a play scripted by her lover. So she is no better off on a pedestal than kneeling subserviently at his feet, because she has arbitrarily, according to whim, simply been placed in [either position].
But it is difficult if not impossible to show love to be anything more than an artistic phenomenon -- a literary innovation of the Middle Ages.-- Michael Delahoyde
The term "Courtly Love" ("l'amour courtois") was coined by Gaston Paris in 1883 (in the journal Romania), so the first problem is that we tend to let the Victorians define it for us. The terms that appear in the actual medieval period are "Amour Honestus" (Honest Love) and "Fin Amor" (Refined Love).
The concept was new in the Middle Ages. The medievals were the first to discover (or invent) it, the first to express this form of romantic passion. There was no literary nor social framework for it in the Christian world before the end of the 11th century; the Western tradition had no room for the expression of love in literature: there's none in Beowulf or The Song of Roland. The religious tradition speaks of love, but that's agape -- platonic/christian love of all humankind as your brothers and sisters. In classical literature we witness what's called love, but, as exemplified well by the case of Dido for Aeneas, the passion is often described in firy terms and always reads like eros -- hot lust. (Medea and Phaedra are other cautionary examples, and "love" plunges them into crime and disgrace.) Ovid's Ars Armitoria and Remedia Amoris (The Art of Love and The Cure for Love) are ironic and didactic treatises generated from a premise that love is a minor peccadillo. Ovid gives rules for illicit conduct.
[...] And the tastemakers in feudal society marry not for love but for real estate and heirs. It's been said that in the Middle Ages you married a fief and got a wife thrown in with the bargain. Idealized "love" goes against the utilitarian economics of marriage, and passion was forbidden by the Church, so until the courtly version came along, Love was duty and "Luv" was sinful. Thus, "Courtly Love" emerged and remained outside of marriage. (Love and marriage don't go together like a horse and carriage.) C.S. Lewis decided that its key features were humility, courtesy, and adultery.
The Courtly Love sung of in the songs represents a new structure, not that of the Church or of feudalism, but an overturning of both. Love is now a cult -- a sort of religion but outside of normal religion -- and a code -- outside of feudalism but similarly hierarchical. The language and the relationships are similar (and the language, sometimes borrowed from religion, ends up borrowed back by religion in certain lyrics). In feudalism the vassal is the "man" of his sovereign lord; in courtly love, the vassal is the "man" of his sovereign mistress. In religion, the sinner is penitent and asks that Mary intercede on his behalf with Christ, who is Love. In courtly love, the sinner (against the laws of love) asks the mother of the love god, Cupid's mother Venus, to intercede on his behalf with Cupid or Eros, who is the god of love. So this new love religion seems to parody real religion.-- Michael Delahoyde
Does Courtly Love heighten the status of women? Yes, compared to their roles merely as "cup-bearers" and "peace-weavers" -- that is, in Beowulf for example, servants and political pawn in marriage. But...-- Michael Delahoyde
Modern love: A feeling or disposition of deep affection or fondness for someone, typically arising from a recognition of attractive qualities, from natural affinity, or from sympathy and manifesting itself in concern for the other's welfare and pleasure in his or her presence-- Oxford English Dictionary; The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Cappellanus
Courtly Love: A certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive mediation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of love’s precepts in the other’s embrace
In theory "courtly love" has been seen as the other side of the coin of antifeminism. Scholars have used the term to designate a set of literary conventions that supposedly idealizes women and makes them into objects of worship. The lady is wooed, usually at a distance, by a knight who fights in her honor, calls himself her "servant," and suffers insomnia, anorexia, pallor, chills and fever, and other symptoms that, he insists, will be his death if he does not obtain her "mercy." (Ex. St. George, the Redcross Knight, is Una's protector, her knight. Sir Philip Sidney's lyrics is based on courtly love.) The relationship between the knight and the lady is an inversion of the relationship between lord and vassal under feudalism. Because aristocratic women were married off for rank and property, and husbands enjoyed total authority over their wives, it has been argued that courtly love was incompatible with marriage and thus necessarily clandestine, although in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" and "Franklin's Tale" courtly suitors woo and marry their ladies. Whether courtly love had any bearing on actual social custom in the Middle Ages is a vexed question, but one may safely assume that the literature reflects a new deference toward "ladies" that still governs much of our social behavior.-- (link)
The only serious affair in the medieval section is that of Lancelot and Guinevere, but it is certainly no idealization of love or of woman. Throughout the Morte Darthur, Malory has portrayed Guinevere as imperious, passionate, and jealous. He reluctantly endorses Lancelot's loyalty to his lady, not so much because Lancelot loves her as because his honor demands it. Although forewarned, Lancelot visits her on the fatal night "Because the Queen has sent for me." On the other hand, once the adultery is made public, Arthur must have Guinevere burned at the stake because his honor requires it. Of Lancelot's rescue, Sir Gawain says, "he hathe done but knightly, and as I would have done myself and [if] I had stood in like case." What Gawain cannot forgive is Lancelot's inadvertent killing of Gawain's brothers in the course of the rescue. Lancelot's conflicting loves for Guinevere and for his brother knights ultimately destroys the Round Table. It is a conflict between love for a woman and male bonding, and the woman would be expendable were it not for the overriding consideration of honor. As Arthur ruefully confesses: "Much more I am sorrier for my good knights' loss [the loss of my good knights] than for the loss of my fair queen; for queen I might have enough, but such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in no company."-- (link)
I've always felt incredibly bad for Guinevere. <3 BTW ever wondered where George R.R. Martin got the name Jenny (she of Oldstones fame)?
The term 'courtly love' was first used by Gaston Paris in 1883 to describe the adulterous love between Lancelot and Guinevere in Chretien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la charette. 'Courtly love' denotes a codified form of love believed to have originated among the Occitan troubadours, where the subservient lover worships, serves and suffers for his elevated lady as if she were his feudal lord, and in so doing is himself ennobled. This development has been linked to contemporary society and seen as fantasy literature, allowing younger brothers access to women and status unavailable to them legitimately -- through adulterous means. Originally seen as empowering for women, feminist critics have seen the misogynistic impulses of the system, which limits the agency of women by banishing them to the pedestal, where as 'ladies' they are differentiated from 'women' who retain the undesirable characteristics associated with femininity throughout the Middle Ages (see: misogyny). Silent and chaste, the lady is denied both desire and a voice with which to communicate it. Courtly love is seen to be the basis of Western romantic love as we know it today.-- Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, ed. Lorraine Code
I want to read this.
There'll probably be more later, hahah. Woo also I made my font bigger yay.
[DW | LJ ]