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Reproduction is always central to discussions about historical women, and that was also true in the Middle Ages. This chapter discusses several aspects of medieval thought: the scientific view of women’s bodies and fertility, the care of the pregnant, and living through life’s different stages, all of which affected the daily lives of medieval women.
UNDERSTANDING THE FEMALE BODY
Scholars in the Middle Ages wanted to understand the female body and the reasons why a woman could or could not have children. Four liquid substances, called humors, were believed to make up the human body in the same way as the four elements (earth, water, air, and fire) made up the physical world. These humors were blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. Each humor was associated with qualities: wet or dry, and cold or warm. The processes of the body, from respiration to digestion, were believed to be affected by the balance of the four humors. If the humors were out of balance, a person became ill: for example, a high fever and flushed forehead could mean an imbalance of blood, the hottest and wettest of the humors. Treatment for such illnesses included baths, carefully chosen food, and sometimes an intervention such as bleeding a small amount of blood from a vein.
Humorally, men and women were believed to be polar opposites. Men were most healthy when they were hot and dry, and women were most healthy when they were cold and moist. This contrast was necessary for procreation. A man had to be sufficiently hot and dry to produce semen, and a woman had to be cold and moist enough to produce menstrual blood. Women’s bodies were believed to be so moist that the flesh was spongy and wet, which made production of menstrual blood possible (Dean-Jones 1994, 55–58). Monthly purges of menstrual blood were necessary to rid the body of impurities. Lack of menstruation in a young woman, therefore, demanded a medical intervention, usually via changes to her diet or treatment with herbal remedies.
We know nothing about how medieval women dealt with their periods, though we know they understood that fertility depended on regular menstruation. We can guess that they probably used cloth of some kind to catch the flow; perhaps each individual woman had a set of rags that she kept for that purpose. Since we know that healers used herbal tampons called pessaries for medical purposes, it is also possible that they used some sort of tampon for menstruation. Medical works contain many remedies that were used to bring on a period if it were delayed. Some of these remedies were abortifacients that might have been used as a sort of contraceptive. Other than that, the sources are silent. This is an area in which we cannot hear the voices of everyday women speaking to each other. (We will discuss contraception further below.)
Menstrual blood itself was thought to be extremely unclean, an inheritance both from Jewish law and from ancient attitudes about menstruation. Pope Innocent III (1160–1216), in a work called On the Misery of the Human Condition, wrote, “This blood is said to be so abominable and foul that contact with it causes seeds not to germinate and vineyards to dry up, grass to die, trees to drop their fruit, and if dogs eat it they become rabid.” These views were inherited from a Roman author, Pliny (Skinner and van Houts 2011, 95). Some authors believed that having sex with a woman who was menstruating caused leprosy or led to children with birth defects. Despite such beliefs, women were not forbidden to attend church while menstruating, although they were not allowed to attend after childbirth until a prescribed amount of time had passed.
Scientific writers continued to be curious about female anatomy. Galen (d. ca. 216 CE), whose writings on anatomy became very influential in the high Middle Ages, conceptualized the sex organs of men and women as mirror images of each other: the shape of the vagina and the penis, and the ovaries and the testicles, provided him with a justification for seeing the female system as an inversion of the male. Yet there was no place in this conceptualization for the clitoris, which was almost entirely misunderstood by medieval thinkers. Some theorized that the clitoris functioned to keep the vagina closed, or that it protected the vagina from the touch of the air. One exception was Pietro d’Abano (ca. 1257–1316 CE), who noted that women became sexually aroused when the clitoris was rubbed: “For the pleasure that can be obtained from this part of the body is comparable to that obtained from the tip of the penis” (Jacquart and Thomasset 1988, 46).
Perhaps as a result of lack of knowledge about the clitoris and perhaps because of the preoccupation with fertility, the womb or uterus became the focal point for the medieval intellectual understanding of female sexuality, and by extension, beliefs about fertility and infertility. The womb was believed to be like a living creature that, lacking the moisture necessary for pregnancy, could move around the body and cause various ailments such as shortness of breath and choking, sometimes termed “suffocation of the womb” or “wandering womb.” Sexual intercourse was one of the treatments for this problem, because it was believed to move the uterus back down where it belonged and to restore its moisture via a man’s semen. The condition could also be treated with an application of sweet smoke to the woman’s vagina and foul-smelling smoke to her nose in order to attract the womb back into its place. Her flesh was so spongy that it could be affected by odor remedies, according to medical writers (Thomasset 1992, 48).
The medieval system of understanding the body fit perfectly with the understanding posed by Christian writers. Not only were women believed to be less moral than men, their very physical bodies were less perfect (because they were less hot and dry), and their bodies were intended entirely for procreation; otherwise, why would the womb be so greedy and troublesome? The female body, which required sexual intercourse regardless of situational morality and produced unclean substances like menstrual blood, was an object of great uneasiness to Christian thinkers. As a result, medieval women who were exposed to these points of view understood their own bodies and biological natures as dangerously sinful.
PREGNANCY
We often imagine that medieval women gave birth to many children in quick succession, but that may not have been the case. Nutrition was often poor. A successful pregnancy requires a woman to have specific nutrients in order to carry a child to term. Since the diets of medieval women varied greatly with social standing, lower-class women may have had trouble conceiving and giving birth. A diet consisting primarily of grains may not have provided women the amount of folic acid that allowed for the development of the neural tube in a fetus, and children born with a neural tube defect such as spina bifida would not have survived. Many people in the Middle Ages also suffered from anemia, the lack of iron, which causes problems with the blood and bones. Very poor women may also not have had sufficient sources of calcium to strengthen their own bones and to build the bones of their infants. Osteoporosis, which is caused by the lack of calcium, has been identified in some early medieval Frankish women who were as young as thirty (Garver 2012, 228–229). (For the bone markers of poor nutrition, see the introduction.)
Medieval writers understood that good food was necessary for conception and pregnancy, and writers of medical literature were quite specific in their dietary advice for women who wanted to conceive. Medieval thinkers imagined that conception occurred when a man’s semen acted upon the menstrual blood in the woman’s uterus. Some writers even used the analogy that the menstrual blood functioned as wood and the semen the tools that were used to work it. There was debate, based on the works of Aristotle and Galen, about whether the woman emitted “seed” during orgasm or whether her only contribution to conception was to provide the menstrual blood that the man’s semen then turned into a fetus. Aristotle had argued that the female parent could contribute only one material, the menstrual blood, to conception. Galen, however, argued that women did emit seed at orgasm (Jacquart and Thomasset 1988, 61–62). This discussion influenced the question of whether female orgasm was necessary for conception and, if so, what role the female seed played in the development of the embryo. William of Conches (ca. 1080–1154), writer of an influential encyclopedia, claimed that the female seed was necessary for conception. Unfortunately, however, he also argued that women who conceived from rape must have experienced pleasure from the violation to become pregnant. (Read more about sexual violence in chapter one.) Other writers did not go that far but suggested that the female sperm was weaker and might not be involved in the formation of the fetus at all, but perhaps formed the amniotic sac or chorion (Thomasset 1992, 56–57).
Medieval thinkers also had a humoral explanation for the formation of infants of either sex. The influential medical text called the Pantegni was a translation of the Arab writer Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi (d. ca. 994) by the great eleventh-century translator Constantine the African (ca. 1020–1087). The Pantegni described the womb this way: “The womb is like the bladder in shape, for both of them are very deep, but it is different in its two extensions which are similar to horns” (Jacquart and Thomasset 1988, 23). The development of male and female fetuses was thought to depend on the relative heat of the sides of the womb and what side of the uterus the child was conceived within. The right side of the uterus, which was closer to the liver, was thought to be warmer than the left side and, therefore, the site of the conception of a male, while a female embryo, which was cooler and moister than her brother, would rest on the left side of the uterus.
The calculation got more complex when the dissection of pigs revealed that sows have a bicornate (two-horned) uterus, which was assumed to also be true for human women, since human dissection was not allowed until the very late Middle Ages. Medieval thinkers eventually adapted sow’s anatomy to mean that the human uterus had seven chambers. In this conception, the three cells on the right side of the womb would produce boys, the three on the left produce girls, and hermaphrodites would be conceived in the middle chamber (Thomasset 1992, 59). Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179 CE), a German mystic and scientific writer, took the idea of the action of warmth and strength on the embryo even further by attaching the love felt by the child’s parents to the later moral development of their child. She wrote that two parents in love produced virtuous, happy children; if either of them lacked love for the other, they produced bitter offspring (Cadden 1984, 155).
Understandably, infertility caused medieval couples a great deal of concern. Women had a broad tradition of charms, prayers, and objects to turn to when they had trouble conceiving. A ritual written in the margin of a text by a medieval physician named Gilbertus Anglicus (ca. 1180–1250 CE) gives the following instructions: A man of twenty years old or more should gather comfrey and daisy roots, make a juice with them, and write a prayer using the juice on a piece of parchment. That parchment was to be worn around the neck of the man, if a boy baby was desired, or the woman, if a girl was desired, during sexual intercourse. The manuscript called this charm “A remedy that never fails” (Jones and Olsan 2015, 412–413). Women sometimes carried amulets and other objects that were intended to enhance fertility. One popular item, handed down from mother to daughter, was a string of coral beads that were thought to “make fruit multiply.” Amulets dedicated to Saint Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth, or to the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, were also common gifts (French 2016, 129). Once a pregnancy was achieved, just as people do today, medieval people wanted to guess the sex of the fetus before he or she was born. An Anglo-Saxon text advised, “Observe how the woman walks. If she touches the ground more with her heels she will bear a boy; if she touches the ground only with her toes she will bring forth a girl” (Larrington 1995, 92).
Pregnancy could be very stressful for medieval women because of their natural fears that something could go wrong (Gilchrist 2012, 219). Charms and prayers have survived, which indicate a concern with the success of pregnancy. An Anglo-Saxon charm against miscarriage advises the pregnant woman this way: “The woman who cannot bring her child to maturity must go to the grave of a dead man, step three times over the grave and say these words three times: ‘This as my help against the evil late birth; this as my help against the grievous dismal birth; this as my help against the evil lame birth’” (Larrington 1995, 91). Frequently, such charms were accompanied by prayers. Such semimagical practices may have helped to reassure women who were worried about the outcome of their pregnancies.
Saints were sometimes credited with a longed-for pregnancy after couples made vows. As we will discuss further in chapter six, medieval people saw visiting the relics of saints—objects including personal belongings or even bones or hair—as ways of accessing the powers of the saint to help with life problems. Families might take a vow to go on pilgrimage to particular shrines or to give particular gifts to the saints. In the early fourteenth century, an Italian couple whose names were Guido and Margarita testified before a church inquiry into the sainthood of Louis of Toulouse that they had been childless for twelve years of marriage. They vowed to take the saint a waxen image the same length and weight as any child they might bear. Margarita then became pregnant with a son who was about eight years old when the papal board of inquiry wrote down evidence of the miracle (Finucane 1997, 19).
Women who conceived often visited saints’ shrines to ask for safe childbirth and good health for mother and child. Specific relics had reputations for being good for mothers and children. The cathedrals of Chartres and Aachen claimed to have pieces of the Virgin Mary’s robe, the Sancta Camisia, which attracted many pilgrims. The churches of Rocamadour, in southern France, and Walsingham, in northern England, both had statues of the Virgin Mary that were reputed to be miraculous. People who visited the shrines to these relics could purchase small pilgrim’s badges, which were usually made of an alloy of lead and tin, and pictures and candles. Such objects were touched to the shrine to connect them with the holiness of the saints’ relics (Gilchrist 2012, 135). Devotees also left their own objects, which are known as votives, at saints’ shrines as thanks for favors or for healing; wax votives of body parts were common, as were gifts or money or other symbolic objects.
CHILDBIRTH
Once labor began, there were many charms and rituals designed to help with the pains and fears of childbirth, some of them for women to use and some to be done by a priest. One particularly long-lived charm consisted of a list of mothers from the Bible followed by an exorcising prayer and a command to the infant to come out, like Lazarus from the tomb (John 11:43). This particular charm was to be written on wax and applied to the woman’s right foot during labor (Jones and Olsan 2015, 415–416). Charms like this one were sometimes written on parchment or wax and applied to the body. One interesting example from the fourteenth century had a series of prayers to be written on three communion wafers, which the woman was then to eat to aid in birth (Jones and Olsan 2015, 423). Holy relics, too, could be used in childbirth to help the laboring mother. Westminster Abbey in London claimed to hold the girdle or belt of the Virgin Mary, and Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward I and the countess of Hereford and Essex, made a special pilgrimage to Westminster in 1303 in order to borrow the girdle for her upcoming delivery. The girdle may have been tied around her waist as she labored to help her give birth (French 2016, 133). Another birthing girdle, made of parchment 180 centimeters long (approximately 5’ 11”) to simulate the height of Jesus, still survives in the collection of the Wellcome Library in London (Leyser 1995, 129).
This medieval birth scene shows a woman in bed while female birth attendants wash the new baby. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Miracle stories from the records of various saints’ shrines give examples of how frantic family members might react to complications of childbirth, especially stillbirth. Newborns who did not breathe immediately after birth were sometimes thought to be dead, provoking prayers and vows from the women present and from the men in the family. Often, the newborn was taken to the nearest shrine in hopes that the saint would resuscitate the infant. A coin might be bent over the body of the child and the coin vowed to a particular saint, or the child might be “measured” with a piece of string that was later incorporated into wax as an offering (Finucane 1997, 11).
The birth experiences of medieval women were different from our own, since all births took place at home rather than in a hospital. It was common for birth attendants to try to keep the woman upright while she delivered her baby, encouraging her to walk around as labor progressed and then, when birth was imminent, placing her on a birthing stool. There are surviving examples of these stools from the late Middle Ages and early modern period, but evidence for them dates as far back as the ancient world. They often had three legs and were structured to provide the woman support as she delivered. The design of birthing stools and chairs remained fairly consistent across the centuries. Their greatest benefit was to allow the laboring woman to sit as upright as possible, using natural gravity to help her give birth (Banks 1999, 3–15).
There is no way to know how often medieval women gave birth successfully and how often they died in childbirth, because record keeping was scant in most areas until well after the end of the medieval period. Certainly, the number was higher than in the present day, and probably higher than it was one hundred to two hundred years ago, even before the advent of antibiotic drugs and the surgical delivery of babies. Because most people married and because the rate of contraception use was probably very low, most women from their first marriages to the end of their period of fertility were at risk of dying in childbirth. A study of Swedish parish registers in the eighteenth century put the maternal mortality rate at eleven per thousand births around 1760; this is significantly higher than the most recent statistics for the United States, in which the maternal mortality rate in 2015 was fourteen per hundred thousand births (Schofield 1986, 237). Although the eighteenth-century statistics cannot be directly connected to the Middle Ages, the contrast between the eighteenth century and today suggests how different women of the past’s expectations for maternal mortality might be.
Similarly, even after a successful birth, medieval children were still at risk. Infant and child mortality were high throughout the Middle Ages, perhaps as high as 20 to 30 percent among children under seven. The trauma of birth and childhood diseases combined to make early childhood very dangerous indeed. Cemetery examples sometimes reflect this reality: in Frösön, Sweden, a cemetery used between 1050 and 1350 yielded a sample in which half of all skeletons were children under seven (Youngs 2006, 24, 26). The deaths of small children left unsupervised often feature in the coroner’s rolls of medieval England, the children dying by “misadventure” when their parents were not home: falling into fire, drowning, or being attacked by domestic animals.
The Black Death, the epidemic of the bubonic plague that began in the mid-fourteenth century, was particularly hard on children. Children made up 88 percent of all the deaths from plague at the Dominican cemetery in Siena, Italy, in 1383. Without effective medical interventions, children’s deaths struck both rich and poor families. At one time, medieval historians wondered whether ancient and medieval parents had the same kind of love for their children that modern parents do today. They argued that frequent infant and child death might have made medieval parents less attached to their children at birth because they died so often. But we cannot imagine the levels of sorrow that must have attended mothers and fathers who lost several children, whether one at a time or all at once. Our evidence for the period indicates that medieval parents loved their children with the same fervor as our more fortunate society today (Crawford 1999, 2–4). The fourteenth-century Welsh poet Llywelyn Fychan mourned his children who were killed by the plague in a poem called The Pestilence. “I was left, feeling betrayed and stunned, barely alive in a harsh world” (Johnston 1993, 50–53).
BIRTH ATTENDANTS AND MIDWIVES
Although they are sometimes difficult to find in medieval sources, we must assume that midwives (the word means “with women”) provided the bulk of the birth assistance throughout the Middle Ages. Historians of childbirth have argued that birth, in most instances, was female business and that men waited for news of the birth at a distance (Harris-Stoertz 2012, 263). But we know surprisingly little about normal childbirth from medical texts; most of the medical literature of the period addressed problems in childbirth but not the course of a normal birth. An author named Trota, possibly a midwife, who lived in the twelfth century in or near Salerno, Italy, wrote a work called On Treatments for Women. This work was the second section of a compound work that became known as the Trotula, three short works on women’s health compiled in the twelfth century. Despite the title, there is very little in On Treatments for Women about normal childbirth, though the work contains detailed prescriptions for such complications as blood loss during birth and uterine prolapse (Green 2001, 124–125). (Read more about Trota in chapter eight.)
Equally sparse is our information about who attended normal births. Early literature on childbirth from the Roman period was written expressly for professional midwives. Soranus, a second-century Greek physician who wrote a work called the Gynecology, explicitly directed his advice to them in the expectation that midwives would be present at most births. The documents then fell silent for several centuries as ancient authors were copied and recopied, and documents about the profession of midwifery disappeared. Since most of what women knew about and did during childbirth is lost to us because women taught one another verbally, we must rely on sources written almost entirely by men. From the thirteenth century onward, male physicians increasingly considered fertility and childbirth to be within their purview, and often criticized or disparaged midwives as ineffective and ignorant (Green 2013, 347). The men who studied childbirth in this period sought to understand the “secrets of women”—meaning the vagina and uterus. Such “secrets” were not written down for women to learn about their own bodies, but so that men in their families could ensure their fertility.
What women who attended births did or did not know about the female body is unavailable to us from the sources, so we are forced to look at the few examples that remain to construct some ideas about how and when they worked. Bartholomeus Anglicus, an encyclopedist writing in the thirteenth century, detailed the midwife’s activity this way: she rubbed balm on the mother in labor, tied the infant’s navel cord, washed the child, and wrapped him in cloths. She was “a woman that hath craft to help a woman that travaileth [labors] of child, that she bear and bring forth her child with the less woe and sorrow” (Orme 2001, 17).
The church gave midwives an important concession in the thirteenth century: if a midwife felt a child was in imminent danger of death, she could baptize the child to ensure that he or she would go to heaven if it did not survive. Beginning at this time, church officials preached the doctrine that the souls of unbaptized babies could not go to heaven but went to a corner of hell called limbo, where they did not suffer punishment but were unable to gain the bliss of heaven (Lynch 1992, 278). A fifteenth-century writer cautioned that the midwife should make sure the child was baptized, “for she bears more responsibility than all the other women” who attended the birth for ensuring the child went to heaven (Green 2013, 352).
Concern about keeping babies from going to hell or limbo provoked a number of practices in the later Middle Ages. These included what we now call cesarean section, which was called a sectio in mortua (Latin for “a cutting of a dead woman”). If a mother died during birth and the attendants believed the child might still be alive, the mother’s body would be cut open to extract the child for the purpose of baptism if nothing else. The first surgical author to describe a cesarean section was Bernard de Gordon (ca. 1270–1330 CE). Unfortunately, we have no evidence as to whether the practice was widespread and little evidence as to who performed the procedure: there are only twelve examples of the procedure in medieval documents, and we do not know if they were successful. One is an Italian case from 1473 in which a notary recorded the removal of a child from Caterino, the deceased wife of Nicoulau Fabri. When he learned that his wife was dead, Fabri petitioned the local bailiff for permission to perform the operation. The bailiff consented, but we do not know whether Caterino’s baby survived (Bednarski and Courtemanche 2011). Although it was probable that there were midwives present at the birth, the document that preserves the story does not mention them. It is possible that the midwives at Caterino’s birth provided care before and during the birth but that they did not participate in the sectio in mortua.
Stories of complex births from saints’ miracles reveal midwives worked in shifts to help suffering mothers who were undergoing complications. In a particularly sad example from the late thirteenth century, a woman named Dulceta, who was seventeen years old, could not deliver her child after four days of labor. A series of midwives tried to help, but none was effective until a woman named Guillelma helped her deliver the partially decomposed fetus. Dulceta was badly hurt by the birth and suffered tremendously for two years from what she thought was a bone lodged in her vagina. A surgeon was called in, but before the procedure, Dulceta made a vow to St. Louis of Marseilles, who caused the object to fall from her body painlessly the next day. Dulceta begged for enough money from parishioners at the church to offer a wax candle to St. Louis and swept out the church as often as she could to show her appreciation to the saint (Finucane 1997, 31–32). In this story, the writer emphasized that a group of midwives and even a surgeon could not measure up to the standard of a saint when it came to healing.
Midwives suffered in the later Middle Ages not only from criticism but also from outright accusations of wrongdoing. The Malleus Maleficarum, or “Hammer of Witches,” a work written in 1486–1487 by two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, accused midwives of sorcery and committing the souls of the infants in their care to hell. This work is infamous for its misogynistic rhetoric, but midwives received particular vitriol from the two authors, perhaps because of their permission to baptize babies. Instead of baptizing babies, Kramer and Sprenger argued, midwives frequently cursed them. “Even when they [midwives] do not kill babies, they offer them to the demons by devoting them with a curse” (Mackay 2009, 369). We will address witchcraft further in chapter six, but this example shows that some views of midwives were marked by uneasiness about their power to affect the spiritual status of newborns.
CONTRACEPTION, ABORTION, AND INFANTICIDE
Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), the authoritative Christian writer of the early fifth century, laid down the Catholic Church’s strict view of contraception: any sexual activity that was not intended to achieve conception was a sin, regardless of whether the couple was married (Brundage 1987, 89). Writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries equated the use of contraceptives to adultery and regarded it as deserving comparable severity. They did not elaborate on the specifics of what they considered to be contraceptive, and it is likely that what they were prohibiting was coitus interruptus, or withdrawing before ejaculation so as to prevent pregnancy (Brundage 1987, 358). Coitus interruptus was a widespread, but often unsuccessful, technique for preventing pregnancy throughout the ancient and medieval periods, and church authors took care to forbid it. The eighth-century Canons of Theodore called the practice “uncleanness or a detestable sin, whence we read that Onan, the son of Juda, was struck by God after entering into his wife and spilling his seed on the ground.” “Wasting” the semen was a sin that violated God’s purpose for sex (Payer 1984, 57).
Despite these prohibitions, knowledge of contraception did exist and was used in medieval Europe. It is not known whether barrier methods of contraception were used, but early medieval Europe certainly inherited knowledge of herbal preparations that could cause abortion, or abortifacients. Some of these herbal remedies came from traditional or ancient sources, and some from the Muslim world. In medieval Islamic law, a woman might use contraception or abort a fetus before 120 days’ gestation (a limit set by the Prophet Muhammad). In the great era of the translation of Muslim medical works into Latin for use by medical practitioners, sections of works describing contraception and abortion became available to European readers. Particularly important were Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi (called Rhazes in Latin, ca. 865–925), and Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina (in Latin, Avicenna, 980–1037), both of whose works were translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the twelfth century. Al-Razi prescribed a contraceptive tampon, which contained the juice of the herb rue and pepper, to be inserted after intercourse. Ibn Sina cited such plants as juniper, cyclamen, and birthwort as causing a spontaneous abortion when brewed into a drink (Riddle 1992, 127, 130–134).
It is difficult to determine when or how often such remedies were used, not only because of a lack of data but also because they often appear in manuscripts as emmenagogues—that is, drugs that would bring on the menstrual period, since women who did not menstruate regularly were thought to be in poor health. The herbal drugs were often given orally or administered in a pessary, an herbal tampon that was inserted into the vagina. Modern research has established that many of the remedies were not effective, but herbs such as rue and pennyroyal can cause abortion when ingested in high enough doses (though in the case of these herbs, the toxicity can be dangerous to the mother) (Riddle 1992, 53–54).
An Old English recipe from the Leechbook III, written in the mid-tenth century, prescribed that a woman whose period was delayed should first drink an herb called brooklime (Veronica beccabunga) boiled in ale, and then bathe in a hot bath. When she rose from the bath, she was supposed to use a poultice made of barley meal (Hordeum vulgare), green mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), and wild celery (Apium graveolens) on her genitals and also drink some of that mixture. The recipe added that all this should be done at the time when the woman would normally have had her period. The treatment could be repeated, if necessary, if it was not effective the first time (Osborn 2008, 154–157). Brooklime, mugwort. and wild celery all contain chemicals that can provoke menstruation. Between drinking this potion and applying a poultice, a woman who used this remedy might actually have succeeded in starting her period.
There is no way to know how often, or whether, medieval women used such preparations or whether they had other remedies available to them that do not appear in the sources. We do know that they used quasimagical preparations, such as amulets and charms, for contraception, which could not have been effective but are very interesting. The Trotula, a collection of texts on women’s medicine from the twelfth century, listed a number of such charms, including: “If a woman does not wish to conceive, let her carry against her nude flesh the womb of a goat which has never had offspring.” Perhaps mindful of religious rules against contraception, the work went on to explain that a woman might have “been badly torn in birth and afterward from fear of death does not wish to conceive any more” (Green 2001, 96–99). Medieval people understood that nursing could slow down conception, and upper-class mothers often chose not to nurse their children themselves so that they could conceive again more quickly. Church authorities deplored the practice and tried to encourage noble mothers to breastfeed their infants themselves. We will discuss nursing more completely below.
Both secular and sacred law threatened parents with serious punishments if they sought an abortion or killed a child after birth. In Carolingian Europe, the penances demanded of women who had abortions depended on the development of the fetus. Once the fetus had “quickened”—meaning the mother could feel it moving in her uterus—the penalty was much higher, because the church held that after forty days in the womb, the fetus was given a soul (Garver 2012, 230–231). Penances could range from a few years to a lifetime, depending on the religious authority. The penitential writer Theodulf of Orléans (ca. 750–821) would not allow a woman who had killed a child to enter a church for ten years. Similarly, some Spanish authors of the time sentenced a child-killer to lifetime excommunication for the double crime of adultery and murder. Paul the Deacon, writing in the eighth century, called a prostitute who drowned her children “more cruel than all wild beasts” (Atkinson 1991, 92–93).
Desperate families who had unwanted children might have turned to infanticide, though the direct evidence for infanticide is sparse. The Romans certainly practiced infanticide, and there is evidence that girl babies were killed more often than boys, but there is little evidence for infanticide of either sex in medieval cemeteries. Infant bones do not survive well archaeologically, so this may be one reason why samples are rare (Crawford et al. 2010, 62). Infants were sometimes buried, however, under the floors or by the walls of houses; it is not clear whether these infant burials were the result of infanticide or stillbirth, or if they were infants who did not survive and whose parents could not bear the expense of a funeral or who had not been baptized before death. Examples occur from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries (Gilchrist 2012, 220–221). There are also stories in documentary sources. In one story from a saint’s life, a notary named Berard recorded how in around 1300, his wife had given birth to a stillborn boy whom they planned to bury in the house, since he was not baptized. Fortunately, the child revived long enough to be baptized and was buried at the church (Finucane 1997, 45). In Ireland, some small unconsecrated spaces, called cíllíns or killeens, became places for unbaptized babies to be buried. Since they were not baptized, these children were denied burial in sacred ground. They were often buried in the shadow of ruined ring forts or unused churches. Although the spaces were not consecrated, the burials of infants in them often included grave cloths and small trinkets, indicating that the parents of the infants wanted to bury their children with love (Finlay 2000, 408–409).
What about children who were born with physical or developmental impairments? Children with catastrophic medical conditions were unlikely to survive, but some people with disabilities certainly did survive and grow up. The many miracle stories that tell of healing indicate that people with disabilities were present in medieval society and that they actively sought miraculous interventions. In fact, one study has estimated that over 90 percent of the miracles recorded between 1201 and 1300 were miracles of healing. Parents often carried or transported their disabled children to saints’ shrines, hoping for divine intervention. Blindness, deafness, and muteness frequently appear in these stories, accompanied by physical difficulties such as paralysis or wasting. These stories provide evidence not only that people with disabilities lived, but that they were valued and cared for.
Medical writers cautioned mothers that a range of factors might cause them to give birth to children who were physically or mentally impaired. Children conceived from sex during menstruation or lactation were widely believed to be deformed or even afflicted with leprosy. Creative sexual positions, labeled “unnatural,” could also harm children. Medieval mothers were cautioned not to think about ugly things during sex because they might imprint such deformities onto the children they conceived; some writers went so far as to encourage women to look at portraits of beautiful people during sex. Pregnant women were cautioned about what and when to eat. The blame for a child born with a disability was most often placed on the mother, with the assumption that something she had done had caused the problem (Metzler 2006, 85–89).
ILLEGITIMACY AND ABANDONMENT
Although the necessity of having married parents was less emphasized in the early Middle Ages than it was later on, by the twelfth century, the church defined a legitimate birth as one that occurred only to married parents. Those born out of wedlock were not allowed to inherit property or claim other inheritances from their parents and were not allowed to become priests without special permission from church authorities. The rate of illegitimate births was very low, but medieval people strictly distinguished between legitimate and illegitimate births. They invented such words as “bastard,” “horcop” (“whore’s head”), and “leir-child” (“child of the leir or lying”) to refer to the illegitimate (Orme 2001, 56–57).
As the Middle Ages passed, children born out of wedlock had fewer and fewer claims on their parents’ property. On occasion, the church legitimated children born out of wedlock if their parents later were married. One well-known example is of John of Gaunt (1340–1399 CE), duke of Lancaster, and his third wife Katherine Swynford (ca. 1350–1403 CE), whose four children, born while he was married to other women, were declared legitimate after the couple married in 1396. However, most illegitimate children were not children of the aristocracy and could not access such consideration.
Some parents of unwanted children simply abandoned them, frequently into the care of the church, by the late Middle Ages. The practice of abandonment, for many, was preferable to killing a child by placing it outside or “exposing” it, which had been a recognized option in ancient Rome. In 1274, a church council at Bordeaux stated that women who abandoned their children were “wicked” but also added, “They should be told that if, God forbid, they are going to do this, they should use salt as a sign that the child has already been baptized” (Boswell 1990, 324). Later, church councils recommended that a priest who found an abandoned child at a church should check to see if salt had been left with him or her. In the late Middle Ages, rising rates of child abandonment, perhaps linked to economic pressures, led to the founding of orphanages or foundling homes, the first of which was the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, founded in 1445. The rate of death for infants placed in such homes was astronomically high. There were more infants in need than could possibly be served and not enough wet nurses to supply milk (Sperling 2013, 11).
Selling children into servitude or slavery was also an option in some areas for parents who were desperate. The laws of Castile called Las Siete Partidas, promulgated for King Alfonso the Wise (1221–1284 CE), recognized such terrible possibilities: “A father who is oppressed with great hunger or such utter poverty that he has no other recourse can sell or pawn his children in order to obtain food” (Boswell 1990, 328). Such laws reflect the many ways in which poor people in medieval Europe skirted the boundary between being free and being enslaved.
THE AGES OF MAN
We turn now to the stages of medieval life and the different experiences of women during such stages. Writers in the Middle Ages recognized that human lives had different, developing phases, but they conceptualized the phases for men and women differently. Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636 CE) a bishop and prolific writer of the early seventh century, laid out what he understood to be the phases of a man’s life cycle, divided into terms of seven years. It began with infancy up to seven years old and continued with pueritia, childhood, which lasted until fourteen years. Adolescent males, up to the twenty-eighth year, were ready to become fathers. A man then entered the time of youth, which lasted until the fiftieth year. The mature period lasted until the age of seventy, at which point the man entered the age of senescence, or old age, ending with senium, the period right before death (Sears 2019, 61).
Descriptions of women’s ages were more general. A Middle English text described the ages of women as congruent with the seasons: spring was a young girl, summer a beautiful bride, autumn a matron, and winter “a decrepit old woman” (Hanawalt 2007, 35–36). From society’s point of view, a woman was defined by her marital status and her ability to produce children, which lasted over half the metaphorical year, or half her life. One indication of the importance of women’s reproductive capacities can be found in early medieval law codes, which assessed harsh fines for harm to a fetus or a pregnant woman. The Salic law, which dates from around 500 CE in France, assessed a wergild for a woman of childbearing age at 600 solidi, which is three times the wergild for an adult man; her wergild dropped to 200 solidi, the same as a man, when she reached menopause. In some law codes, half the mother’s wergild was also assessed for the death of a fetus still in utero. The sums demanded were highest when the woman was still fertile (Harris-Stoertz 2012, 267).
STAGES OF LIFE: THE FAMILY
We often imagine the medieval family as being large and extended, in contrast to the modern first-world model of the nuclear family. Archaeological evidence, however, suggests that most medieval households were fairly small and consisted mainly of a married couple with their children. One reason for the small size of many families may be the shortened average life span of adults in some regions: if only 10 percent of adults lived past forty-five years of age, as in parts of Anglo-Saxon England, it is not surprising that few grandparents lived with their extended families. On the other hand, the availability of land for settlement made a difference in how families developed. In places where there was little land available, households became larger simply because there was nowhere else for grown children to go. Such households might have had multiple nuclear families sharing the same house and land. Social class also had an impact on household size: wealthier households supported servants and others outside the nuclear family and occupied larger homes and pieces of land (Crawford 1999, 10–12). Most children likely grew up in communities of connected families. Godparents were considered part of the family, and some people used the term godsibs (“God siblings”) to describe one another (the root of our word “gossip”). The relationship was taken very seriously. Marrying into the family of a godparent was considered incest and was forbidden (Orme 2001, 25).
STAGES OF LIFE: INFANCY
As we have seen above, parents were concerned about making sure their babies were baptized in a timely manner in order to assure them a blessed afterlife. By 1300, most infants were baptized quickly, within three days of birth, although wealthy families sometimes waited a little longer to baptize healthy infants so that a grand ceremony could be planned. The mother of the baby normally did not attend the baptism, as she could not enter the church until she was declared ritually clean from the childbirth, or “churched.” This term of waiting was normally forty days, much longer than families wanted to wait to ensure their children’s spiritual safety. Instead, the father and chosen godparents took the infant to the church. They answered ritual questions posed in Latin, and the priest anointed the child with oil. The baby was immersed in holy water three times and anointed again with chrism, a mixture of blessed oil and balm. Then the child was wrapped in a cloth called a chrisom, which was intended to keep the oil and balm in place. The priest warned the biological parents that they should guard the child from harm and directed the godparents to see to the child’s education in the prayers and teachings of the church. The chrisom was a religious item and so had to be returned to the church at the mother’s churching, although some babies who died early were buried in their chrisom cloths (Orme 2001, 28–29).
The child was also formally named at the baptismal ceremony. The practices for choosing names varied across Europe. In England and France, the child was often named for one of the godparents; in Italy, the father generally chose the child’s name. Names might also be chosen to honor particular saints, especially the saint whose feast day fell on the day of the baptism or a saint who had particular meaning for the family (Youngs 2006, 47). Just as they do today, families passed down names from older relatives; for example, in the lineage of the counts of Anjou in the eleventh century, all the first- and second-born sons were named either Fulk or Geoffrey. Girls’ names often varied more than boys’ names, arguably because they were not the focus of the lineage the way their brothers were.
Care of infants fell, for the most part, to mothers and female caregivers in the home. Most infants were exclusively breastfed in the Middle Ages, frequently to the age of two or three years old. Lower- and middle-class mothers nursed their own infants, but upper-class women often employed wet nurses to nurse their children in order to enable the mothers to return to daily activities more quickly. As a result, there was a type of literature advising families on the choice of a wet nurse. The literature about wet nursing originated in the ancient world with a writer named Soranus (second century CE), who set out a lengthy series of qualifications for a wet nurse. He assumed that a woman who had already had children would be healthier and better able to nurse. “One should choose a wet nurse not younger than twenty nor older than forty years, who has already given birth twice or thrice. . . . Her breasts should be of medium size, lax, soft and unwrinkled, the nipples neither too big nor too small and neither too compact nor too porous and discharging milk overabundantly” (Soranus of Ephesus 1956, 90–91). Breasts that were too large, Soranus explained, would increase the chance that leftover milk could spoil in the wet nurse’s breasts and harm the child. Sexual intercourse was also thought to “spoil” breast milk, so wet nurses were paid in part to remain celibate while feeding someone else’s child. Medical writers also told fathers to be sure to hire wet nurses who were not drunks, as an excess of alcohol might harm the child. In Renaissance Italy, studies have shown that there was a difference between the treatment of male and female babies in wet-nursing; boys were nursed at home by live-in nurses more often than girls, who were more likely to be sent out to live with a wet nurse in the town or country. This may have contributed to a higher rate of infant mortality for girl babies in places where this was the practice (Ferraro 2012, 66). Infant feeding could also be done through artificial means. One method was to fit a hollow cow’s horn with a sponge or cloth and allow the infant to suck on it. Infant feeders were also made of pottery, either with a small hole for feeding or with long spouts designed to admit very little milk at one time. We do not know how often or how successfully such items may have been used (Gilchrist 2012, 155).
Some writers in the Middle Ages, such as the Italian politician Francesco Barbaro (1390–1454 CE), in a treatise called On Wifely Duties, urged noble mothers to breastfeed their own infants, citing the belief that the nurse’s personal traits and qualities were passed to the infant with the breastmilk (Youngs 2006, 48). The belief was both long-lasting and widespread. In an Old French song about the life of Godfrey of Bouillon (1060–1100), who became the ruler of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, the author commented that Duke Godfrey’s youngest brother, Eustace, had once been breastfed by another woman, despite strict instructions from his mother, Countess Ida of Boulogne. The angry countess shook the baby until he vomited the other woman’s milk, but the poem states that she was too late: the foreign milk had done its work, and Eustace never measured up to his brothers in later life (Labarge 1986, 77).
Between birth and age seven, medieval children were considered to be too young to be at fault for their actions, and writers put great emphasis on the need for a good upbringing to make children into good adults. Children at this time were sometimes compared to clay or wax, that would take the impression of any lessons learned from parents. Las Siete Partidas specified that younger children were the responsibility of their mother, and older (presumably male) children of their father: “Mothers should nourish and bring up their children while they are under three years of age, and their fathers those who have passed that age” (Amt 2010, 55). Children began work and chores at young ages; children at four or five could be set to watch infant brothers and sisters, pull weeds or herd livestock, and young girls could learn the rudiments of spinning and sewing. Children seem to have been left unattended much more than we would think wise today and to have taken on responsibility earlier.
Around the age of seven, parents often made decisions about their children’s long-term futures. Boys would go to work in the fields or be sent to apprentice for a trade or train in other skills, while girls were becoming responsible for the skills that would enable them to marry and be successful wives and mothers within their own classes. Lower-class girls went out to the fields early, while upper-class young women were kept close to home and taught the skills that would make them attractive partners. In wealthy households, where there could be multiple sons and daughters, the greatest attention was paid to the boy who would inherit the bulk of the property and to girls intended for marriage; extra sons and daughters could end up in monasteries, even as early as aged eight or nine (Ferraro 2012, 63–64).
Mothers were responsible for the education of daughters. This miniature painting shows St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary to read. (The British Library)
Though work began early for medieval children by our standards, there were still games and fun. Despite its sad origin, a lament for a dead son by the fifteenth-century Welsh poet Lewys Glyn Cothi gives us a few hints about children’s games: a wooden sword, a bow made of a branch, and dice were a few of his son’s favorite toys (Johnston 1993, 102–103). Infant rattles, tops, and dolls are some of the toys mentioned in other medieval sources. The fifteenth-century poem “Ratis Raving,” written by a Scottish man for his young son, mentions that children “will always with flowers for to jape and play” (Orme 2001, 176).
STAGES OF LIFE: ADOLESCENCE
According to Isidore of Seville’s calculations, adolescence was the time in which young people were able to become parents, and in many places, young people married early by our standards. The church set the minimum age for marriage at twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, and there are certainly examples of women who were married early: a case in point is Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509), mother of Henry VII of England, who was married at twelve in 1455 and gave birth to the future king at thirteen (Phillips 2003, 38–39). Adolescent mothers were not uncommon. Hildegard, wife of Charlemagne, died at age twenty-five in 783, already having had nine children (Garver 2012, 233). Archaeological evidence also supports some early marriages. In an Anglo-Saxon grave from Abingdon, Berkshire, archaeologists discovered the body of a young woman, fifteen or sixteen years of age, who had clearly been pregnant when she died. She was buried with brooches, beads, and other tokens of class and wealth, suggesting that she had been buried with affection and respect (Crawford 1999, 48).
Medieval artists often illustrated the education of the Virgin Mary. Here, she learns to read with her mother, St. Anne. (Gift of G. J. Demotte. The Cleveland Museum of Art)
In many places, however, puberty was not automatically thought to be the best time to marry, because most women were not ready at twelve or fourteen to take on the duties of a fully grown married woman, even though they were capable of bearing children. Economic pressures shaped age at first marriage. In the Carolingian period in the early Middle Ages, when farmland was passed down from fathers to children, couples married in their twenties, and the ages at first marriage for men and women were fairly close (Herlihy 1985, 77). Economic and social pressures forced the age of first marriage back for upper-class women beginning in the central Middle Ages. The Italian poet Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265–1321 CE) criticized the people of his time for early marriages, and the moralist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536 CE) wrote, “It isn’t rare to see, especially among the French, a girl hardly ten years old married, and a mother at eleven” (Herlihy 1985, 104–105). For English princesses in the late Middle Ages, the approximate mean age at first marriage was sixteen. The period before marriage has been described as a time of “maidenhood” for late medieval English women, between twelve and fifteen, in which the responsibilities of adult life were stayed until they were old enough for full marriage and childbearing (Phillips 2003, 39). The age of maidenhood was a time of beauty and desirability: young women wore their hair down, suggesting both their sexuality and their virginity.
STAGES OF LIFE: ADULTHOOD
Although maidenhood was privileged as a time of beauty, adulthood was a time when grown women could assert their places and responsibilities in society. To “come of age” in this period meant to be old enough to inherit property or to fulfill the demands of a profession. For women, it meant being old enough to marry, give birth, and run a household or workshop. The word adult, from the Latin word adolescere, means “grown up.” Young people did not necessarily become adult all at once. The narrator of the Ménagier de Paris, a middle-aged man writing to his fifteen-year-old wife, advised that she had time to enjoy her adolescence. “Know that I take delight rather than displeasure in your cultivating rose bushes, caring for violets, and making chaplets, and also in your dancing and singing . . . for it is only right and just that you should thus pass the days of your maidenly youth” (Bayard 2001, 27–28). The Ménagier planned for a new wife to learn the chores of her married life gradually under her husband’s instruction. We generally look askance at couples for whom the age difference is so great today, but it was not unusual in the Middle Ages for an older man to take a young wife.
STAGES OF LIFE: WIDOWHOOD
Christine de Pisan (1360–1430), writing in the fourteenth century and herself a widow, spoke frankly to widows about what they could expect in her Book of the Three Virtues. “Rich women are in trouble because people try generally to rob them, and poor and less wealthy women because no one will show pity toward them” (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1997, 169). In societies where wives were generally younger than their husbands, their chances of being widowed were greater. Dower property was reserved for widows after their husbands died, but it was not always easy to get the husbands’ heirs to release the property for the widows’ use.
Some widows certainly chose to remarry, though the number and ratio of those who remarried is unclear. Anecdotally, the sources suggest some level of remarriage in most places. The author of the Ménagier of Paris fully expected that a young wife would remarry after her husband died and made frequent reference to it. Not surprisingly, age made a difference: a study of Florentine women indicated that among that population, two-thirds of widows under twenty remarried, but only 11 percent of widows in their thirties did. The difference may partly be a reflection of fertility (Klapisch-Zuber 1985, 120). Money and property also played significant parts in women’s decision making about remarriage, because there were outside pressures from family and from society. Some husbands who left wills specified that their wives were entitled to certain monetary or property benefits only so long as they remained unmarried and “of good reputation.” Other families pressured widows, especially young widows, to remarry as soon as possible (Youngs 2006, 151–152).
In her study of peasants in fourteenth and fifteenth-century England, Barbara Hanawalt points out that for some women, widowhood meant financial and personal independence: “A widow could enter into land contracts on her own, could decide on marriage alliances for children, could make her own decisions about remarriage and whom she would marry” (Hanawalt 1986, 220). Many widows maintained the tenure of their lands for themselves and for their minor children. One example is Agnes de la Lande, who held her family’s tenancy for twenty years, from 1286 to 1306, until her son Richard turned twenty-one and could manage the land himself. She then received a third of the property as her dower. Other widows negotiated rights for themselves from grown children if the children already managed the family holdings. These included rooms in the house, the use of dower property, and sometimes sums of money or amounts of food (Hanawalt 1986, 222–223).
Widows also provided for their heirs through wills. Anglo-Saxon wills from the tenth and eleventh centuries show widows disposing of both land and belongings. In her tenth-century will, a wealthy matriarch named Wynflaed left land and jewelry to her daughter Aethelflaed, made numerous bequests to churches, and freed at least ten slaves. Aethelflaed was the greatest beneficiary of her mother’s will. The testament ends with this catch-all: “Then she makes a gift to Aetheflaed of everything which is unbequeathed, books and such small things, and she trusts that she will be mindful of her soul” (Amt 2010, 116).
STAGES OF LIFE: OLD AGE
The image of elderly women in sources from the Middle Ages is uniformly negative. After the menopause, which was thought to occur at around fifty years old, medieval writers spotlighted declining physical and mental health. Loss of fertility, too, reduced a woman’s value in society, both metaphorically and literally (Youngs 2006, 167). In the Danse Macabre des Femmes, a fifteenth-century French work in which various women meet Death, the character of the old woman complained, “I’m not worth two silver coins” (Harrison and Hindman 1994, 94). Medically, moreover, women who were no longer menstruating were thought to contain all their bodily impurities inside them, which posed a danger to others, especially children, who could be harmed by the “evil eye.” An anonymous author known as Pseudo-Albertus Magnus wrote in the late twelfth century that “The retention of menses engenders many evil humors” (Metzler 2006, 114). Elderly women could be treated as though they were worthless, or worse, feared because they were toxic.
Writers of the Middle Ages sometimes followed a pattern known as the vituperium in vetulam (“insult against an old woman”). The insult could be in any medium—prose, poetry, song, etc. Authors dwelled on the unattractiveness of the elderly female body—baldness, toothlessness, and physical infirmity—and equated the old woman’s ugliness with indecent sexuality. One Italian poem from the fourteenth or fifteenth century addressed the old woman as an “annoying sow” and wished that she would have “asps, and frogs, and scorpions” attack her body. Such literature describes elderly women in the worst language possible—probably a form of medieval humor that we would prefer to forget (Alfie 2017, 396).
Regardless of bad press, some elderly people in the Middle Ages succeeded in securing a sort of retirement for themselves through negotiation with landlords or even with their own children. Corodies were arrangements made between elderly people and monasteries in which the owners of land handed it over to the monastery in exchange for food, drink, and clothing for life. They could be used as a sort of pension and, in many places, could be purchased to ensure a steady living in old age. In 1322, for example, Hainrich Klucke and his wife agreed to turn over their land to the hospital at Villingen in return for maintenance (Metzler 2006, 124). Contractual agreements could also be drawn up between elderly people and their children or elderly people and those not related to them. In 1327, a woman of Great Waltham, Essex, named Estrilda Nenour complained to the court that she had agreed with her daughter to turn over her landholding in exchange for food, clothing, and a place to live, but that her daughter had not fulfilled the contract. The court awarded her a sum of money for the breach of contract, and Estrilda found another couple to support her (Youngs 2006, 177).
Retiring to a religious house was also possible for those women who could afford it. A number of medieval queens, such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, retired to convents in their later years, but retiring to a monastery or nunnery was also widespread among people lower on the social scale than nobility, though not among the poor. Families sometimes gave gifts to nunneries to ensure that their elderly relatives had a place to go when they wished. Two widows from Châteaugontier, France, Raingardis and Maria, gave their land to the monastery of Le Ronceray d’Angers in the eleventh century to allow them to profess as nuns. Anselm of Châteaugontier and his wife, Elizabeth, also gave Le Ronceray a large donation of land and goods, with the expectation that Elizabeth would enter the nunnery if she was widowed (Marchegay 1854, 3:87–88).
If a devoted noble patron died a distance away from the place she wished to be buried, she might arrange to have her heart sent back to the site rather than her entire body. Hildegarde, countess of Anjou in the early eleventh century, died in 1046 while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Her heart was sent back to France to be buried at the nunnery she and her husband founded in 1028. Hearts and intestines might be preserved so that a wealthy patron could be buried in more than one place. Isabel of Clare was buried next to her second husband in 1239, but her heart was placed next to her first husband, Gilbert, in a different cemetery.
Outside of the wealthier classes, the fate of elderly women in the Middle Ages was often a difficult one. Guild regulations sometimes provided for the widows of members, especially if they were infirm and unable to work. Charitable bequests to the elderly occurred in many medieval wills. Joan Cotyngham, a widow with property in York in the 1450s, left another widow named Joan Day “my russet gown lined with buckskin and a chemise of linen cloth.” This would have been a coarse garment made of the rough brown or gray wool cloth called russet. Emma, another widow from York, left all the widows in her area three pennies each, “total by estimation, 10 s. 9 d” (Goldberg 1995, 162–163). English coroner’s rolls, which record deaths, give other pictures of women in poverty and desperation. In Bedfordshire in 1274, “Emma of Hatch came from Beeston, where she had been begging bread from door to door, and towards vespers she returned towards Beeston to seek lodging . . . . [She] was overcome by cold and died by misadventure” (Goldberg 1995, 165). Such cases remind us that although wealthy women might have considerable control over their decisions, poor women might live on the edge of starvation.
STAGES OF LIFE: A GOOD DEATH
Medieval people hoped for a “good death,” a death in which a person was surrounded by family and died peacefully without pain, having confessed all their sins and ensuring a good afterlife in heaven. Dying people in the late Middle Ages were encouraged to meditate on the death of Christ as they approached their own ends. Deathbed scenes appeared in books of hours illustrating prayers for the dead, reminding the readers both to pray for their loved ones and to be aware of their own mortality. Yet although aristocratic women often commissioned and used books of hours, most of the dying people portrayed in these images are men, surrounded by female caregivers. Illustrations of what is called the “dormition” of the Virgin Mary, however, are also included in books of hours. (Theologically, Mary did not die but was assumed bodily into heaven.) She is usually shown surrounded by the apostles and lying on a bed. Sometimes the image includes Jesus as he summons her to heaven, carrying Mary’s soul in his arms. Women who were devoted to Mary may very well have imagined their own deathbeds as similar to hers.
This carved altarpiece depicts the dormition (“sleeping”) of the Virgin Mary, surrounded by the Apostles. (The Cloisters Collection, 1973. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
CONCLUSION
Social and medical authorities concentrated on women’s fertility in the Middle Ages because fertility, in the face of infant and maternal mortality, affected the well-being of all of society. Women’s relationship to fertility as they grew up and aged shaped their interactions with their families and their society. It may also have shaped how they understood their purpose in the world. Not all events in women’s lives were related to fertility, however. In the next chapter, we will look at women’s other work, both inside and outside the home.