How's the Reading Going?

Like I said, some of you are picking some really great books I've never read, so please share whenever you get the chance. Any how, here's a good breakdown of fairytales and some real tales. 

Fortunately for medieval haircare budgets, Rapunzel and her sisters in the folk tale type "Maiden in the Tower" are primarily that--folk tales. But there are some interesting specific things to look at anyway. Or at least, interesting if you like killing abusive fathers with lightning.

First: while lonesome towers imprisoning beautiful virgins might not have been scattered across later medieval Europe, one story about one tower sure was. St. Barbara was one of the most popular saints in western Christianity. She was never a real person (or at least, there's no historical evidence for her). But her legend made her one of the select group of saints known as the virgin martyrs. These saints--most of whom were apocryphal like Barbara--were Christian teenagers (always female) or young women in the days of the early Church and pagan-Roman persecution, who refused sex and/or marriage for religious reasons, stood up for their faith, and were violently killed.

The thing about medieval virgin martyr legends, especially the apocryphal saints, is that they're awesome. Katherine of Alexandria defeats fifty pagan philosophers in a head-to-head debate. Margaret of Antioch gets eaten by a dragon, then kills it by splitting open its stomach from the inside and bursting out. And Barbara is our maiden in the tower.

As Barbara's hagiography has it, her father Dioscorus built a tower and confined his beautiful daughter there to keep men from seeing her before marriage. But whereas we might see a prison, the situation didn't seem to bother Barbara all that much--she was far more upset when her father tried to present her with suitors to choose from, since she'd chosen her Prince Charming already and he was Christ.

One interesting thing about Barbara's hagiography as opposed to other virgin martyrs is that her father doesn't seem to have a problem with her turning down marriage. His reaction is to...build another building (in some versions, for her use specifically) and go out of town for awhile. When Dioscorus does return, though, he finds out that Barbara had the builders alter his plans for the non-tower building. She insisted that it have three windows instead of two, to reflect the Christian idea of God as a Trinity. He was so angry about her Christian devotion that he nearly killed her on the spot, but virgin martyrs don't get off that easy she was miraculously transported out of the building and onto a mountainside.

...But virgin martyrs also don't get off without being, you know, martyrs, so one of the shepherds betrays her back to her dad, for his trouble God turns him to stone and his sheep to locusts.

Then Barbara ends up in real prison, and then violently dead. And afterwards, God smites her father with lightning--and then smites the ashes left behind so that not a trace remains.

But while virgin martyr hagiographies have a strong tinge of romance to them (amidst the gory torture and death, of course), actual tower or castle captivity for medieval women would not be told as a tale of tragic quasi-adventure. Lords forced female family members into service as hostages in treaty negotiations or other agreements. Sometimes this came in the guise of marriage or betrothal, or "planned" versions thereof, but sometimes it came down to handing over a prisoner. And the resulting picture of the woman's life also varied greatly.

Consider Constance (d.1201) and Eleanor of Brittany (1184-1241), mother and daughter. Constance was the daughter of Conrad II of Brittany, who made the grievous mistake of owning land that English king Henry II wanted closer control over. Conrad was "persuaded" to send his daughter Constance to Henry's court as a future wife for Henry's son Geoffrey--when Constance was four. This wasn't a case of two families making a betrothal or arrangement for the future; Constance was sent to the other court. 

However, Constance did seem to have a relatively normal life for a twelfth-century English princess. Annette Parks remarks that we have no evidence of whether or not Constance helped in running the duchy--just significant absences by her husband, in which medieval noblewomen often stepped up...and, oh yeah, a long-burning conflict between Geoffrey and his father.

It was Eleanor who was in trouble.

First, there was the failed attempt to make her a hostage. (No, really). When the Holy Roman Emperor imprisoned the King of England after the Third Crusade, Heinrich did so intending to extract a significant ransom for Richard. Part of that ransom was hostages sent from England to Germany to act as, essentially, a guarantee that England would pay everything off eventually. Eleanor was to be one of those hostages, in the guise of marriage to Leopold of Austria's heir. But Leopold had the gall to die when Eleanor was only halfway across Europe, so she was sent back to England.

And say goodbye to Richard the Lionheart and hello to King John. It didn't take John much to see that as the granddaughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Eleanor of Brittany had a strong claim for her descendants (if not in herself) to a whole lot of territory--including a future claim to the throne of England, a.k.a. John's throne). It also seems that it didn't take John very much to defeat a rebellion by Eleanor's older brother--and one of the results was John's physical custody of Eleanor.

And so just like the apocryphal Barbara's apocryphal father built a tower to keep her away from men and marriage outside of his control, John thrust Eleanor into a castle away from men and marriage. As Parks writes:

Once John had captured Eleanor, he and his heirs had little choice but to keep her. Even when she had passed her child-bearing years and was no longer a threat to produce claim-holding heirs...mere possession of her person brought with it implicit and explicit claims to land, position, and power that required careful management.

One wonders what Eleanor thought of thirty-nine years of "careful management": allowed servants and the space to go horseback riding, but never again leaving the castle where she was shut up--and with no Prince Charming coming to save her. Deity or otherwise.

And then, let's go to the place where history and hagiography meet back on the other side: the granddaughters of English king Henry I this time, and why we shouldn't brush off stories of hostages as guests with restrictions. Henry was trying to pacify relations between two of his nobles involved in what super-comprehensive 12th century chronicler Orderic Vitalis noted as one of the few blood-feuds (Latin talio) in his knowledge. He had Ralph Harenc send his son to Eustache of Breteuil (Henry's son-in-law, by the way), and in return Eustache sent to Ralph his daughters.

Eustache, unfortunately, was interested primarily in using the situation to lash out at Ralph. He had Ralph's son's eyes gouged out...and sent to the boy's father as a "gift." In return? Ralph asked Henry for permission to blind and cut off the noses of his own hostages, Eustache's daughters...Henry's own granddaughters. Henry granted it.

~~

If you'd like to read more about virgin martyrs (specifically the hungry dragon part) OR saving princesses, you can pre-order my book How to Slay a Dragon: A Fantasy Hero's Guide to the Real Middle Ages. Learn how to survive your next dungeon crawl or self-insert fantasy fic with evidence from actual medieval history...and a handful of really terrible pickup lines

but as reddit giveth, so reddit taketh, and though I managed to kinda miss the latest right wing scream machine (crime wave that's blaming BLM, CRT, a straight reactionary backlash against anything good, never mind aiming for more Jim Crow era laws) but then there's everyday stuff:

I was running some errands yesterday, and on my drive I had to slow down to a stop for a mama duck crossing the street with about 10 ducklings in tow. It's mid afternoon, on a wide straight road, where the speed limit is only about 45mph. So I had plenty of time to see them and slow to a stop. No brake slamming or anything like that. I see a car coming up from behind me about 5-8 seconds back that isn't slowing down at all. By this point mama duck is across the street and the ducklings hot on her heels. The car moves onto the shoulder to pass me instead of also stopping, and in doing so kills most of the ducklings. I tried to believe that they didn't see the ducks and just saw a car stopped with no purpose on the road so they passed and it was an accident. But no the sick fuck didn't even slow down afterwords. The worst part is I pulled up the very same car at the next red light. So it's not like their little massacre even saved them any time on their drive which had to be their intention right? Mama duck was still just standing at the side of the road with her remaining ducklings when I drove by again on my way home. The whole event just put me into such a depressive mind state on how people can just kill other beings for no purpose at all. Gonna be a long time before that's out of my head. 

I just need to put that out in the air and didn't want to ruin my partners day by telling her. So thanks for the post space.

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