Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It

by Janina Ramírez

From these records, we can be sure that many women were drawn into Catharism. Why was this dangerous sect so appealing to them?

Because all human flesh was weak and prone to evil, Cathars rejected the idea that Jesus was divine. Why would God put himself in a human vessel? They also reportedly rejected the symbol of the cross. The deposition against one Peter Garcia of Bourguet-Nau says he was overheard making heretical comments during the Good Friday procession. He suggests that instead of uttering ‘Behold the wood of the cross’, the faithful should instead just say ‘Behold, Wood!’

Cathars invested in educating their young, regardless of background. As a result, they translated the Bible into the vernacular of southern France, Occitan, so that they could provide access to those who may not have learned enough Latin to understand the Scriptures.

It cannot be underestimated how heavy the burden weighed on medieval women, knowing that from childhood their destiny was to put their lives in danger through childbirth. While most women might be vulnerable to rape, or rejection by a man who had impregnated her therefore rejection by society, Cathar women could lean on their promise to abstain from sex as a means of taking control. About one in 20 women died in childbirth, and many more would have to deal with losing children, physical pain and long-term health issues.38 To abstain from sexual activity on religious grounds was a safer bet for many, including for nuns, whose populations exploded during the medieval period, and for groups like the Cathars.

Because intercourse was considered an evil act that rooted souls to bodies on earth, Cathars were also required to avoid anything positive connected to sex. Just as eggs and meat were tainted with mammalian reproduction so couldn’t be eaten, this aversion also extended to pregnant women.

Conversely, many Cathar women were also singled out for their virginity in testimonies. It seems that by entering into marriage and consummating it, a woman was seen to have left behind her heretical ways. Tying herself to an orthodox man showed she was prepared to enter the Catholic Church, but remaining single and chaste could be a sign she was guilty of heresy.

By the time of her trial by the Dominican inquisitor Brother Ferrier in 1244, Arnaude was a frail 40-year-old.52 Her thin frame was the result of decades spent on the run, relying on the generosity of those hiding her from persecution. She had avoided meat and alcohol since she was a child, eating a vegan diet with a little fish when she could get it. She walked thousands of miles over the course of her life, moving from cave to hut, from forest to barn, constantly changing location to escape crusaders and inquisitors set on hunting her down.

Fear of heresy was a growing epidemic in the thirteenth century. This is clear not only from the emergence of the Moralised Bibles, but also through the growing number of trials and inquisitions from 1225 onwards.

In line with Himmler’s extended work on Aryan origins, Rahn used the Cathars to further his work on German race theory.65 But dogged by the Nazi regime for his open homosexuality, in 1939 Rahn found himself pursued by the Gestapo for desertion. Rahn disappeared that same year and his body was discovered frozen to death in the Austrian mountains on 13 March, just days before the anniversary of the fall of Montségur. His demise was tragic. It has been claimed he was following the example of the Cathars he so admired by undertaking the ‘endura’, purging his body of impurity, then at the point of starvation walking out into hostile environments to welcome inevitable death, as those who died at Montségur may also have experienced.

At the age of five Jadwiga celebrated her ‘sponsalia de futuro’ or ‘provisional marriage’ to Leopold’s son, William.15 He was only a few years older at the time. The two children were bound to one another in a lavish ceremony in Hainburg on 15 June 1378. It was a serious event which meant that the couple could legally consummate their marriage as soon as Jadwiga turned 12 without any need for another church ceremony. They were effectively married.

With no sons and an uncertain future, in 1374 Louis signed a treaty with the Polish nobles called the Privilege of Koszyce. The nobility was released from many of its duties, including building and repairing castles, paying tribute, tending to towns and bridges, and even providing hospitality for the king on his travels, on just one condition: that they make one of his three daughters ruler of Poland after his death.

Creating a bond with Jagiełło would ensure peace on their northern border as well as access to the fertile lands of the kingdom of Rus.20 He would also allow the noblemen to increase their personal wealth and would act as a deterrent to Austrian influence. But there was a problem; Jagiełło was a pagan. Lithuania was the last part of Europe yet to be Christianised.

Jadwiga’s coronation took place on 16 October 1384 in Wawel Cathedral: ‘Hedvigis coronatur, in regem Poloniae’ – ‘Hedwig is crowned, king of Poland’.28 Polish law did not recognise succession in the female line, but Louis’s treaty ensured his daughter would be declared king.

When news of her mother’s murder reached Jadwiga, she marched at the head of her troops to demand the submission of the rebels that had supported Charles. All but one governor accepted her without opposition.

While relations remained tense, her mediation skills meant that during her lifetime all-out war was avoided. Just two years after Jadwiga’s death, Jagiełło resumed his battles with the Order. This culminated in the famous Battle of Grunwald in 1410; one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the medieval period. The Polish-Lithuanian troops secured victory, leaving the Teutonic Knights virtually annihilated.

Jadwiga was a uniquely educated medieval monarch. Chroniclers documented that she could speak up to seven languages, could certainly read, and most probably could write too. This was by no means a given for medieval rulers, and her husband Jagiełło reportedly could neither read nor write.

Her intention was to develop a system of education which would produce learned clerics who could lead the church in Poland and influence the conversion of her husband’s people in Lithuania. It is one of the oldest universities in the world and has produced scholars like Copernicus and Pope John Paul II. However, the university was not named after Jadwiga. Jagiełło oversaw the official opening of the Jagiellonian University just months after her death in 1399. His involvement in its creation was minimal. She dedicated her worldly possessions and energy to it. History has written her name out of her greatest legacy.

Like her sister before her, Jadwiga’s death was connected to childbirth. Childless for over a decade after her marriage to Jagiełło, she finally gave birth to a much-awaited child on 22 June 1399. She was called Elżbieta Bonifacja, honouring an arrangement Jadwiga had made with Pope Boniface. He agreed to be the child’s godfather on the condition that Jadwiga named her after him. But mother and daughter only managed three weeks together. First Elżbieta died, followed four days later by her mother, who was just 26 years old. The two were buried together in Wawel Cathedral.

When her skeleton was measured, it was determined that at 180 centimetres she had been unusually tall for a medieval woman. Despite the height, studies on individual bones, including the collar bone and sternum, concluded that the skeleton was definitely female. Reddish tufts of hair were found on the back of her skull and temples, and analysis of the teeth gave the age at death of around 28, which was not far off from official records. Popular historical accounts probably influenced the analysis, but in the absence of any other cause of death it was noted that the pelvis was high and narrow, which could have led to complications in childbirth.

newspapers seized on the story of the unearthed treasure. In 1934, among news of Nazi restrictions and Canadian fires, the manuscript caught the public imagination. The Evening Standard described its contents as ‘certainly queer, even for a queer age’.5 But what was this book and who is the queer woman at the heart of it?6 Now known as The Book of Margery Kempe, since its discovery in the 1930s the text has become something of a superstar in the world of medieval studies;

The Book of Margery Kempe is a miraculous survivor. Known as ‘the first autobiography written in English’, there were countless times it could have been lost or destroyed. During Margery’s life she was accused of and arrested on charges of heresy, so her mystical and at times bizarre book would have been high on Reformers’ ‘burn’ lists. The book is not a hagiography of a revered saint, but an anomaly; a record of the life of an ordinary married woman, mother to fourteen children.

If that one manuscript hadn’t been passed hand to hand, concealed in collections and hidden in cupboards, we would not have this unique window into the medieval world. We’d have only known about a woman named Margery from seven pages of printed text in the publisher and writer Wynkyn de Worde’s A Shorte Treatyse of Contemplacyon, produced in London in 1501.

She then tells the reader how, while struggling through the birth of her first child, she developed what we would today describe as post-partum psychosis.11 She records her experiences in the third person as a way of indicating she is narrating past events objectively. Margery says she ‘went out of her mind and was bewilderingly vexed and troubled by spirits for half a year, eight weeks and odd days’. She was so affected by the hallucinations it brought about that she had to be restrained day and night. She describes being attacked by demons, and throughout her Book Margery constantly fears she is stuck between good and evil; thoughts sent by God and by the devil. Her tormented imaginative world is brought clearly to life.

She was so disturbed by the guilt of her sin – compounded by the visions, fever and pain following the difficult birth – that she thought of killing herself many times. She even ‘bit her hand so violently that the scar could be seen afterwards for her whole life’.

In one carving a monkey rides a mule backwards, recreating the notorious ‘skimmington ride’. This was a mock parade intended to humiliate individuals considered troublesome within the community, and named after the wooden spoon that so-called ‘unruly’ women used to beat their husbands.

stairs and she nursed him back to health.25 They weren’t living together at this point, as Margery had taken her own home in her later years, while John lived nearby alone. She had gained the independence she clearly craved throughout her early life. It was not unusual in the medieval period for husband and wife to live separately, but as she narrates in her book, some were critical of her choice and felt she should live under the same roof as John.

They weren’t living together at this point, as Margery had taken her own home in her later years, while John lived nearby alone. She had gained the independence she clearly craved throughout her early life. It was not unusual in the medieval period for husband and wife to live separately, but as she narrates in her book, some were critical of her choice and felt she should live under the same roof as John.

Margery adds insult to injury, explaining that she still lusts after other men but is sickened by her own husband. Sex and physical pleasure are a constant theme throughout the book. Margery, unlike many of her mystical contemporaries, thinks, talks and worries about sex all the time.

The passage is sensual and intense, suggesting that the medieval world she inhabited could and would discuss sex in open and revealing ways. After all, she narrated this episode to her own son and at least two other writers.

The intense passion Margery describes as she grapples with her lust for men is transferred onto the vision of Jesus she repeatedly sees. She describes how he ‘ravages her soul’, calls her his wife, spouse, ‘a unique lover’, and when she receives his body during communion she will be ‘filled with him’. She even wears a ring engraved with the words ‘Jesus is my love’.27 While it may seem surprising today, sexualizing the relationship between Christ and his female devotees was not a new phenomenon. The thirteenth-century Ancrene Riwle (the monastic rule for female anchoresses) encouraged women to see Christ as their knight in shining armour, their object of desire, their lover.28 But Margery’s Book goes further than any other surviving medieval text in sexualising the relationship between the female protagonist and Jesus.

Margery hears voices and has companions (Jesus among them) whom only she can see and hear. She also suffers what appear to be fits, where she ‘writhed and wrestled with her body’. When she is about to have a seizure she describes her skin changing colour, turning ‘purple like lead’.31 She hears and sees celestial melodies and white lights that flash around her day and night. She even describes being assailed with the repeated vision of men’s genitals, paraded in front of her as temptations.32 Today we might diagnose her as schizophrenic, epileptic (some of her contemporaries suggested this too),33 or psychotic, but to those around her she was either possessed by the devil, or could possibly provide a direct link to God.34 It certainly seems many wanted Margery’s prayers and intercession: she was paid handsomely for communing with Jesus on other people’s behalf.

The Domesday Book records that after the Norman Conquest of 1066 roughly 10 per cent of people were listed under the Latin term ‘servus’, but whether they were serfs or slaves is uncertain. While the legal basis for slavery disappeared across Europe during the thirteenth century, there was certainly still trade in enslaved people taking place. A Catalonian record of 1410 counted 10,000 African slaves in that area.

But for most of the medieval period difference and division was perceived according to religion, ethnicity and race, with state and church stoking xenophobic feeling at various times for economic or political gain.22 New lines were drawn in 1095 when Pope Urban II called on ‘all Christians’ to join in a crusade to take back the Holy Land from Muslim control:

Anti-Semitic sentiment festered and grew in England until 1290, when it became the first country to forcibly expel all Jews.

There are surviving records from the late-medieval period, originally developed for the purposes of taxing ‘aliens’ in the city, that describe residents of London as coming from countries around the world. These include India, Greece and Scandinavia, and record nearly 500 foreign-born servants.

Eleanor was arrested for performing a sex act with a man while dressed as a woman. Their testimony went on to describe years of cross-dressing, as well as homosexual and heterosexual encounters with men, women, clerics and nuns, sometimes under the guise of a seamstress or barmaid, and other times dressed as a man.