Status Updates From Medieval Maidens: Young Wom...

Spatial autonomy: Female servants... would have dressed her and bathed her"... provide an impressive and decorative retinue... and to provide companionship to the lady. the exclusion of men from the room until after the birth. Men and women mingled during dinner and dancing. If they were to draw in men, they had to associate with them, not totally isolate themselves. girls' had other sides of identity beyond chastity

1) Most rooms had more than one function, and so the rooms that may have been reserved as women's sleeping quarters at night would often during the day be used for dining, social purposes, and even business purposes.
2) Households headed by women were by no means all female in
terms of staff. This is a point overlooked by those who would argue for complete segregation.

It is indisputable that separate rooms or apartments for female heads of households, existed within very high status households at least. Segregation of male and female sleeping quarters among the children of the household perhaps took place when one at least of the children reached puberty.

Whether they were living at home or in another household, noble maidens were subject to considerable degrees of control. Their conduct during maidenhood was regulated for the honour of the house in which they were living. Canon law dictated that families could not override the consensual marriages of their children but they could certainly make life unpleasant for children who married without their blessing,

The household book of Dame Alice de Bryene records numerous instances of "daughters" accompanying their father or mother, or sometimes going alone, on visits to Dame Alice's household for meals, suggesting a genteel world of social networks and sociable interchange of which daughters were very much a part". The daughters who visited on their own are likely to have been at least of teenage years

Maidenhood" did not have precisely the same meanings across the social spectrum, but rather took on different identities according to the social position and outlook of the family or household of which the young woman was part.

Perfect ages at marriage, therefore, were eighteen for women and twenty-one for men, said Giles, considerably lowering Aristotle's perfect age for men from thirty-six but retaining the perfect age for women.

We are more likely to know about the marriages of heiresses than other girls, and heiresses are more likely than other girls to have been married off very young. Moreover, we are more likely to know about marriages that come into dispute than marriages which do not, and under age marriage is one of the concerns which could result in such disputes.

urban girls tended to marry in their early to mid twenties, while rural girls married in their late teens to early twenties, and both married men close to them in age

girls in their late teens marrying men around ten years older than themselves, should be seen as Mediterranean rather than medieval, and in
making this claim initiated the trend in medieval family history which notes strong differences between north-western and southern European practices.

wardship was also an investment, and could be very profitable. The guardian of a
feudal heir (and here I deal only with wards in chivalry) held rights in the person, marriage
and land of the heir

According to the principles of class and the standard set by the law on majority for males, women must come of age at twenty-one. But from the point of view of their sex, it seems to have been more practical to sometimes bring the age down to fourteen or fifteen.

Bracton describes full age for women in socage
as "whenever she can and knows how to order her house and do the things that belong to
the arrangement and management of a house, provided she understands what pertains to
'cove and key', which cannot be before her fourteenth or fifteenth year, since such things
require discretion and understanding

Holdsworth argues that the age of majority in the knightly
class - twenty-one - came to apply to all classes, and so the law for the elite came to be
the law for all'

there is a strong notion of the idea of transition or development. But that transitional or developmental phase occurs, for boys and girls, mostly between the ages of seven and twelve or fourteen - that is, within puericia,

The case relied on the testimony of witnesses who claimed to remember Alice's birth, and by relating it to events in their own lifetimes could state her age
*before the introduction of registers of baptism in the mid-sixteenth century many legal proofs of age
relied on memory and oral testimony.

The very tension between the requirement of chastity and the achievement of sexual maturity became a focus of desire in late medieval English culture. This, I argue, is the key to the identity of medieval maidenhood, and she - as an abstract figure and as a real girl - was subject at once to protection and desire

This scheme categorises women according to their sexual or marital status, in contrast to categorisations of men according to their physical and intellectual state. Where a man is conceived of as an individual unto himself, woman is conceived of according to her future, present or past relationship with a sexual and marital partner.