A History of the Wife (12 page)

Adulterous love, however forbidden, however immoral, however detrimental to social harmony, was an exceptionally hardy strain. From the Middle Ages on, adultery was one of the constant themes of litera- ture. Other variations of the Arthurian legend focused more directly on the spiritual nature of the knight’s quest, but almost always, his prowess was inspired by a great lady.

This elevated position of the beloved probably did not reflect the lives of real wives, and, as one historian has pointed out, “it was the reality of only a narrow stratum of the female population, namely noblewomen.”
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For these women, usually married to older men for social, economic, and political reasons, the vision of the youthful knight in shining armor offered an outlet for their erotic imagination. Eventually, this fantasy vision trickled down from the nobility to the general population, where it has remained to the present day. The Har- lequin romance, with its plebian version of savior heroes, continues to feed the imagination of today’s disgruntled wives.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, an advice literature sprang up to teach men and women how to conduct themselves in the art of love. This “new” love called for sentiment and sighs, refined speech and

noble gestures, with rewards that might be spiritual rather than sen- sual. Indeed, the highly influential Latin
Treatise on Love
(
De arte hon- este amandi
) written by Andreas Capellanus at the court of Marie de Champagne around 1170 argued that “pure love” was preferable to the baser sort. Yet the underlying message points to the expectation of sex- ual fulfillment.

Flattery was considered an essential part of the art of seduction, with praise directed to a lady’s eyes, nose, lips, teeth, chin, neck, hands, and feet. After flattery, the man was urged to take action: “Press her with many a burning kiss,” and if she resists, “Well, hug and kiss her any- way.”
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The common wisdom among men was that “every woman can be won.”
23

Another author goes so far as to suggest that even rape is acceptable. “With one hand lift her gown, then place the other square/ Upon her sex.... Let her shout and shriek.... Press your bare bodies close, and do your will with her.”
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Brute strength was not seen as inconsistent with deeper feelings; indeed, the author advises the rapist to marry the woman if she is faithful to him. In all probability, a young woman who lost her virginity in such a manner was well advised to marry her seducer, especially if she became pregnant.

What about advice books for young women? These, too, became pop- ular in the Middle Ages, though in fewer numbers than the guidebooks for men. Richard de Fournival, physician to the King of France in the thirteenth century, wrote an
Advice on Love
in the form of a letter to his sister. Inspired by the Latin poets, he spoke of love as a “folly of the mind, an unquenchable fire, a hunger without surfeit, an agreeable illness, a sweet delight, a pleasing madness” that could be experienced first by either man or woman.
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Yet following the ancient bias that saw the man as “active” and woman as “passive,” it was never proper for her to be the pursuer and for him to be the pursued. What then was a woman to do?

Richard advised his sister that she must affect “artful guises to dis- close her love” to the man in question. She might speak to him of some vague concern, give him long affectionate glances, “in short, anything but a frank and open entreaty.”
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So women were advised to play the coquette, as long as they didn’t usurp male initiative. It was unthink- able for a woman to make the first declaration of love or to force the first kiss.

Another thirteenth-century author, Robert de Blois, addressed his

Advice to Ladies
to married women. While he enjoined them to be faith- ful to their marriage vows, he, too, offered an art of coquetry designed to inflame, rather than suppress, desire. Wives were told to avoid drunkenness and gluttony, to sweeten their breath with some kind of spice, to avoid kissing when overheated, for “the more you sweat, the more you smell.”
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Some women were rebuked for wearing the reveal- ing décolletage that became fashionable about this time. And they were told explicitly to keep roving hands off their chests. “Take care not to allow your breast/ To be felt, fondled, or caressed/ By any hands save those that ought.”
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Only the husband was supposed to be able to touch his wife’s breasts.

All in all, treatises on love were probably read or heard only by the elite. Yet they tell us that Love with a capital “L” had set up shop at the center of the literate discourse—which represented a small segment of the population, to be sure, but an influential one.

Among the illiterate members of society—that is, most of the popula- tion—love was no less the subject of speech and song. One type of song popular with people of lower social strata—the lament of the “mal mar- iée” (the unhappy wife)—repeatedly explored the triangle of wife, hus- band, and lover. According to Ria Lemaire, who has studied these songs extensively, they were sung by women while dancing with other women or with mixed-gender groups.
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These songs expressed a woman’s complaints about her husband and her desire to take a younger, more attractive lover. The husband is invariably “bad, violent, ugly, avaricious, stinking and old” and often beats his wife. The lover is “young, handsome, kind and gallant,” as in the following:

Fat lot I care, husband, about your love Now that I have a friend!

He looks handsome and noble

Fat lot I care, husband, about your love. He serves me day and night

That is why I love him so.
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The woman presents herself as youthful and merry, and names her- self
amie
(friend, sister) rather than “wife.” She calls her lover
ami,
indi- cating that she and he are bound together through affinity, rather than

legal and religious ties. It was this way of thinking that led Héloïse to say she preferred to be called
amica
by Abelard, though she could claim the title of wife.

The unhappily married wives of the popular songs seem unaffected by feelings of guilt for cheating on their husbands. They speak out defi- antly: “My husband cannot satisfy me/ As a compensation I will take a lover.”
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In one ballad, the speaker complains of being beaten by her husband because she had kissed her
ami.
She knows what she will do for revenge: “I’ll make a cuckold of him . . . I’ll go and sleep completely naked with my friend.”
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Yet the thrice-repeated refrain—“Why does my husband beat me?”—is probably closer to the reality of her life. It’s hard to know whether these ballads of sexual revenge reflect married women’s behavior, or merely their hopes and dreams.

These cultural artifacts suggest that some wives, at different levels of society, were subverting the message of an ascetically oriented church and taking pleasure in such “vices” as disobedience and adultery. Inci- dentally, from the mid-eleventh century onward women and men of the upper classes also defied the church by playing chess, a game recently introduced into Europe by the Arabs. Europeans created the chess Queen as a replacement for the Arabic Vizier (chief minister), and by the end of the Middle Ages, she became the most powerful player on the board. The chess King and Queen represented the fundamental pair: though the King was the most important piece, the Queen became more powerful than the mate she served. This chess hierarchy may pro- vide an interesting gloss on the complexity of marital relations in late- medieval Europe.

MOTHERS AND OTHER WORKERS

Most medieval wives eventually became mothers, many within the first year of marriage. Motherhood was generally a desired state, seen as the fulfillment of a woman’s God-given role. Wives who had a hard time conceiving turned to midwives and healers, went on pilgrimages, bought potions and amulets, and prayed to the Virgin Mary and saints of both genders. They desired sons as heirs for the family estate or, at a lower level, as workers on the farm. They needed daughters to effect alliances with their peers or help with the daily chores. For economic, social, religious, and emotional reasons, children were perceived as a

blessing.

The church took a hard line on any practice that prevented concep- tion, as it still does today. The common contraceptive method of coitus interruptus was regarded primarily as a male sin, whereas abortion was considered a female sin. Infanticide, too, was considered a female crime, whether the baby was done away with for economic reasons or because the mother wanted to conceal the product of fornication or adultery.
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But church and secular courts heard very few cases of infan- ticide during the Middle Ages; only later, in the sixteenth century, when infanticide was legally equated with murder and carried a death penalty, did the number of court cases increase significantly.
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With no means of birth control available beyond coitus interruptus and the natural contraception resulting from lactation, it was common for women to have a large number of children. Seven or eight would have been considered “normal,” though some women, like Margery Kempe (1373–1431), had as many as fourteen, and some even more. Kempe’s successive experience of parturition and her responsibility for bringing up so many children may have played into her decision to renounce sexual activity while her husband was still alive—a subject to which we will return.

The experience of childbirth was fraught with hazard. Women with means were assisted by midwives, whereas poor women would depend upon female relatives and neighbors. Husbands were excluded from the birthing scene—indeed, it was considered unlucky for them to be there—and surgeons were a rarity, brought in only to remove a fetus from the body when all other means had failed. Since the possibility of maternal mortality was always present, parish priests made sure that pregnant women would confess and receive holy communion before their lying-in.

A special mass on behalf of pregnant women and those in labor entered the liturgy. The Virgin was invoked as the “benign assister of women in travail,” with power to succor “poor women, labouring with child” and “deliver them from all dangers.” God the Father, too, was entreated to “bring matters to a speedy and successful issue.”
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The lying-in after a delivery was a special time for the new mother. In well-to-do families, she rested in bed, received visitors, and was the object of considerable attention. Game boards were sometimes given to mothers in affluent Italian families to help them enjoy their time of con-

finement. Especially if the child were a boy, a husband might commis- sion a birth salver or tray with a game board on one side and a painting on the other. One at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, from the first decade of the fifteenth century, has a chess board on one side, and a birth scene on the other. The new mother is sitting up in a high bed, while attendants bring her a meal. Lower down, her baby has just been bathed and is being swaddled. Typical of such paintings, guests are coming and going on each side. Of course, poorer women in Italy and elsewhere were usually up and about as soon as they could stand.

For six weeks after childbirth, a mother was prohibited from attend- ing church, in accordance with the Old Testament decree that a woman was impure during this period. The “churching” of a woman was the ritual that allowed her back into society. The service began outside the church, with a blessing of the woman who had recently given birth. She would be sprinkled with holy water by the priest and then led, by her right hand, inside.

On the whole, both rich and poor mothers nursed their babies, sometimes with supplemental milk from a cow, especially among the peasantry. But some members of the nobility, most notably in Italy and France, were already employing wet nurses, who were often chosen with care from good families and brought to live within the baby’s resi- dence (as opposed to the later practice of sending babies out to live with the wet nurse.)
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We get a female perspective on the medical problems women faced from the writings of Trotula, a unique woman physican who practiced in Salerno in the late eleventh or twelfth century, and whose name is associated with several treatises that circulated in Latin and the vernac- ular throughout the Middle Ages. Trotula wrote of menstruation and childbirth, infertility and abortion (which she condemned), and the way to restore the appearance of virginity. She also gave women numer- ous recipes for hygiene and beauty, including one that would reduce the size of one’s vaginal opening, presumably after childbirth, so as to please one’s husband. With the directness of Middle English, this pas- sage begins: “Now it is to touche of some wyman that han thair prive membre [genitals] so large and so eville-smellying, where-thorow [because of which] their hosebondes forsaken hem because of largenes and be [because of] the wykked smel, ne han no wille [desire] to come nere hem.”
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Wives, then as now, had the responsibility of keeping their

husbands sexually happy, as well as producing offspring.

Women also had the responsibility of bringing up the children and educating them during their first years. When a boy was about seven, the father was supposed to take charge of his education, while the mother continued to educate the girls—that is, of course, if the family was sufficiently well-off to educate their children at all.

Public education, with a focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic, was available by the end of the thirteenth century to upper-class girls in Flanders and Paris, and a few decades later in Italy.
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8
By the turn of the fifteenth century, girls’ schools were established in Germany and Switzerland. In England, public schools were attended exclusively by boys. On the whole, girls from wealthy families and the nobil- ity were taught at home by tutors. Peasants, for the most part, were uneducated.