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‘Both Small and Great Beasts’: An Introductory Study
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2022
Extract
The history of women in the middle ages is difficult to write. Few women were literate; their opportunities to record their own thoughts and feelings and attitudes were restricted; the bulk of medieval records were written by men for men. Yet twelfth-century literature would be much impoverished in personal interest, and in human and intellectual content, if we lacked the writings of Heloïse and Hildegarde; and I remain stubbornly unconvinced that the letters of Heloïse were written by a man. Some of the best poetry of this and other centuries was written by women; and the cult of womankind is the essential centre and focus of the whole romantic, courtly tradition. At the other extreme White Annays and her colleagues figure in innumerable court records. A part of the relative neglect of medieval women has been due to the neglect of the history of marriage. This is now past: the academic world is full of the sound of symposia and conferences on matrimony; and a much better balance of interests between the sexes is one evident result. Catherine Morland’s gay jibe at history—’the men all so good-for-nothing and hardly any women at all’—had an edge to it in Jane Austen’s day and in the early and mid-twentieth century; it will hardly be so true of the history we study in the 1990s.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1978
References
1 No attempt at a bibliography is here attempted; nor is this paragraph intended to depreciate the rich literature on the subject. One must regret that Eileen Power never completed her great project in this field, though it is good that her surviving essays have been published in Medieval Women, ed M. M. Postan (Cambridge 1975); good too to learn that Dr Eleanor Searle is at work on her notes.
2 Which is not to deny the serious nature of the argument about the authenticity of her letters, and of Abelard’s. See esp the recent studies by Benton, [John], [‘Fraud, fiction and borrowing in the correspondence of Abelard and Heloise’], Pierre Abélard: Pierre le Vénérable, Colloques Internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 546 (Paris 1975) pp 469–511Google Scholar, and Dronke, Peter, Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies (Glasgow 1976).Google Scholar
3 Or so the only figures from the central Middle Ages known to me suggest: see Brooke, [C.N.L.], [Medieval] Church and Society (London 1971) p 52 n 14Google Scholar. But they relate only to the high nobility.
4 On Matilda, see Eadmer, , Historia Novorum, ed Rule, M., RS (1884) esp pp 122–5Google Scholar; Southern, R. W., St Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge 1963) pp 183–93Google Scholar; Brooke, C. and Keir, G., London 800-1216 (London 1975) pp 314–23.Google Scholar
5 Among the copious modern literature see esp the seminal paper of Hajnal, J. in Population and History, ed Glass, D. V. and Eversley, D. E. C. (London 1965) pp 101–43.Google Scholar
6 Hence, I would presume, the discrepancies between Abelard’s ‘Rule’ and later practice at the Paraclete noted by Benton pp 475-6.
7 See n 2.
8 Origo, Iris, The Merchant of Prato (London 1957)Google Scholar; compare Brooke, Church and Society, cap 12.