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.

In 655 king Oswy of Northumbria defeated and killed Penda of Mercia near the river Winwaed. The odds were heavily against Oswy. He faced Mercian forces some three times larger than his own, his nephew Ethelwald had defected and his son Egfrid was currently held hostage by queen Cynewise of Mercia. So depressed had Oswy’s power become in the years leading up to 655 that he had even tried, unsuccessfully, to buy off Penda and although the favourable outcome at the Winwaed may have been assisted by the river’s bursting its banks, Bede, recording the victory, was inclined to regard the unexpected success as heaven-sent request for fulfilment of a vow Oswy had made, in sheer desperation, to dedicate his daughter to God and to holy virginity if he were victorious. Thus, on a wet November day, the future of the infant Elfled was sealed. Barely a year old, she was consigned to the cloister at Hartlepool, where her aunt Hild presided, and shortly transferred to Hild’s new foundation at Whitby where she grew up in the monastery which was to become preeminent in the north of England under the rule of its remarkable foundress. The outlook for the tiny princess was not one of solitary gloom.

Since they got a toe-hold in universities, the achievement of women in the field of medieval history has been high. Some female historiography may have been justly criticised for a certain breathlessness of style, a narrowness of concern, a subjectivity, even romanticism, of approach: faults produced, no doubt by the pressures of most women’s early socialisation. But the work of Rosalind Hill has shown an exemplary freedom from the faults and contributed substantially to the achievement. The combination of good sense and judgement with breadth of vision might perhaps have been expected from that rare person (of either sex) who can combine scholarly excellence with prowess in mountaineering. And so, despite its title, the paper that follows, in which I deal with the careers of two very active and intelligent women who commanded both the respect and the affection of many contemporaries (however unfairly posterity has treated them) will not, I hope, be thought a wholly inapt tribute.

In this year (975) Edgar, king of the English, reached the end of earthly joys, chose for him the other light, beautiful and happy and left this wretched and fleeting life’ (ASC MS A). Edgar died in his thirty-second year. He had ruled the whole of England for sixteen years, since the age of sixteen, and the northern parts of it at least since the age of fourteen. He left three known surviving children, each by a different mother. Eadgyth, his daughter, was abbess of the nunnery at Wilton, appropriately enough since she was the daughter of the nun Wulfthryth. He left two sons. The eldest Edward the martyr was the son of his first marriage to a lady named Aethelflaed. Edward’s mother was dead or otherwise disposed of by 975. She had disappeared early in the reign, before Edgar took as his wife and queen the lady Aelfthryth in 964. Aelfthryth was the mother of two sons: Edmund, who pre-deceased his father in 972, and Aethelred, better known to history as Aethelred Unraed. The reputation which has attached to the mild Aethelred would hardly apply to his mother, who involved herself with great purpose in the advancement of her two sons. Aethelred was at most nine years old in 975, making all possible allowance for the speedy consummation of his mother’s marriage and the birth of his elder brother. We do not know the age of Edward, but he is called a ‘child ungrown’ in MS C of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which should make him no more than twelve, the age of social maturity in tenth century England. These two children, or more accurately their supporters, immediately flung themselves into a battle for the throne.

In these days of women’s liberation it must be a matter of satisfaction for the ladies of Athens to reflect that during the long Byzantine period the two most eminent native-born Athenians were both of them women. There was, in the early days, the scholar Athenai’s who became the pious empress Eudocia, and, in the high Byzantine era, Irene, the first woman in recorded European history to reign as a sovereign monarch. It is Irene whom I wish to discuss, as I think that she has been rather shabbily treated by historians. Her reign was a period of ecclesiastical, constitutional, diplomatic and economic importance, with herself at the centre of it all. Yet, so far as I know, no one has ever published a monograph on her or on her reign or given it more than cursory treatment. It must be admitted that the reason for this is not disapproval or contempt for the empress, but simply the inadequacy of the source material. Apart from the seventh oecumenical council, which is fully documented, the events of the reign are covered by one original source only, the Chronographia of Theophanes.

Writing of the early and impressionable years spent by Ailred in the household of king David of Scotland, Knowles, in a felicitous phrase, remarked that the Scottish court had been ‘something of a nursery of saints’ during the previous half-century. The conduct, character and traditions of that spiritual kindergarten he associated with ‘that âme d’élite’, the ‘exquisite St Margaret’, and the contrast between the Scotland of king David and that of his father Malcolm Canmore, the proliferation of religious vocations and works of practical piety which followed the marriage of Malcolm and Margaret, make his claim self-evident. Within the royal circle if the careers of David and Edith/Matilda, and in the next generation of Waldef and Ailred, supply conspicuous testimony they do not stand alone. For Ailred, writing C1153/4, Malcolm’s oldest surviving son Edgar was homo… dulcís et amabilis, cognato suo regi Edwardo [the Confessor] per omnia similis, while his successor Alexander ‘the fierce’, was ‘humble and loving to clerks and monks’. Litteratus, according to Ailred, his active interest in the conduct of church life, and his piety reflect the interests and example of his mother. As earl he was the only layman present at the opening of St Cuthbert’s tomb in 1104, while his father, allegedly, was present at the foundation of the new cathedral at Durham in C1093.

The important part played by women in the history of the crusader states has been obscured by their exclusion from the battle-field. Since scarcely a year passed in the Frankish east which was free from some major military campaign it is natural that the interest of historians should have centred on the men responsible for the defence of the kingdom. Yet in any society at war considerable power has to be delegated to women while their menfolk are on active service, and the crusader states were no exception to this general rule. Moreover, because the survival rate among girl-children born to Frankish settlers was higher than that among boys, women often provided continuity to the society of Outremer, by inheriting their fathers’ fiefs and transmitting them to husbands many of whom came from the west.

At the close of the eleventh century the region of north west France experienced a revival in popularity of the eremitical movement. Men and women seeking retirement from the world, withdrew to the seclusion of forests and wastelands where, dwelling in crudely constructed huts and living only on small provision, they devoted themselves to a life of voluntary poverty and simple piety. Robert of Arbrissel provides an example of one following the eremitical life. Having retired to the forest of Craon he lived under conditions of extreme austerity, seeking solitude and dedicating himself completely to the contemplation of God. While still practising his austerities in the forest he began his mission of preaching and very soon gathered around him people eager to hear his message. It is not the purpose of this paper to discuss the influences and personal motivations which were at work in determining Robert’s career as a hermit and wandering preacher, aspects which I have examined elsewhere, but to provide an analysis of the impact Robert’s career may have had on others, and on women in particular.

IN the middle ages any man, or woman, who wished to discipline themselves according to the principles developed in the early days of monasticism in Egypt had to withdraw from the world. This was true whether the experiment of asceticism was to be pursued in community or in isolation, as hermit, anchorite or recluse. Yet however extreme was the degree of withdrawal from contact with society, the world affected, and was affected by, the one who withdrew. This general thesis is amply illustrated by the surviving evidence for the life of Christina of Markyate who first spent some sixteen years as a recluse and then perhaps as many as thirty five as a nun, after her profession at St Albans around 1131. In one way or another she renounced the world for over fifty of her allotted three score years and ten.

Although the story of the nun of Watton by Aelred of Rievaulx was published by Twysden in the seventeenth century and reprinted by Migne, it has never been studied in detail for the light it throws on religious life and attitudes in the twelfth century and on the history of the order founded by St Gilbert of Sempringham. This neglect has been the result less of ignorance than of the nature of episode, which was described as ‘disgraceful and fanatical’ by Dixon, ‘distressing’ by Eckenstein and by Graham, ‘painful’ by Powicke, ‘strange’ by Knowles, ‘of almost casual brutality’ by Nicholl, and as ‘curious’ and ‘unsavoury’ by Aelred Squire.

The early Cistercians were remarkable for their hostility to the feminine sex. ‘No religious body’ wrote Southern, was ‘more thoroughly masculine in its temper and discipline than the Cistercians, none that shunned female contact with greater determination or that raised more formidable barriers against the intrusion of women.’ The whole tenor of several of the early Cistercian statutes was that women were to be avoided at all costs. One decree enjoined the monks to sing like men and not imitate the high-pitched tinkling of women. Apart from these disparaging references to the female sex in general, an early statute explicitly stated that no Cistercian abbot or monk should bless a nun. In the thirteenth century this was interpreted as applying to the solemn consecration of nuns—a task which pertained to the bishop. It is stated that abbots did have the power to bless nuns at the end of their novitiate. But this later interpretation may well reflect later subtleties. It seems probable that the decree was originally intended to stop the Cistercians concerning themselves with nuns. The view that it was originally a straight-forward prohibition is strengthened by the fact that the same early decree went on to forbid the baptizing of infants. This decree, therefore, is crucial to any analysis of the position of nuns within the Cistercian order in the twelfth century. Dating it is difficult.

The prologue to Jacques de Vitry’s Life of Mary of Oignies introduces us immediately to a situation peculiar to a small part of Europe at the turn of the twelfth century. He draws our attention to a small, like-minded, closely knit group of people, mainly women, whose religious views and experience seemed to have developed only within the confines of the principalities of Brabant-Flanders, an area which the members of this group knew as Lotharingia. In writing the Life his aim was to make the group which he had found and indeed which he himself had been eager to develop, known to a much wider audience, with the ultimate aim of establishing a tradition sufficient to allow for its possible institutionalisation and ultimate acceptance by the ecclesiastical authorities.

St Clare died on II August 1253, and the celebration of her seventh centenary in 1953 was accompanied by a revival of scholarly interest in her life and work scarcely to be paralleled since the Bollandists passed through August. Grau established the canon of her writings and published an annotated German translation: Hardick fixed the chronology of her life—born in 1193-4, received into the religious life at the age of 18 in 1212; from 1212 to 1253 head and leader (from 1216 abbess) of the community in San Damiano. Much else occurred besides in 1953 in scholarly publication and popular festivity; and little perhaps remains to be discovered about her life and works.

For the thirteenth-century Guglielmites women were the only hope for the salvation of mankind. These idealists believed that contemporary human failings could be remedied and that all were soon to be saved through the intervention of a female. Yearning for such immanent change, the Guglielmites quickly moved from enthusiasm to heresy. If the false Christians, jews, saracens, and, in fact, all diose outside Christianity were still not transformed by grace, according to these zealots, it was the fault of the present form of the ecclesia which must therefore be altered to fulfill their utopian expectations.

Among the best-known mediaeval women are literary and pictorial personifications of abstract concepts: Virtues and Vices, Fortune and Philosophy, and the Seven Liberal Arts. Male embodiments of these subjects are exceptional, flouting both iconographie convention and the gender of the Latin nouns. The artes liberales in particular might be expected to remain a female preserve. In literature, from their first appearance as personifications in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae, they are uniformly female.

In 1364 a cause of divorce a vinculo was brought in a York court by a certain Edmund Dronesfeld against his reputed wife Margaret de Donbarr, on the grounds of her previous marriage in Scotland. The story unfolded by the witnesses, whose depositions are the only remaining record of the cause, is a strange one, which reflects the unsettled conditions of life on the border and in northern England during the long-drawn-out Scottish wars, and the further confusion introduced by the Black Death. The questions put by Edmund’s side were intended to prove that Margaret’s name was originally Agnes, that she had married in Scodand, eighteen years before, a man named William de Brighan, who was still alive, and that Edmund himself had not known this when he had ‘married’ her at Bedale six years later.

THE historian chips eagerly in search of veins of psychological truth behind the autobiographer’s polished facade. But the latter’s Roman art held little appeal in the medieval west. Medieval autobiographers had no generally favoured literary stereotype on which to model their fragments of experience. Familiar with confessional practices, and with preachers’ fabliaux, they often wrote with a frank, engaging air. Yet, since they were inclined to conform to what they considered seemly for exempla, the historian needs to be as much on his guard against seduction by their apparent artlessness as by the polished suavity of the antique self-portrait.