When we get into the later middle ages, the information we have about Europeans, particularly western Europeans, increases exponentially. Court records survive from Italian cities in their hundreds of thousands, and financial records from the English government almost to the same extent. Furthermore, the increasing range of lay literacy means that we have writings by ever-wider groups of people, and from ever further down the social scale – sometimes artisans, very occasionally peasants. These texts are increasingly not in Latin, and are thus closer to, although not the same as, the ordinary speech of the laity. The result of all this is that it becomes easier to get a sense of some of the cultural values and practices of the non-élite majority, and to know more about the non-religious values of élites as well. Let us therefore look at how cultural practices actually worked in this period, focusing on gender difference, with particular regard to women, and community solidarity: mostly after 1300, but looking back where possible too. This will be the inescapable underpinning, the cultural base if you like, for the analyses of political superstructures and discourses, and economic change, which will follow in the next two chapters. I will begin with two examples of female religious innovation and reactions to it, which will help to illuminate some of the wider presuppositions of the period as well, above all concerning female gender roles. That in itself will take us into the world of the values of the laity, and we will then look at other aspects of these, using, among other sources, contemporary imaginative literature. Here we will concentrate on the collective identities, of, in turn, aristocrats, townspeople and peasants, and how they were increasingly clearly defined – including the dark side of such definition, the stigmatisation of outsiders.
So let us start with the future saint Catherine of Siena, who died in 1380 at the age of thirty-three, whose success and whose strangeness show what possibilities there were for a certain sort of female protagonism in her time. She was from a prosperous artisan family, of dyers, who were part of Siena’s medium élite, and included city leaders in the 1360s; she was said by her biographer to be her mother’s twenty-third child, but was one of only five or so to survive into adulthood. She refused food early, and by 1370 was eating virtually nothing; it is entirely likely that her decision in 1380 to stop drinking water for a month as well contributed to her death not long after. Caroline Bynum has convincingly shown how this decision by Catherine – and its associated physical signs, like sleeplessness, plus more extreme food choices like drinking pus – cannot simply be seen through the prism of anorexia, but also needs to be understood inside the complex relationship to food, to the Eucharist and to Christ’s blood which was a characteristic feature of female spirituals. Catherine, who also refused marriage and withdrew into a single room for some years, certainly saw her vocation as overwhelmingly spiritual and visionary. This was recognised early, and she had Dominican advisors in the 1360s (the Dominican church of Siena towers over the section of the city where she lived); by 1374 she had become formally attached to the order, had come to the attention of the pope, and was assigned a senior Dominican as a confessor, who later wrote her longest biography.
All major female spiritual figures had a male confessor, who very often is our only source for their activities, normalising their lives in a male narrative framework. We get rather more of a sense of Catherine’s own personality, however, for she authored over 380 surviving letters and a theological work – all in Italian; if she had any Latin it was sketchy – and so emerges as a figure with her own down-to-earth metaphorical style (for example, Christ’s divine nature is the wine in the opened wine barrel on which one gets drunk; his double divine and human nature is like a grafted tree). She was active in Tuscan and papal politics, and began to travel extensively; she was taken seriously as a political and moral force, urging Pope Gregory XI, then based in Avignon, to return to Rome, which he did in 1377.
In Siena she was taken very seriously indeed, although she by no means always argued for the interests of the current Senese government; she also developed an entourage of influential male Senesi, whom she called her famiglia (she was their mamma – her family-based political imagery extended to addressing popes as babbo, ‘daddy’). Catherine was often viewed with suspicion, as were other female spirituals, whose prominence outside marriage or the monastery often seemed problematic, as we shall see. She was tested by panels of ecclesiastics more than once. Like other female religious actors, she did not make it to sainthood early, and was only canonised in 1461, by a Senese pope. All the same, in the last six years of her life, this artisan’s daughter, with no Latin, the standard political language, was a significant political figure in Siena and Florence, Rome and Avignon. Her extreme ascetic acts, plus a personal charisma which is very clear in her letters, were enough for that.1
My second example is Margery Kempe (d. after 1439), daughter, wife and mother of merchants of the port of (King’s) Lynn in Norfolk. Her father, many times mayor of Lynn and an MP, was particularly successful, and Margery was seldom poor, except when she gave away her money. Almost everything we know about her comes from the autobiographical book that she dictated in the 1430s, when she was in her sixties. This mediated writing does not show she was illiterate in the sense of being unable to read (Catherine of Siena also dictated, until she miraculously learned to write in 1377, as did many male chroniclers); Margery’s book is ambiguous as to whether she could read, but a rich merchant’s child, even female, is likely to have had some training in it by now, and she was certainly well acquainted with spiritual religious texts. The text depicts her – ‘this creature’ as she calls herself throughout – as developing a highly personal style of ecstatic Christianity, not based on asceticism (except chastity, which she found hard) but on public weeping and crying out, especially in religious contexts, on self-humiliation, and on intense visions of Christ, with whom she went through a visionary marriage when on pilgrimage in Rome.
She had a more-or-less normal marriage for a long time, despite a moment of mental breakdown, including bearing fourteen children, but visions persuaded her in the 1410s to ask her long-suffering husband for a chaste marriage and permission to go on pilgrimage, which he agreed to as long as she paid his debts. Dressed in virginal white, she went to Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela. These were the classic pilgrimages for anyone who could afford it, but it was very unusual to do all three; and a lone woman on such long journeys, even though travelling with companions as she always did, was distinctly uncommon. Late in life, she also added religious shrines in the Baltic (she had a German daughter-in-law who, rather unwillingly, took her to Gdańsk).
More visibly to her social world, she also travelled around England, creating a certain degree of notoriety for herself, given her garments and her crying and her constant discussions about religion with everyone she met. In 1417, on her return from abroad, she ran into trouble, for that was a time of panic about heretical Lollards, and several times she was hauled in to face charges in front of bishops and town officials (the mayor of Leicester said ‘thou art come hither to lure away our wives from us’, one of the many signs of discomfort which Margery generated, according to her text).
Actually, however, bishops were relatively sympathetic to her, as she could respond to all interrogation in a totally orthodox manner, and she got certificates of orthodoxy from both English archbishops; she could also get out of accusations that she was preaching – a potentially heretical act – by saying that she simply talked to people. Margery Kempe was doubtless, on the basis of her book at least, a totally infuriating person, but she managed to create a Margery-sized space for herself and defend it against people of every social level. Modern historians have sometimes hypothesised that she sought sainthood with her book; it does not really seem so to me; but she certainly saw her personal closeness to Christ as highly special, and it is clear that many others were prepared to go along with that too.2
I will come back to the gendered aspects of Catherine’s and Margery’s activities in a moment; let us start by simply looking at them as members of the laity. These two were obviously wildly atypical figures in their religious commitment, and also atypical in that they both, despite their considerable differences, came from the interior-minded, spiritual wing of Christianity (it is often called ‘mysticism’, but the term is very vague). What is important for us, however, is not that most ordinary people did not behave like this, but rather that they tolerated, and often admired, these forms of action. Lay religious devotion was normally a matter of regular weekly and yearly rituals, in churches or processing between them, and its outward forms were essentially run by priests, who were also expected to preach to the laity and to confess them annually.3
The idea that the Christian religion should be mediated by the clergy was fundamental, and much of the anti-heresy activity of the thirteenth century had been aimed at people who did not accept that. So was it later; Margery Kempe was explicitly accused of heresy, and Catherine skirted its edges; they got away with it, and gained protection from the powerful, because their acceptance of the church hierarchy (even if not their respect for its individual members) was, or appeared to be, complete. We will come back to late medieval versions of heresy in the last chapter of this book, for they can be seen best in the framework of wider problems of authority and dissent in this period. Here, however, the important point is that Margery and Catherine were not ultimately seen as heretical, but they were nonetheless engaged in innovative ways of acting morally in the world; and religious authorities such as bishops and indeed popes were happy with that.
Clearly, then, it is not the case that all lay religious protagonism was seen as wrong by the church, and it never was; it had to be scrutinised before it was accepted, but, once that happened, senior clerics rather welcomed the extra access to the divine which lay commitment could provide. Gregory XI indeed sought Catherine out in part because his previous spiritual interlocutor, Birgitta of Sweden (a similar figure, but aristocratic, rather than of an artisan background, so in a way less exceptional), had recently died. This had already been the case with the impact Francis of Assisi had on Innocent III, and the beguines in Flanders and northern France sometimes gained similar respect. But there does seem to have been more lay spiritual activism, and more acceptance of it, in the later middle ages; a further instance was the influential (and well-studied) Modern Devotion movement in the fifteenth-century Low Countries.4
How was that acceptance achieved, and what were the obstacles to it? It is not easy to tell, for our narratives all know that acceptance would come in the end, and how it was arrived at is dominated by cliché. Some patterns are clear, all the same. It is not chance, for a start, that both my examples are of urban-based religiosity; there was more of a social space for self-fashioning in towns (it was one of the reasons why people emigrated to them, not least women, who could, by working for pay, live independently, longer than they could manage in the countryside).5 Urban communities also often valued having a recluse or other ascetic figure in the town, as a sign that the town was special. Sibylla of Marsal was an earlier instance, a beguine of exceptional religious commitment in a small town in Lorraine, who fasted and had visions and in 1240 began to attract pilgrims to Marsal; the inhabitants had no problems with this at all, and nor did the bishop of Metz, who had come in person to investigate, once he encountered the demon whom Sibylla was fighting. Only more detailed scrutiny revealed, apparently by chance, that Sibylla was faking it, to the extent that she had made her own demon suit and dressed up in it. Had she not been so successful, she might never have been checked on, and Marsal would have continued to benefit.6 This makes the initial excitement of the Senesi about Catherine’s sanctity rather less surprising.
Conversely, it is equally clear that the suspicion of lay ‘spiritual athletes’ which also existed in this period, as Catherine and Margery both found, was highly gendered. Catherine managed to establish a considerable degree of international respect, as we have seen, but a more common reaction to female spirituality, taken as a whole, was negative, and became still more negative as time went on. This was in large part because women were liminal to the male religious world: they were thought to be spiritually weaker, more prone to demonic possession, which resembled divine spirituality so greatly, and more prone to have a chaotic effect on the male order which circumscribed them. Another, famous, example was Joan of Arc, the peasant girl whose access to saintly voices led Charles VII of France to use her to inspire his armies against the English invaders in 1429–30 and whom the English burned for heresy in 1431: the whole argument of her show trial hung on whether her voices were divine or diabolical – because they were not signed off by the church, that is – as well as on the legitimacy of a woman cross-dressing as a soldier.
This sort of worry would strengthen further after the mid-fifteenth century, when some female visionaries began to be assimilated to a newly important category of the spiritually dangerous, witches; Joan was in fact one of the first to be accused of this, as a minor part of the charges against her.7 But spiritual worries of this kind were spin-offs of patriarchal power relations of a less religious type as well: these were women whose actions were not, as it was believed they should be, mediated or controlled by fathers or husbands, or even, often, their confessors; and they were claiming a public role which many thought they were not entitled to. We need to look at more widely at these power relations, in particular as they concerned women.
It is not news that women were constrained by male power, in this as in every period, but it is worth making it clear all the same. Dante refers in his Monarchy to a proverbial curse, ‘may you have an equal in your house’; households were regarded as hierarchical by definition. In 1392–94 an anonymous Parisian bourgeois wrote an advice manual for his young wife which takes for granted that it was his responsibility to direct her every action, however unreasonable his demands, with much citation of improving stories from medieval literature of hyper-dutiful and abused wives such as Patient Griselda, who humbly obeyed the intentionally humiliating instructions of her husband (more attractive and more useful is the second part of the book, which contains gardening advice and recipes).
Women were weaker, inferior, more lecherous, more prone to evil; they needed controlling, if necessary by force, and their reputation was easily at risk – and, it is important to add, these were assumptions held by women as much as men.8 Rape was common and was rarely punished; the writer of an early etiquette guide to courtly behaviour, Andreas Capellanus in the 1180s, sees it as a standard and amusing usage of aristocrats when they meet peasant women. And so on. These were widely held norms, against which every literary account of a bold female actor in, for example, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron of c. 1350 needs to be understood (Boccaccio included Griselda among his stories as well, with little irony).9
Constraints on women were also in part enforced by law, as in legislation on dowries, which limited the property any married woman could inherit or control directly. Once again urban environments made other female protagonism, particularly in gendered economic activities such as weaving and brewing, less unusual – and we should also not forget that, even in the countryside, women of the peasant majority worked all their lives as part of the family collective, and were often responsible for marketing goods. Nonetheless, the only secular women who had any long-term chance of acting independently were widows; the economic rise of the Fugger family as rich cloth merchants in fifteenth-century Augsburg was quite as much the work of widowed women as of men, for example. The one thing which women did tend to have under their direct control was household management and the household economy – even the Parisian bourgeois assumed that; this is indeed the context for the role Anna Dalassene had in managing Byzantine imperial finances in the 1080s for her son Alexios I, as we saw in the last chapter, in what was in effect a family takeover of the Byzantine state apparatus.
Much wider economic activity tended to derive from that household role elsewhere too: weaving, for example, was gendered as a female trade because it was always done by women in a family context, and indeed men often took over larger-scale, more ‘public’, weaving.10 Expertise was gendered as well: women always controlled childbirth, and much practical medical knowledge as well, but as soon as medicine became professionalised (this was in most places a late medieval tendency) its career structure became male. Patriarchal control was never complete; personal relationships with acquiescent husbands (like Margery Kempe’s), as well as economic necessity, gave a practical space for many women to operate in. Indeed, the Reformation, when it came in the sixteenth century, often regarded the practical autonomy of many wives as something to combat by ever-tighter regulation.11 But the control was still there, usable if anyone wanted it.
It is not surprising that when historians want to study female protagonism, they very often find themselves studying queens and senior aristocratic women, who could exercise considerable power, either by inheritance (in the absence of brothers) or, most commonly, as regents for children after their husband’s deaths; women had these roles in non-élite families as well, but aristocracies are far better-documented. That power was real, but it too was circumscribed. Female rulers tended to find a rather more hostile and critical political environment, or else bolstered up their authority by marriage, or indeed both, from Urraca of Castile (1109–26), through Joan and Margaret, successive countesses of Flanders (1206–78) and Joanna I of Naples (1343–82), to Margaret I of Denmark (1375–1412) and Isabella I of Castile (1474–1504), the last two of whom were the most successful of this set. Margaret of Denmark, even though she inherited her kingdom as her father’s heir, in fact almost always ruled through young males, her son and then a handpicked nephew, like queens-regent did elsewhere. It is true that Margaret is also notable, not only for overcoming opposition almost completely, but also for actually extending her power-base: it was during the only period in which she ruled on her own, 1387–89, that she unified the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, by force in the Swedish case.12
There were tough matriarchs elsewhere, too – on the Welsh Marches, for example; and Isabella of France, wife of Edward II of England, was even capable of overthrowing her husband, with the help of her lover Roger Mortimer, in 1327.13 All the same, other female rulers found that the fragility of all political authority particularly applied to them. And so did the policing of behaviours. With the development of ‘courtly love’ and Arthurian-inspired rules of etiquette (see below), a king’s or lord’s wife could easily find herself surrounded by young knightly admirers, but woe betide any lady who was thought to have fallen for that; even royal figures could be brought down by accusations of illicit sex with such admirers, from the daughters-in-law of Philip IV of France in 1314 to Anne Boleyn in England in 1536. The survival of the Arthurian Guinevere and Isolde in the face of such accusations was simply the fiction of romances.
There was thus no secure public space for women, unless nunneries count as that (but female monasteries, too, were often more enclosed, and often poorer, than those of men).14 Female secular power was obtained, when it was obtained at all, only in the context of positions in family life cycles. Every time power was exercised by collectivities, it also moved away from being available to women; Italian city communal government was a male space, for example, so were universities, and so were most craft guilds (although some guilds had female members, particularly widows, and Cologne and Paris, in particular, had specifically female weaving and spinning guilds and wider female guild membership).15 Gender analysis thus tends to be about the negotiation (by men as well as by women) of expectations, assumptions, boundaries, body-based categories, and it is logical that it should be. It is by such negotiation, too, to come back to Catherine and Margery and also Joan of Arc, that exceptional women could play with gender expectations, including that of female frailty, to create spiritual spaces for themselves which could sometimes have political implications. But this was restricted to the exceptional (and the exceptionally pious), and it, too, was hedged around with constraint and risk.
Did anything change in this across the middle ages as a whole? There is disagreement. Some have argued that the early middle ages gave more space to female property-holding and power, whereas from roughly 1100 onwards the growing patrilinearity of aristocratic family structures in the west, and the exclusion of daughters from inheritance if there were sons, cut them out from political protagonism as well, constraining them inside family and marriage patterns made by men.16 It is certainly true that male-line families are rather more visible in the second half of the middle ages (though they existed before too); it is also true that the marriage-portions women had access to in the later middle ages were, in general, smaller than those of earlier periods, and that women in some cases lost other rights of inheritance (but here the issue is also how much control they had ever had over their land, which was very variable).17
The transactional power of political women was however always fragile: as we saw earlier in this book, the queens-regent of the Merovingian period or pre-1100 Byzantium were powerful, but faced the same sorts of constraints and criticisms as those of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries; Carolingian queens faced accusations of adultery just as the daughters-in-law of Philip IV did, and for similar reasons. The growth of male-line lineage actually increased the number of queens- and countesses-regent for male children, who were all the more essential because there was less choice as to who could be a legitimate heir. I would rather see women as making the best of varying but always limited opportunities for personal agency, with success rates which, although low, were not vanishing in any period, and no major shift around 1100 in this respect.
What seems to me to be different about the late middle ages, however, is above all the increase in ambiguities. Patrilinearity excluded women from inheritance, but gave them more authority as widow-mothers. University education and the professionalisation of knowledge excluded women, but a steady widening of lay literacy gave more of them access to books (there were always female authors, and mothers – notably St Anne and the Virgin Mary – are regularly depicted in late medieval images teaching their children to read18). Towns excluded women from urban government and usually from guild protection, and often cut them out of artisanal activities they had dominated before, but gave them opportunities for employment and, sometimes, prosperity which they could not have gained elsewhere. The sharpening of the hierarchy of the church gave more power to celibate men, but lay piety gave a new, even if restricted, space to female religious sensibility.
The basic reason for all this is that Europe was now more economically complex, as we have seen; with that complexity came ambiguities of all kinds. And it is in societies where complexity and ambiguity give space for pragmatic solutions that women have in general found it most possible to negotiate space for their own protagonism. Societies with sharper lines, by contrast, like those of the Reformation, and, later, the French Revolution, have often made that negotiation harder, between an initial period of innovation and a later period in which the complexities which are also there are allowed fuller play again.
Hence also the fact that Christine de Pizan (d. c. 1430) became an intellectual figure, after her husband died young in 1390 and she had to raise her family on her own in Paris, with all the difficulties in securing control over her husband’s property which widows often faced. She made ends meet thereafter, very unusually, by writing poetry and prose for money. She would hardly have managed this if she had not been the daughter of the royal astrologer to Charles V of France and widow of a well-known royal notary, so was well connected, even if in financial trouble. But she would certainly not have managed it had she not been highly educated, including in Latin and Italian, her parents’ language, more than almost anyone so far mentioned in this chapter, which is significant in itself (she had access to the royal library too, and was influenced by Ovid, Boethius, Boccaccio and Aquinas). She was also a remarkably gifted poet.
In 1404–05 she wrote a long tract against male hostility to women, The book of the city of ladies, in which she is called on to build the city by Reason, Rectitude and Justice, who all agree with her that women have been maligned by the lies of men, and that the catalogue of virtuous women in the past (a long list, including Griselda again) shows that women are in reality kind and loyal, whereas men are lustful and violent. This text is interesting for its independence of thought and evident anger, of a type which modern commentators can identify with (and they have); but it has also to be said that, although Christine clearly prefers women to men in moral terms, and thinks that they are fully as intelligent, she accepts the normative medieval female roles outlined above in other respects almost completely: men do naturally rule; women should be modest, and simply endure wicked and violent husbands. She was a woman of her time, then, as were (in very different ways) her partial contemporaries Catherine of Siena and Margery Kempe. But she is an intellectually stimulating one to finish with here; and she well shows the possibilities that a virtually self-guided education could produce, towards the end of our period.19
I have here cited writers in the vernacular almost exclusively, which is itself, as we have been seeing, a sign of the steady extension of lay literacy. They were of course not the only writers in the later middle ages – in most of the west, Latin remained the standard international, administrative and intellectual language throughout the medieval centuries, and often beyond – but such writers often reflect the cultural attitudes of wider sections of the laity. (It was easier in Byzantium, where everyone still spoke Greek, although, conversely, there were few fully ‘vernacular’ texts there, for the literary language was by now usually quite far from the spoken one.) These attitudes need to be followed further, if we want to understand how aristocratic, urban and peasant communities defined themselves in the later middle ages; this will be the focus of the rest of the chapter, with vernacular literary representations set against other elements of the sociocultural practices of each in turn.
The first thing to keep in mind is that a French literary culture was usually dominant in this period in western Europe. The twelfth-century French epic poems about Charlemagne, particularly the Song of Roland, were widely translated and adapted, into Old Norse, German, Spanish, English, as well as, and most influentially of all, Latin prose, as the so-called Pseudo-Turpin chronicle.20 The late-twelfth- and thirteenth-century French romance tradition, largely associated with stories about the court of King Arthur in verse and prose, spread even further across Latin Europe, including back to Wales, where the first Arthurian material came from. Much literary creation in German consisted of adaptations of them in the thirteenth century, and, later, English authors from Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) to Thomas Malory (d. 1471) did the same: in these countries, a dialogue between French and native literary styles continued for a long time.21
In Italy too, although romance itself only came in much later, French initially had a similar status; the works of Brunetto Latini (d. 1294) were largely in French, and so in 1298 was the first version of Marco Polo’s Milione, the account of his travels to China. It was not until Dante Alighieri (d. 1321) made the choice to write the highly literary Divine comedy in Italian that the vernacular really took off there. Dante’s complexity fascinated Italians from the start, in much the same way that James Joyce did for modernists in the 1920s and 1930s, and sections of the Comedy circulated even while he was finishing it in the 1310s, with commentators following on fast as well; but his impact outside Italy was for some time relatively restricted, except in Spain.22 Of Italian texts, Boccaccio’s Decameron had the greatest early effect beyond the Alps, thanks to multilingual figures like Chaucer and Christine de Pizan (they knew Dante too, but used him less).
The problem about vernaculars was of course translation; French was widely spoken (in England the whole aristocracy spoke it for a long time), but other languages were not, so their literary achievements were less known. This was even more the case for Byzantine romance literature, which was unknown west of the Adriatic; although it predates the first Arthurian romances, it did not influence them (it is also timeless in a way which much western secular writing is not; its loving couples are separated by shipwreck and capture by pirates, then brought back together by coincidence – social context, except gender of course, is cut out of these texts almost deliberately).
Conversely, French romance, in particular, provided a template for the ‘courtly’ and ‘chivalric’ behaviour of the aristocracy of over half of Europe, with rulers and their courtiers on occasion dressing up as Arthurian figures and the like, from the late twelfth into the sixteenth century; Edward III of England’s Order of the Garter of 1348, for example, played off Arthurian imagery very explicitly.23 This contributed substantially to the self-consciousness of the aristocratic strata of the period.
Chivalry had other origins than literature. Jousting and the tournament developed out of military training; the bond between a lord and his knights had been strong since the early middle ages, and all lords wished to keep it that way with as much ritual and feasting as possible, as we have seen; the religious imagery of the Grail quest and other Arthurian themes had at its roots the assumption, which military aristocrats had had since the Merovingian period, that they were far more moral than everyone else. French romance was initially successful simply because it represented that aristocratic world in emblematic terms, adding in the fin’amors (courtly love) rhetoric of the south French troubadour tradition, and creating attractive plotlines around the trials of individual knights, such as Lancelot, loyal to his lord Arthur but tragically in love with Arthur’s wife Guinevere. As we saw earlier, eroticised power games were very risky if they went too far in real life, but as a literary image they were very strong indeed.
The rituals of knighthood steadily gained coherence, defining and idealising as they did so the order of ‘those who fight’, one of the three orders or estates of society (together with ‘those who pray’ and ‘those who work’), which were rapidly gaining currency as a classification from the end of the twelfth century onwards. As they did so, an etiquette for knights at court was ready-made for them, in the works of Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, and, in the thirteenth century, the authors of the huge Arthurian prose cycle which Malory would later translate and adapt. This chivalric etiquette gained in elaboration across the rest of the middle ages. The dialectic between literature and self-image was here unusually tight. Of course aristocrats were usually far from chivalric in practice, and they mistreated peasants and townspeople during both war and peace with at least as much commitment as they had done in earlier centuries, but the ideal of the honourable wandering knight, being constantly tested, and fortified by love and religion, had a long future.24
Aristocracies also developed a new degree of definition in this period. Being a member of the ruling élite was taken for granted by its members in the early middle ages, and not theorised; there was indeed no word before 1200 or so which accurately translates the words ‘aristocrat’ or ‘élite’, which are our words, not theirs. Nobilis, which came closest, was a word with many meanings, both narrow and wide. Élite membership was in practice negotiated, for it was based on several different elements, wealth, birth, office, political skills, training, royal favour, not all of which every potential aristocrat had. By 1500, however, at least in the Europe of kingdoms (communal Italy was, for a long time, more flexible), you were either a ‘noble’ or you were not. The upper aristocracy was thus bounded, even if differently in different countries. The right ancestors by now made one a noble almost automatically, and the policing of heredity became ever more visible. One could rarely become noble by marrying up, even if a few women managed it, like Alice Chaucer (d. 1475), granddaughter of the poet, who married a knight and then two earls, and died duchess of Suffolk. But kings and other rulers by the fourteenth century could create aristocrats as well, ‘ennobling’ them, after which, at least in theory, they were the equals of older families.
Sometimes (in Germany in particular), this aristocracy defined itself as a ‘nobility’ (Adel) against cities and their rich élites; elsewhere, participation in the upper secular house in parliaments and their equivalents was a key element. As the code of chivalry became ever more explicit as a self-image for such nobles, rulers could play with that too, with new orders of noble knighthood, the Garter in England or the Golden Fleece (1430) in Burgundy. This still often left a wide knightly and quasi-knightly stratum outside the narrower nobility, such as the English gentry or the urban caballeros villanos of Castile. Their élite status was certainly real – they too could have chivalric aspirations, for instance – but it remained more informal, and sometimes more transactional, as that of all élites had been in the early middle ages (the gentry were for example sometimes called nobiles in texts, without being ‘nobles’ in a strict sense). All the same, everywhere in Europe the centuries after 1200 brought both clarity and restriction for the aspirant aristocrat.25
The concept of urban identity was becoming equally elaborate too, and is increasingly well documented in this period. By 1300, towns had some type of self-government everywhere, in the wholly autonomous city-states of north-central Italy, the imperial cities with their special status in Germany, the towns of Flanders which could defy their ruling count with regularity, and then in every possible form, whether defined or de facto, everywhere else. They expressed their identity publicly, and indeed the latest medieval centuries are the first period in which urban public ritual begins to be really clear in our texts in most of the west. Such ritual was at its base religious in almost every case, and processions on major religious feast days were standard everywhere (not only in towns, indeed), but they acted in many urban centres as the basis for remarkable elaboration. There were sometimes dozens of them every year in large cities.
The processional map was very complex and long-standing in places like Rome and Milan, and of course Constantinople, where it went back to the early middle ages; but Florence, Venice, Bruges, Ghent and other Italian and Flemish cities developed similar patterns in later centuries. From 1317, when it was properly established as a universal church feast in the west, Corpus Christi in June became a particularly significant focus for public events: in England, major late medieval towns like York, Chester, Wakefield and Coventry established cycles of ‘mystery’ plays for performance at Corpus Christi, as did some south-west German towns such as Künzelsau and Freiburg, and there was a playwriting competition on that day in Lille in northern France too.
Public events with a more secular element matched them, such as the archery and poetic competitions of the fifteenth-century Low Countries, or the bullfighting and jousting in Rome on the first Sunday of Lent, regulated in some detail in its communal statutes of 1360. But none of these were events with a purely religious meaning anyway. Rituals are polyvalent, for a start: they regularly take on different meanings for participants from those intended by organisers, often several different meanings at once. One general meaning of all these processions and other events was a celebration of the civic identity of the participants, which was frequently fully explicit, and also marked by dances and jousting in the days before and after the more formal religious ceremonials.
They were also, of course, intended to support local power structures and social hierarchies, as with the pope’s Easter Monday procession in Rome, which represented (among other things) his local sovereignty, or the particular festivities at Carnival and on St John’s day which Lorenzo de’ Medici developed around 1490 in Florence to showcase his charismatic authority. Conversely, such rituals were also foci for contestation, as, earlier in Florence, the opposition between urban aristocratic jousting and guild processions. Any procession could be disrupted, indeed, to make a political point: that was how internal civic crises often started. One-off political points were also made processionally, as with the often elaborate and expensive joyeuses entrées into towns by Burgundian dukes and French kings, which of course represented external power, but could be manipulated to make their own public arguments by the citizen groups (guilds, confraternities) who had paid for them. Almost all these public events, indeed, were paid for by town-dwellers, and that conveyed a sense of ownership which allowed plenty of different points to be made, if necessary.26
Towns were complex places, even after their populations halved in the wake of the Black Death, and they needed to be regulated. Urban statutes survive from the thirteenth century onwards in considerable numbers, and the problems of government were many: not only ensuring that civic taxes were collected and markets and guilds were properly run and violence kept under control, but, more widely, the creation and defence of public space, the disposal of sewage (an almost impossible task), the banning of activities held to be unpleasant (such as tanning, and, more unexpectedly, candle-making) from town centres, or attempts, as in Italy, to prohibit unrestrained grief in funeral processions. That last example shows that secular government in cities often saw itself as having a role in the creation of what it saw as public morality, too. The problem of how good government should be achieved was faced first in Italian cities, as is logical since they were effectively sovereign, but widely thereafter as well. Brunetto Latini’s encyclopaedic The book of the treasure, written in the 1260s and focused on his experience as an official in Florence, was excerpted and adapted in London in the early fourteenth century by the city chamberlain Andrew Horn, for example, and was also widely available and translated in late medieval Spain.27
Such government, however, was of course also focused on maintaining the power of urban élites, or of one of their factions, often in the face of considerable opposition; it was coercive as much as administrative. Indeed, the need to bolster up élite power, plus a fear that bad behaviour by the few might menace the town as a collectivity, could and did produce moral panics among urban rulers; these largely depended on the chance crises which hit, whether war, struggles with external powers, or plague, but they often accumulated across time. Marginal groups, who could be thought to have provided that menace, suffered as a result, as we shall see later.
For town-dwellers, there was little aspirational literature to match romance. The expressed aspiration of Italian citizens, for example, was more architectural (squares, civic buildings) and image-based, as with the Allegory of good and bad government of Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1338–39) in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. Patriotic poetry, urban chronicles, and tracts on city government, in Latin for the most part, were seldom aimed at filling this imaginative gap.28 In Italy, we have to wait for Boccaccio’s Decameron to find a vernacular ‘civic’ text, focused on the elegant storytelling of ten Florentine aristocrats fleeing the Black Death in a country retreat. Much of the content of their stories is not as elegant as their conversation, but instead bawdy and comic (and far more attractive for a modern reader than most other writing mentioned so far in this chapter), but it regularly has an urban and commercial background, and its values and prejudices are those of the urban upper class, made slightly more aspirational by the delicate manners of the storytellers, even when they are telling stories about sex. Chaucer borrowed the format for his Canterbury tales of the 1380s and 1390s, although in his case he mixed a very urban (in his case London) consciousness with an intent, visible in a wider cast of storytellers than Boccaccio had, to speak not so much for London, but for society as a whole.29
Unsurprisingly, articulated urban narratives were mostly restricted to élites who did not work with their hands, including the ricordanze tradition, developing out of account books, which allowed prosperous civic figures in Italy from the fourteenth century onwards to recount their lives and those of their families. Only in the fifteenth did this tradition occasionally extend to real workers, like the builder Gaspare Nadi of Bologna (d. 1504), whose diary begins with his record of his birth in 1418 and proceeds, over hundreds of pages of the modern edition, until just before his death; even then Nadi’s work tends for the most part to record Bolognese and Italian political events, plus some conflict among fellow-builders, and only occasionally the affairs of his family – it is an oddly impersonal text. But anyway we would look in vain for an urban élite Lancelot, let alone a romance hero who was an artisan, in any of our medieval literary forms.30
Some medieval urban literature, indeed, was the opposite of aspirational. The bawdy aspect of the storytelling of Boccaccio and Chaucer is matched, and far exceeded, by the thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century north French fabliaux, relatively short comic poems, certainly with roots in oral storytelling, of sometimes quite startling obscenity. A simple example is The maiden who felt ill at talk of fucking, in which the new farm servant finds that, as long as he uses euphemisms, the maiden concerned is only too delighted to have his erect young horse and his two round stable boys drink at the spring in her meadow, as often as they like. It cannot be said that fabliaux are representative of urban values only; they largely were, but they will have been popular in all kinds of social environments. They were also, undoubtedly, less shocking to the sensibilities of audiences in 1300 than they would have been in (say) 1950, and indeed would still be to some audiences now. But the naturalism of their contexts allows us to recognise the socioeconomic flexibility of the north French society they deal with (there are plenty of nouveaux riches, who generally get their comeuppance in the derisive conservatism of these texts), and the imagery of the marketplace returns often: this is a society involved with towns, even if it is not always an urban society.
Anyway, what we can certainly say is that the society, which appreciated poems such as these, did not need to idealise itself, or not exclusively at least: they are about trickery, and, above all, enjoyment. This is sexual enjoyment for the most part, as it might be in any time and place, but food imagery marks the genre just as much; the stews, partridges, pastries, fish, wine, and much else, lovingly listed, are as much part of the texts as the equally carefully described human genitalia.31 It is worth adding that eating (and sometimes avoiding) good food appears repeatedly in Margery Kempe’s (very different) book as well, and also in the Parisian bourgeois’s advice manual; if we strip away the idealised world in medieval secular representations (or, at least, do our best to strip it away), food and the pleasure of eating is what we end up with on a very regular basis.32 This was probably common ground in the whole medieval period, but it is particularly clear from now on.
An imagery of direct peasant origin is more of a problem. The fabliaux are not always bourgeois, but they are certainly contemptuous of peasants. An often-cited (because relatively clean) example is The peasant donkey-herd, in which the peasant, hauling manure, enters a spice market and faints because of the sophisticated and unfamiliar smell, and only revives when some of his own manure is put under his nose. In this respect these poems do not differ from most other medieval literary traditions. Indeed, the ridiculous vileness and stupidity of the peasant majority was so obvious to the literate social strata that it is not always even stressed – it was so much an axiom that, as with the gender boundary, the gulf between peasants and everyone else could be played with in texts, as for example in the myths that the earliest royal houses of Poland and Bohemia were both descended from peasants, or in the Christ-like if simple virtue of William Langland’s Piers Plowman in the late fourteenth-century English poem of the same name.
The values of the peasantry themselves, by contrast, were so far from the sensibility of most writers that peasant revolts in the late middle ages often seemed close to meaningless. Steven Justice has clearly shown how English-language texts preaching the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 invoke a concept of ‘truth’, itself related to usages in Langland, which implies collective just activity, something which was so invisible to élite commentators that they casually preserved the texts in their own chronicles. What peasants thought they were doing is otherwise systematically falsified in most of the narratives that survive for us.33
It is true that knowledge about and involvement with literate practices extended quite far into peasant society by the fourteenth century in much of Europe. One result was that peasants sometimes found their way into public debates about the direction of politics. What literacy was directly available to them, however, tended to be pragmatic, rather than representing in detail their cultural values. Indicative is Benedetto del Massarizia (d. c. 1501), a peasant in the countryside outside Siena, part-proprietor, part-sharecropper, who recorded his rent-payments and buying and selling and credit operations between 1450 and his death in two surviving account books; each deal had to be recorded by others, for he could not write (although he evidently valued writing and could doubtless read). That text is gripping for the complexity of his dealings, not for his views about the world.34 For the most part, peasant values and presuppositions are only available in detail through their witnessing in court – in civil litigation,35 criminal prosecutions, and inquisitions about heresy and sanctity – and thus, although often expressed in the first person, are recorded in texts written by people who were not peasants, and often not in the language of the witnessing. But such texts are certainly illuminating, perhaps above all those concerning heresy.
What peasants told inquisitors about heresy often (even if not always) simply reflected what inquisitors expected, but at least when they contextualised their statements about meetings with supposed heretics they could provide guides to their assumptions about more secular matters too. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s famous account of a very late (1320s) anti-‘Cathar’ investigation at Montaillou in the Pyrenees, although it takes a literal approach to the inquisition record which sidesteps not only the distortions of the inquisitor but also the narrative strategies of the peasants themselves, nonetheless constructs a rich picture of peasant attitudes to time, space, the complicated relation between pastoralism and agriculture, household structures, contraception and illicit sex (the philandering village priest used a herb which, if worn around the neck, prevented semen from curdling, thus avoiding pregnancy), and mutual delousing etiquette. It is this sort of external framing, then, which gives us our most detailed, even if distorted, account of peasant thought-worlds, in all their complexity.36 Future work – for this is a field which is not as fully ploughed as one would think – will give us guides to difference too, for the Europe of the middle ages held a myriad of different peasant societies, each with distinct value systems, which in the future might be, as so far they have not been, properly compared.
In the late medieval period, all the same, we can say more about the construction of rural communities. Villages gained franchises, as we saw in Chapter 7, and other forms of rural collective identity, in much of the west between (very roughly) 1100 and 1300; these became more organisationally developed as time went on, around the village church and its ritual life (parishioners were generally in charge of church upkeep), and around local political and economic collective structures. In much of England, even though peasants were often legally unfree into the late fourteenth century, manorial court records show that the villagers themselves policed their community, using local customs which had largely been generated by themselves. Such customs, and policing, were normal throughout Europe. Customs were formally recorded from 1300 onwards (sometimes earlier) in England in custumals, in Germany in Weistümer, in France and Spain in the franchise documents themselves, in Italy in village statutes, some of which are very complex texts.37
Villages and their parishes already had their boundaries confirmed ceremonially too, through religious processions (as in towns) or the beating of the village bounds, although accounts of these before 1500 are fairly sketchy. The landscape was itself often numinous, full of sacred spaces of differing importance, as we know because Protestant reformers spent much time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries trying to secularise it; communities drew on that too, drawing up (often competitive) networks of collective religious practice.38 Villages were hardly idyllic; they always had difficulties with their lords, obviously, and were also themselves run by village élites who could be overbearing – part of the tension in the Montaillou inquisition hearings came from the fact that Catholic villagers were happy to bring down a leading ‘Cathar’ family, who included the village’s badly behaved and domineering priest, already mentioned. They faced newer dangers, too: to village solidarity, when new families who were less interested in it rose in status, like the yeomen of late medieval East Anglia, getting rich through dealing in grain and playing the local land market; or to village coherence itself, when, in Tuscany, late medieval settlement steadily became more dispersed into the isolated farms of sharecroppers.39 But the network of rural communities, which had taken shape across Europe by the end of the middle ages everywhere, usually survived.
The only place in Europe where narratives give us a peasant voice is Iceland, for the ‘family saga’ tradition of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries provides us with very detailed and naturalistic imaginative accounts of the affairs of Icelanders who were, certainly, the island’s élite, but were peasants all the same. Iceland’s tenth-century Norwegian settlers avoided even the weak kingship they had experienced in Norway (see Chapter 5), and any other form of government except regular assemblies, and for much of its medieval history it is hard to see who could have exercised it. Only in the thirteenth century did it become possible for more than a small number of people not to farm the land directly, and for the decades around 1000, the chronological focus of most family sagas, the narratives assume that even the richest people, the subjects of the texts, worked with their hands.
These texts are anonymous, so exactly what sort of person wrote them has been disputed, but Icelandic literature was largely secular, and the sagas relate to a certainly secular oral tradition. Icelandic men in these texts were macho and suspicious, but also often very cautious, as peasants frequently are; they were committed to revenge-killing when their spiky honour was at stake, but their assemblies provided an elaborate network of courts in which grievances could be addressed, before peace was made or men turned again to fighting. As Iceland had no superior authority with effective disciplinary power, such courts had no coercive force on their own (all they could do was outlaw people); they worked because they were public arenas in which other men could see where right and wrong lay, and whether it would be sensible to take part in future violence.
Icelandic saga narrative is nonetheless focused, to a remarkable degree, on the need to feud to preserve honour and on the etiquette of feuding. The social set-up just discussed was the basis for some very subtle accounts of the workings-out of feud, with an attention to characterisation and motivation for the principal figures, male and female alike, which is unmatched in any other type of medieval text except a handful of the most thoughtful chronicles. One classic example is Gudrun Osvifsdottir, an extremely strong-minded woman, who, out of jealousy, goads her husband Bolli, with great dramatic tension, into killing his cousin and foster brother, Gudrun’s former love Kjartan. When Bolli is killed in return by Kjartan’s kin and allies, Gudrun resolutely has them hunted down and killed, but admits to her son in old age that ‘I was worst to the one I loved the most’, meaning (she does not say, but we have to conclude) Kjartan.
The reason for this attention to character was that, in a relatively economically equal society like this one, personal strengths and weaknesses, and reputation, could determine success and failure almost totally. This was a non-aristocratic society whose self-representation was indeed aspirational, but here the aspiration was only in part focused on honour, for honour in such a society was available to nearly everyone if they had the character and skill to maintain it; it was highly transactional. People did, nonetheless, aspire to a more ordinary courage, and an effectiveness in negotiation through careful and targeted violence – plus a literary style of laconic discourse in the face of difficulty and death which has seldom been surpassed.40
Historians have sometimes written about the discovery or development of ‘the individual’ when dealing with later medieval sources; this is a false image, for individual identity exists in all societies – and no-one who knows texts of the Carolingian period could doubt that it existed then. All that we are dealing with, when we consider the widening range of social groups whose voice can be heard in the late medieval centuries, is the steady extension of literate practices, which, as stressed in Chapter 8, by no means changed people’s wider perceptions, least of all their perception of ‘individuality’. But if there was ever a medieval society in which we know a great deal about individual identity it is Iceland, for particular reasons: because, to repeat, in this peasant environment it was individual character which determined success and failure, more completely than almost anywhere else in medieval Europe.
The construction and bounding of communities had as its other face the growth of practices of exclusion. These were not new in the later middle ages. How the growth in central power, both secular and ecclesiastical, in the thirteenth century was accompanied by an increasing hostility to out-groups, heretics, Jews, lepers, homosexuals: these people, defined as beyond the increasingly rigid boundaries of Christian society, were by now more often seen by élites (in particular) as polluting and viscerally dangerous. This argument gives a context to late medieval developments too. Urban governments had regular moral panics about able-bodied beggars and prostitutes, for example, and municipal legislation about them developed systematically.
In London, it is notable that the major panics in the fourteenth century fit well with periods of wider tension: the fear of French invasion in 1338–40 at the start of the Hundred Years’ War, the aftermath of the Black Death in the 1350s and 1360s, the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which had a big effect on London; the phraseology of ‘cleanliness’ appears in municipal acts, and the image of moral pollution is hard to escape. These clean-up campaigns may have had popular support, but were above all élite-led.41 So was the fifteenth-century development of witchcraft theory, which was generated above all in the minds of theologians and inquisitors, and was hardly at all a major preoccupation of secular society except in the valleys of the Alps, until the success of the Hammer of witches, published by the inquisitor Heinrich Kramer in 1487, which would have a long and dark future in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.42
Of these exclusions, however, the key one was in every century the experience of the Jews; for they were a permanent non-Christian presence, often disliked but theologically tolerated, and protected by popes as reluctant witnesses to Christian triumph. Jewish communities in Mediterranean Europe went back to the ancient world, and some, particularly in Spain and southern Italy, were substantial; around 1000 or so they moved into towns in northern France and the Rhineland as well, often as merchants, and then into Norman England (their settlement in eastern Europe came later, as part of the German colonisation movement after 1150). Their achievements in biblical commentary, philosophy and spiritual thought match those of the Christian tradition in the central and later middle ages, even if this had less effect on Christian intellectual life than translated Arabic thought did – although the great Jewish theologian Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) did influence Aquinas.
As time went on, Jews increasingly became associated with moneylending, which did not help their popularity with their Christian neighbours; and nor did their use as state agents by kings. But it was rulers and urban élites whose hostility tended to be much more important for the history of Jewish communities. As in Visigothic Spain in the seventh century, another society obsessed with religious unity, in the thirteenth century Jews faced greater state persecution: they were forced to wear special clothing by Innocent III, and the Talmud was burned in France under Louis IX (one of medieval Europe’s most anti-Jewish kings) as supposedly containing blasphemous statements.
These regulations, and early expulsions of Jews – from England in 1290, from France more than once from 1306 onwards – were essentially royal decisions, made for religious and fiscal reasons, with relatively little popular pressure. Not that popular tolerance was particularly benign. David Nirenberg has shown how the secular acceptance of Jews was a violent one as well, punctuated, that is to say, by regular hostile episodes: either fitting the Christian ritual calendar, as with the systematic violence often undergone by Jews during Easter week, or occurring when crusades came through, for, from their very beginnings in the Rhineland in 1096, those moments of religious fervour were regularly accompanied by massacres.
The tolerance of Jews was incomplete, then; and there was a growing hostility to them from élites. And violent moments, even if still episodic, spiralled in number in the fourteenth century. Excluding crusades, 1321 in France, 1336–38 in the Rhineland, 1348–51 in Spain, France and Germany (there was always less of this violence in Italy), 1391 in Spain again, were particularly important instances of religious hatred and massacre, focused on towns. Jews were accused of poisoning wells in 1321 (together with lepers), and again above all in 1348–51, as part of the attempted explanations of and hysteria following the Black Death; fantasies that Jews ritually sacrificed Christian children, which seem to have begun in England in the twelfth century, or that they desecrated the bread used in the Eucharist, also gained ground.
Pogroms were largely conducted by urban leaders, city councillors and the like; in Spain, only the 1391 violence (and its successors in the fifteenth century, by now also focused on converted Jews in royal and urban government) was principally a spin-off of the political grievances of non-élite groups. Either way, however, hostility to this religious minority was much more entrenched at the end of the middle ages than it had been in earlier periods. It was part of the sharpening of collective boundaries which can be traced in other ways too. It culminated in 1492 in the expulsion of Europe’s largest community of Jews from the kingdoms of Spain, again by royal decree, but this time with rather more popular support.43
In the patterns of late medieval culture, we have looked in this chapter at some clear trends: the contradictory directions in the opportunities available to women, a growing availability of evidence (often in the form of imaginative narrative) about the cultural assumptions and practices of more and more social groups, a growing cohesion of social strata and a greater visibility of community boundaries, a growing edginess about and potential hostility to outsiders. These trends were underpinned by more generalised developments: the still-growing complexity of the economy, which allowed for both expansions and contractions in female protagonism (as also considerable social mobility among the lucky and the unlucky, which itself led to the sharper policing of social boundaries); the steady extension of literacy and literate practices, which both reveal to us an ever-greater range of difference and enabled those differences to be accentuated; and the contradictions and ambiguities involved in the growth of central and local power.
Major social and cultural shifts cannot be reduced to single causes in any period, of course, but these three developments do indeed seem to me to mark the late medieval centuries more than any others, and they played off each other. As we shall see in the next chapter, rulers and élites had the force and resources to control more, as time went on; but at the same time local societies and practices, which were themselves more and more complex, escaped every control. This is simply the further working-through of the cellular nature of local power after the eleventh century, if wider political power was built up on the basis of such various foundations, the other side of the deal was, in effect, that it was very difficult to change the nature of the cells themselves, lordships, urban communities, villages, from the outside. These cells did not get weaker in the later middle ages, far from it; as we have just seen, they were ever more clearly delimited, now that not only local power structures but social strata, classes, were gaining clearer boundaries. Rulers sometimes reacted badly, trying to coerce local communities in shrill or violent ways. But those communities were themselves entirely capable of behaving coercively when things were seen as having gone wrong. Socioeconomic change which is ill-understood – and, as we shall see shortly, after 1350 this included the shock of the Black Death, not to speak of the spin-off effects of widespread and serious war – tends to provoke fear in most societies, and bad behaviour resulted from that in the late middle ages too.
But this does not mean that the late middle ages was particularly marked by fear, or anxiety; this argument has often been made, but it seems to me to have almost no force.44 There are terrors in every period, but for the most part people get on with their lives, for better or worse. What really marks out the late middle ages, in this respect by contrast to earlier medieval centuries, is the extension of political activity, both positive and negative, to a much wider range of people. Another result of the long economic boom, and the continuing development of the European economy after the Black Death as well, was that society was much more diverse, and people who considered themselves protagonists in some way or other, and were thus empowered to try to influence their world, became much more numerous.
Landed aristocracies, in their widest definition (that is to say, including the gentry and their equivalents across Europe), had started to become more substantial already in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the acceptance of the castellan and knightly strata into different versions of the aristocratic élite; each élite stratum came to have its own separate voice, both locally and nationally. Urban élites, too, who barely existed in 1100 outside Italy, Constantinople and Muslim Spain, were present, often rich, and loud everywhere by 1400, and less privileged urban groups were making their own claims; a few urban women were autonomous protagonists too, as we saw at the start of this chapter. And peasant voices were louder by now as well, in many places; there were, among other things, more peasant revolts after the Black Death. So: this cellular, collective world was one with more players in than before. They were harder to control, and they required different forms of politics to confront, as well as generating different forms of the public sphere themselves.
Notes
1.E. Dupré Theseider, ‘Caterina da Siena, santa’ (1979); C.W. Bynum, Holy feast and holy fast (1987), 165–80, 204–7; and the very valuable F.T. Luongo, The saintly politics of Catherine of Siena (2006) – 97, 109 for the wine barrel (he also points up the sexual imagery invoked by Catherine in the opening of the barrel, here made of the cross of the Crucifixion, with a spike); for the grafted tree, Epistolario di Santa Catarina da Siena (1940), n. 41.
2.The Book of Margery Kempe (2004) (cc. 48 for Leicester, 52 for not preaching); I have found particularly useful J.H. Arnold and K.J. Lewis, A companion to the book of Margery Kempe (2004) and A. Goodman, Margery Kempe and her world (2002).
3.See for a survey R.N. Swanson, Religion and devotion in Europe, c.1215–c.1515 (1995).
4.See esp. J.H. Van Engen, Sisters and brothers of the common life (2008).
5.For England, P.J.P. Goldberg, Women, work and life cycle in a medieval economy (1992), esp. 324–61; contrast J.M. Bennett, History matters (2006), 82–107; eadem, Ale, beer, and brewsters in England (1996), e.g. 37–43, 58–9; her more pessimistic view does not affect the general point. See for a Europe-wide survey K. Reyerson, ‘Urban economies’ (2013), 295–310.
6.N. Caciola, Discerning spirits (2003), 87–98.
7.For the patterns and problems of female sanctity, see C.W. Bynum, ‘Women’s stories, women’s symbols’ (1992); Caciola, Discerning spirits, 309–19 and passim; Elliott, Proving woman; A. Vauchez, The laity in the middle ages (1993), 171–264. For anxieties about the demonic and about (particularly female) sexuality, Elliott, Fallen bodies, esp. 35–60. For Joan, H. Castor, Joan of Arc (2014), sums up an extensive bibliography (largely in English, perhaps surprisingly); Cr. Taylor, Joan of Arc: la Pucelle (2006), is more than a good collection of texts. For witches, see n. 42 below.
8.Dante, Monarchia (1995), 1.5.5; Le ménagier de Paris (1846). There are many guides to medieval gender and women’s history, but Bennett and Karras, The Oxford handbook of women and gender, is now by far the best collective introduction to the whole of this section and cites earlier work. For the fragility of female reputation, see e.g. the case study of scolding accusations in late medieval England, S. Bardsley, Venomous tongues (2006). For patriarchy in a family context, R.E. Moss, Fatherhood and its representations in Middle English texts (2013).
9.Andreas aulae regiae capellanus, De amore (2006), 1.11.3; see in general K. Gravdal, Ravishing maidens (1991), 104–21 and passim; G. Boccaccio, Decamerone (1993), 10.10 for Griselda.
10.D. Herlihy, Opera muliebria (1990), 75–102. Bennett, Ale, beer, and brewsters, 51–76, shows that late medieval men took over large-scale brewing too. D. Cardon, La draperie au moyen âge (1999) shows that the late medieval male–female balance in large-scale weaving in continental Europe was fairly even. For the Fuggers, M. Häberlein, The Fuggers of Augsburg (2012), 12–20 (who were not exceptional here: see E. Ennen, The medieval woman (1989), 165–84, 201, 209–10); by contrast, in the sixteenth century women were excluded from directive roles in the Fugger trading company: Häberlein, The Fuggers, 34–5, 204.
11.For medicine, e.g. M.H. Green, ‘Women’s medical practice and health care in medieval Europe’ (1989); H. Skoda, ‘La Vierge et la vieille’ (2012). For the Reformation, L. Roper, The holy household (1989) (who stresses that regulation affected husbands too); eadem, Oedipus and the Devil (1994). 37–52.
12.For Margaret, see for a rapid survey J.E. Olesen, ‘Inter-Scandinavian relations’ (2003), 720–9; for queens in general, see T. Earenfight, Queenship in medieval Europe (2013); A. Rodríguez, La estirpe de Leonor de Aquitania (2014).
13.E. Cavell, ‘Intelligence and intrigue in the March of Wales’ (2015); J.C. Parsons, ‘Isabella (1295–1358)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography (2004). (Isabella’s public liaison with Mortimer was very unusual; they were both exiles in France when they began their relationship, however – Isabella could never have got away with it in her husband’s court.)
14.R. Gilchrist, Gender and material culture (1994).
15.Ennen, The medieval woman, 170, 180–7, 230.
16.See e.g. J.A. McNamara and S. Wemple, ‘The power of women through the family in medieval Europe: 500–1100’ (1973); G. Duby, ‘Women and power’ (1995). I prefer to follow the more continuitist reading of J. Bennett, Medieval women in modern perspective (2000).
17.See S.M. Stuard, ‘Brideprice, dowry, and other marital assigns’ (2012), and M.C. Howell, The marriage exchange (1998), 196–228, for general overviews of dowries and marriage contracts; Howell’s case study, Douai, shows that the control by women over property could be more complex and in some respects longer-lasting than many previous studies assume.
18.M.T. Clanchy, ‘Did mothers teach teach their children to read?’ (2011), 139–53.
19.Christine de Pizan, Le livre de la cité des dames (1997), esp. 1.11, 27, 2.50, 3.9; see for commentary, among many, R. Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan and the moral defence of women (2000), 128–74.
20.For the complex meanings of Pseudo-Turpin in France (in particular in its later retranslations back into French), see above all G.M. Spiegel, Romancing the past (1993), 69–98.
21.For Germany, e.g. M.H. Jones and R. Wisbey, Chrétien de Troyes and the German middle ages (1993); for England, W.R.J. Barron, The Arthur of the English (2001); for Wales, R. Bromwich et al., The Arthur of the Welsh (1991).
22.G. Petrocchi, ‘Biografia’ (1978), 45–9, for early citations; M. Caesar, Dante: the critical heritage (1989), 15–18 for Dante abroad.
23.For courts and their social dramas, see e.g. M. Vale, The princely court (2001), esp. 179–246; S. Gunn and A. Janse, The court as a stage (2006). For Byzantine romances, E. Jeffreys, Four Byzantine novels (2012).
24.For a rapid guide to all medieval French literature, see F. Lestringant and M. Zink, Histoire de la France littéraire, vol. 1 (2006); for the three orders, G. Duby, The three orders (1980), 271–353. For knighthood, J. Flori, L’essor de la chevalerie (1986), with correctives in D. Barthélemy, The serf, the knight and the historian (2009), 137–53. For the complexities of chivalry in practice, see e.g. M. Keen, Chivalry (1984). For the religious virtue of aristocrats (and their continued fast track to sanctity), see A. Murray, Reason and society in the middle ages (1978), 331–82.
25.See in general Coss, The origins; Crouch, The birth of nobility; K.B. McFarlane, The nobility of later medieval England (1973); J. Morsel, L’aristocratie médiévale (2004), who gives a Europe-wide analysis. For early medieval uses of nobilis, Goetz, ‘“Nobilis”’. For Alice Chaucer, see R.E. Archer, ‘Chaucer, Alice, duchess of Suffolk (c.1404–1475)’ (2004).
26.R.C. Trexler, Public life in Renaissance Florence (1980), 218–23, 450–2; J.-C. Maire Vigueur, L’autre Rome (2010), 178–84; M. Rubin, Corpus Christi (1991), 164–84, 271–87. For entry ceremonies, A. Brown and G. Small, Court and civic society in the Burgundian Low Countries c. 1420–1530 (2007), 23–8, 165–209 for texts; P. Arnade, Realms of ritual (1996), esp. 127–58; E. Lecuppre-Desjardin, La ville des cérémonies (2004), esp. 103–97, 259–302.
27.J. Catto, ‘Andrew Horn’ (1981), 387–91; cf. Q. Skinner, The foundations of modern political thought (1978), vol. 1, 27–48, and B. Latini, Li livres dou tresor (2003), (xxxii for Spain); for grief, see C. Lansing, Passion and order (2008); for candles, e.g. Statuta sive leges municipales Arelatis (1846), 221, c. 93, for Arles.
28.Jones, The Italian city-state, 440–76, gives a good survey.
29.Boccaccio, Decamerone; for Chaucer, e.g. P. Strohm, Social Chaucer (1989), 84–91; for London’s absence, D. Wallace, Chaucerian polity (1997), 156–81.
30.Diario bolognese di Gaspare Nadi (1886); for ricordanze see e.g. P.J. Jones, ‘Florentine families and Florentine diaries in the fourteenth century’ (1956). Boccaccio, Decamerone, 5.8, 9, 10.1, comes half-way to the values of chivalric literature as attached to civic élites, but only half-way; note also the quasi-epic poem on a football match attributed to the fifteenth-century Florentine merchant and diplomat Giovanni Frescobaldi, in L. Avellini, ‘Artigianato in versi del secondo Quattrocento fiorentino’ (1980), 178–81, 213–29.
31.See N.E. Dubin, The fabliaux (2013) for a recent parallel text of nearly half the corpus, although his decision to match the French verse forms creates imaginative rather than literal translations; 872–85 for La damoisele qui n’oït parler de fotre qui n’aüst mal au cuer. I have gained insights about the social context of the fabliaux above all from P. Ménard, Les fabliaux (1983) (65–72 for food); C. Muscatine, The Old French fabliaux (1986) (73–83 for food) and N.J. Lacy, Reading fabliaux (1993).
32.For the spiritual context of Margery’s eating, see M. Raine, ‘“Fals flesch”’ (2005). For peasant attitudes to good food, see e.g. J. Birrell, ‘Peasants eating and drinking’ (2015).
33.Le vilain asnier (in Dubin, The fabliaux, 176–80); see in general, above all Freedman, Images of the medieval peasant, 133–56. For 1381, S. Justice, Writing and rebellion (1994), 102–39, 181–90; and below, Ch. 12.
34.D. Balestracci, La zappa e la retorica (1984).
35.See the rural witnessing in Wickham, Courts and conflict, and G. Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna (1986), 21–5. For a classic example not long after 1500, even if further mediated by commentators, see N.Z. Davis, The return of Martin Guerre (1983).
36.Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou; key critiques are L.E. Boyle, ‘Montaillou revisited’ (1981), and N.Z. Davis, ‘Les conteurs de Montaillou’ (1979). For later examples, see Ch. 8 n. 55.
37.Birrell, ‘Manorial custumals’; G. Algazi, ‘Lords ask, peasants answer’ (1997); S. Teuscher, Lords’ rights and peasant stories (2012); G. Brunel and O. Guillotjeannin, ‘Les préambules des chartes de franchises’ (2007) provides a comparative survey with bibliography. For a list of medieval Italian village statutes, see A. Rizzi, Statuta de ludo (2012), 29–76; one of the few analytical studies of them is P. Toubert, ‘Les statuts communaux et l’histoire des campagnes lombardes au XIVe siècle’ (1960).
38.See A. Walsham, The Reformation of the landscape (2011); B. Kümin, The shaping of a community (1996); A. Torre, Il consumo di devozioni (1995); W.A. Christian Jr., Local religion in sixteenth-century Spain (1981), for important case studies focused on the post-1500 period.
39.J. Whittle, The development of agrarian capitalism (2000); G. Cherubini and R. Francovich, ‘Forme e vicende degli insediamenti nella campagna toscana dei secoli XIII–XV’ (1973).
40.For Iceland see above all Miller, Bloodtaking and peacemaking; Byock, Viking age Iceland; Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Chieftains and power in the Icelandic commonwealth (1999); for the historicity of the family sagas, a point of reference is C. Callow, ‘Reconstructing the past in medieval Iceland’ (2006). The classic texts are Brennu-Njáls saga (1954), for which see W.I. Miller, ‘Why is your axe bloody?’ (2014), and Laxdæla saga (1934) (quote from c. 78).
41.London: see above all F. Rexroth, Deviance and power in late medieval London (2007), 27–187; for prostitutes in general, R.M. Karras, Common women (1996). Cf. also B. Geremek, The margins of society in late medieval Paris (1987), 199–215, for Paris (repression of beggars but not prostitutes), and the Europe-wide citations in T. Dean, Crime in medieval Europe (2001), 47–72.
42.See L. Stokes, Demons of urban reform (2011), for the fifteenth-century starting points of the witch craze.
43.For the contradictions of papal policy, R. Rist, Popes and Jews, 1095–1291 (2016). For the fourteenth century, D. Nirenberg, Communities of violence (1996) (200–30 for the stability of Easter week violence); S.K. Cohn, ‘The Black Death and the burning of Jews’ (2007); P. Wolff, ‘The 1391 pogrom in Spain’ (1971); A. MacKay, ‘Popular movements and pogroms in fifteenth-century Castile’ (1972). For the desecration myth, M. Rubin, Gentile tales (1999). For an overall view, R. Chazan, The Jews of medieval western Christendom, 1000–1500 (2006). J.M. Elukin, Living together, living apart (2007), stresses the relative peacefulness of Jewish–Christian relations, more than I would.
44.Sensible remarks in S.K. Cohn, The Black Death transformed (2002), 223–46.
By Chris Wickham in "Medieval Europe", Yale University Press, USA, 2016, chapter ten. Digitalized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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