A Distant Mirror (43 page)

While the cult of courtly love supposedly raised the standing of noble ladies, the fervid adoration of the Virgin, which developed as a cult at the same time, left little deposit on the status of women as a whole. Women were criticized for gossip and chatter, for craving sympathy,
for being coquettish, sentimental, over-imaginative, and over-responsive to wandering students and other beggars. They were scolded for bustling in church, sprinkling themselves with holy water at every turn, saying prayers aloud, kneeling at every shrine, paying attention to anything but the sermon. Cloistered nuns were said to be melancholy and irritable, “like dogs who are chained up too much.” Nunneries were a refuge from the world for some, the fate of others whose families offered them as gifts to the Church, the choice of a few with a religious calling, but generally available only to those who came with ample endowment.

Evidence from poll and hearth taxes indicates that women’s death rate was higher than men’s between the ages of twenty and forty, presumably from childbearing and greater vulnerability to disease. After forty the death rate was reversed, and women, once widowed, were allowed to choose for themselves whether to remarry or not.

In everyday life women of noble as well as non-noble class found equality of function, if not of status, thrust on them by circumstance. Peasant women could hold tenancies and in that capacity rendered the same kinds of service for their holdings as men, although they earned less for the same work. Peasant households depended on their earnings. In the guilds, women had monopolies of certain trades, usually spinning and ale-making and some of the food and textile trades. Certain crafts excluded females except for a member’s wife or daughter; in others they worked equally with men. Management of a merchant’s household—of his town house, his country estate, his business when he was absent—in addition to maternal duties gave his wife anything but a leisured life. She supervised sewing, weaving, brewing, candle-making, marketing, alms-giving, directed the indoor and outdoor servants, exercised some skills in medicine and surgery, kept accounts, and might conduct a separate business as
femme sole
.

Some women practiced as professors or doctors even if unlicensed. In Paris in 1322 a certain
Jacoba Felicie was prosecuted by the medical faculty of the University for practicing without their degree or the Chancellor’s license. A witness testified that “he had heard it said that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than the greatest master or doctor or surgeon in Paris.” At the University of Bologna in the 1360s the faculty included Novella d’Andrea, a woman so renowned for her beauty that she lectured behind a veil lest her students be distracted. Nothing is said, however, of her professional capacity.

The
châtelaine
of a castle more often than not had to manage alone when her husband was occupied elsewhere, as he generally was, for the sun never set on fighting in the 14th century. If not fighting, or attending
the King, he was generally being held somewhere for ransom. In such case his wife had to take his place, reach decisions and assume direction, and there were many besides Jeanne de Montfort who did so.
Marcia Ordelaffi, left to defend Cesena while her hot-tempered husband (he who had stabbed his son) held a second city against the papal forces, refused all offers to negotiate despite repeated assaults, mining of walls, bombardment day and night by stones cast from siege engines, and the pleas of her father to surrender. Suspecting her councillor of secretly arranging a surrender, she had him arrested and beheaded. Only when her knights told her that collapse of the citadel would allow no escape from death and that they proposed to yield with or without her consent did she agree to negotiate, on condition that she conduct the parley herself. This she did so effectively that she obtained safe-conduct for herself and her family and all servants, dependents, and soldiers who had supported her. She was said to fear only the wrath of her terrible husband—not without cause, for, despite all the talk of
courtoisie
, lords of chivalry, no less than the bourgeois, were known to beat their wives. In a case of particular brutality and high rank, the Count of Armagnac was accused of breaking his wife’s bones and keeping her locked up in an effort to extort property.

Woman’s status in the 14th century had one explicit female exponent in Christine de Pisan, the only medieval woman, as far as is known, to have earned a living by her pen. Born in 1364, she was the daughter of Thomas of Pisano, a physician-astrologer with a doctor’s degree from the University of Bologna who was summoned to Paris in 1365 by the new King, Charles V, and remained in his service. Christine was schooled by her father in Latin, philosophy, and various branches of science not usual in a woman’s education. At fifteen, she married Etienne Castel of Picardy, one of the royal secretaries. Ten years later, she was left alone with three children when her husband, “in the flower of his youth,” and her father died within a few years of each other. Without resources or relatives, she turned to writing to earn the patronage that must henceforth be her livelihood. She began with poetry, recalling in ballades and rondeaux her happiness as a wife and mourning her sorrows as a widow. Though the forms were conventional, the tone was personal.

The plaintive note (or perhaps more sympathy than Christine pretended) loosened the purses of nobles and princes—whose status was reflected in patronage of the arts—and enabled Christine to undertake studies for a flow of didactic prose works, many of them adapted or translated from other authors, as was the common practice of the time. No subject deterred her: she wrote a large volume on the art of war based on the Roman classic
De re militari
by Vegetius; a mythological romance; a treatise on the education of women; and a life of Charles V which remains an important and original work. Her own voice and interest are strongest when she writes about her own sex, as in
La Cité des dames
on the lives of famous women of history. Though translated from Boccaccio’s
De Claris mulieribus
, Christine makes it her own in the prologue, where she sits weeping and ashamed, wondering why men “are so unanimous in attributing wickedness to women” and why “we should be worse than men since we were also created by God.” In a dazzling vision, three crowned female figures, Justice, Faith, and Charity, appear to tell her that these views of the philosophers are not articles of faith “but the mists of error and self-deception.” They name the women of history who have excelled—Ceres, donor of agriculture; Arachne, originator of spinning and weaving; and various heroines of Homeric legend, the Old Testament, and Christian martyrology.

In a passionate outcry at the close of the century in her
Epistle to the God of Love
, Christine again asks why women, formerly so esteemed and honored in France, are now attacked and insulted not only by the ignorant and base but also by nobles and clergy. The
Epistle
is a direct rejoinder to the malicious satire of women in Jean de Meung’s continuation of the
Roman de la Rose
, the most popular book of the age. A professional writer with a master’s degree in Arts from the University of Paris, Jean de Meung was the Jonathan Swift of his time, a satirist of the artificial conventions in religion, philosophy, and especially chivalry and its central theme of courtly love. Nature and natural feeling are his heroes, False Seeming (hypocrisy) and Forced Abstinence (obligatory chastity) his villains, whom he personifies as mendicant friars. Like the clerics who blamed women for men’s desires, or like the policeman who arrests the prostitute but not the customer, Jean de Meung, as a male, blamed women for humanity’s departure from the ideal. Because courtly love was a false glorification of women, he made women personify its falsity and hypocrisy. Scheming,
painted, mercenary, want
on, Meung’s version of woman was simply the male fantasy of courtly love in reverse. As Christine pointed out, it was men who wrote the books.

Her protest was to provoke a vociferous debate between antagonists and defenders of Jean de Meung in one of the great intellectual controversies at the turn of the century. Meanwhile her melancholy flute still sounded in poetry.

As shown by the sumptuous bindings of surviving copies, her works were in large demand by wealthy nobles. At the age of 54 she retired to a convent in grief for the condition of France. She lived for another eleven years to write a poem in praise of the figure who, to posterity, stands out above all others of her time—another woman, Joan of Arc.

Fixed as they were in the pattern of female nature conceived for them by men, it was no accident that women often appeared among the hysterical mystics. In the uncontrollable weeping of English Margery Kempe there is a poignancy that speaks for many. She began to weep while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem when “she had such great compassion and such great pain at seeing the place of Our Lord’s pain.” Thereafter her fits of “crying and roaring” and falling on the ground continued for many years, once a month or a week, sometimes daily or many times a day, sometimes in church or in the street or in her chamber or in the fields. The sight of a crucifix might set her off, “or if she saw a man or beast with a wound, or if a man beat a child before her, or smote a horse or other beast with a whip, if she saw it or heard it, she thought she saw our Lord being beaten or wounded.” She would try to “keep it in as much as she could, that people might not hear it to their annoyance, for some said that a wicked spirit vexed her or that she had drunk too much wine. Some banned her, some wished her in the sea in a bottomless boat.” Margery Kempe was obviously an uncomfortable neighbor to have, like all those who cannot conceal the painfulness of life.

On July 27, 1365, at Windsor Castle, Isabella of England and Enguerrand de Coucy were married amid festivity and magnificence. The
finest minstrels in the realm played for the occasion. The bride was resplendent in jewels received as her wedding present from her father, mother, and brothers, at a cost of £2,370 13s. 4d. Her dowry, considerably increased over the d’Albret marriage-portion, was an annual pension of £4,000. The King’s gift to Enguerrand was no less valuable: he was released from his role as hostage without payment of ransom.

Four months later, in November, the couple received the King’s leave to return to France, evidently given with some reluctance, for the letter refers to a repeated request “to go into France to visit your lands, possessions and estates.” Isabella being already pregnant, the King’s letter promised that all children male or female born to her abroad would be capable of inheriting lands in England and considered “as fully naturalized as though they were born in the realm.”

To the customary ringing of church bells vigorously pulled to induce the saints to ease labor, a daughter was born at Coucy in April 1366 and christened Marie. Before a month had passed, Isabella with husband and infant was hurrying back to England. A lady of rank and in delicate condition would travel in a four-wheeled covered wagon with cushioned seats, accompanied by her furniture, bed linen, vessels and plate, cooking pots, wine, and with servants going on ahead to prepare lodgings and hang tapestries and bed curtains. Even with such comforts, to brave the Channel crossing and the bumpy land journey with a newborn baby seems peculiar and reckless haste or a desperate affection for home. Throughout her married life, Isabella never put down roots at Coucy-le-Château, and instantly rushed back to her father’s court whenever her husband departed on some expedition. Perhaps she was unhappy in the great walled castle on the hill, or did not feel at home in France, or more likely could not live without the indulgence and royal surroundings of her youth.

Edward’s determination to attach Coucy as firmly as possible to England was acted on as soon as Enguerrand and his wife returned. On May 11, 1366, the Chancellor informed the nobles and commons in Parliament, in the presence of Edward, “how the King had married his daughter Isabella to the Lord de Coucy, who had handsome estates in England and elsewhere; and for the cause that he was so nearly allied to him, it were fitting that the King should enhance and increase him in honor and name, and make him an earl; and thereupon he requested that advice and assent.” Lords and Commons duly consented, leaving to the King the choice of what lands and title to confer. Enguerrand was named to the vacant earldom of Bedford with a revenue of 300
marks a year, and as Ingelram,
^*
Earl of Bedford, he appears thereafter in English records. To complete the honors, he was inducted into the Order of the Garter.

At the same time Isabella received yet another £200 of annual revenues, which promptly disappeared down the bottomless drain of her expenditures. She seems to have been one of those people for whom spending is a neurosis, for within a few months of her return, the King paid £130 15s. 4d. to discharge her debts to merchants for silk and velvet, taffetas, gold cloth, ribands and linen, and another £60 to redeem a jeweled circlet she had pawned.

Sometime before Easter of 1367, which fell on April 18, the Coucys’ second daughter was born in England, within a year of the first. Named Philippa for her grandmother the Queen, the infant received from her royal grandparents an elaborate silver service of six bowls, gilded and chased, six cups, four water pitchers, four platters, and 24 each of dishes, salt cellars, and spoons costing a total of £239 18s. 3d.