Women in the Middle Ages

Index

Women and the Clergy in The Middle Ages

Women in the Inquisition

The Minstrels and women in The Middle Ages

Healers and witches in The Middle Ages

Women and the Clergy in The Middle Ages

Women held a difficult position in the middle ages society. They were limited to household tasks such as cooking, cleaning, baking, bread, weaving, spinning and sewing. The women were the centre of the family and the

houses.

In The Middle Ages there were schools for

children and for girls, separated. In them,

the girls were learning Latin, to read, to

write and principally the Holy Writ.

When the girls become women a regular

day in their life is like this: .They quickly get dressed in their long tunics and wash their faces and

hands. .Then they put on a breakfast with bread and water.

.They are in charge of:

.embroidery, and carding wool .dinner-bread, water, and fried goose eggs .walking over to help with the sheep .working in the fields of wheat

.praying at the church

.delivering cloth goods to the castle .supper-fried fish, fried goose eggs, bread and water .preparing for bed .prayers before bed then retiring

In the Middle Ages, men and common women, had the same offices or labours. There was no difference. There were women blacksmiths, merchants, and apothecaries.

Others were midwives, worked in the fields, or were engaged in creative endeavours such as writing, playing musical instruments, dancing, and painting.

The women had many offices, though the only that were exclusively feminine, were those where one was working with silk

Being a famous woman in The Middle Ages was difficult.

However we can find some of them, such as Christine de Pisan and Joan of Arc

Christine de Pisan

Christine was Italian, the daughter of an astrologer. Her father wanted her to be educated, so she learned French, Latin, Arithmetic, and Geometry.

At the age of 15, she married Etienne du Castel, who was twenty-four. He died two years later, leaving her with three children and numerous relatives to support. She used her skill as a writer

and poetess to earn a living. She was one of the few true feminists before the modern era.

Joan of Arc As a teenager, Joan believed she

heard the voices of angels telling her to help

the future Charles VII, who had been deprived of his inheritance by the English and the Burgundians, to regain his throne.

Impressed, Charles sent her to raise the

siege at Orléans, which she did successfully, driving the English from

the city and allowing Charles VII to be crowned at Rheims

She was soon captured by Burgundians and sold to the English, who found her guilty of witchcraft and wearing a man's clothes. She was burned at the stake in 1431 and canonized in 1920.

The church was very powerful in The Middle Ages. They ruled everybody including the kings and emperors. The church at this time was the Roman Catholic Church which was headed by the Pope.

All the Pope had to do was tell a king, "Do this or I will excommunicate you and all your people”. Excommunication was the biggest

threat, it meant that the king and his people would not be able to do the holy sacraments and therefore (according to the Catholics)

they would go to Hell instead of Heavens.

During the middle ages, the Church was a major part of everyday life. The Church served to give people spiritual guidance and it served as their government as well.

Now, in the 21th century, the church’s role has diminished. It no longer has the power that it used to have.

Women in the Inquisition

The Inquisition was a Roman Catholic tribunal for discovery and punishment of heresy.

The role of women was very different from the role they have nowadays. In those days, women were submissive to men, we mean they didn´t take part in any issue. During the inquisition, they were blamed for everything and accused of witchcraft.

These prejudices against women made

them a major victim of the Inquisition and

women were considered prone to evil.

If they had some knowledge or cured diseases, they were humiliated and everyone said their work was the

work of evil.

Women could not even make decisions about their life, they didn´t decide whether they wanted to marry or not, since everything depended on their parents and husband. In exceptional cases in which women were emancipated, they were persecuted by society.

We can say that during the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, exchanges of cultures between different people from Europe were broken. The persecution of Jews and Arabs and all people who weren’t Christians, produced a decline in the world of culture.

The Minstrels and women in The Middle Ages

Their social function was one of the most singular and extravagant of the medieval days.

They were instrumentalists, right-handed

jugglers and acute poets. They also were

adventurous people without job neither

profit, that alternated their musical

exhibitions with the thefts in squares.

However, above all, the minstrels were transmisors of fundamental culture

during the Middle Ages: they transmitted

music poetry, news, social events in a world of illiterate people and impregnated of

oral tradition.

Women were active as menestrelles and

joglereusses. Permorfers themselves, they

travelled as part of small groups of entertainers.

Entertainment for rich people centred around the spectacles of jousting and

feasts or banquets. The role of women

in the medieval parties was that to prepare all the necessary things for the banquets and also to entertain men.

Women's involvemente with medieval music took a variety of forms; they served at times as audience, as participant like singers and dancers, as sponsor, and as creator.

Perhaps the most famous of the medieval

women composers is Hildegard of Bingen.

She was a remarkable woman, at a time

when few women wrote, she produced

many works of theology and visionary writings.

Hildegard had a vision that changed the course of her life. A vision of god gave her instant understanding of the meaning of the religious texts, and commanded her to write down everything she would observe in her visions.

Hildegard was able to finish her first visionary work Scivias ("Know the

Ways of the Lord") and her fame began to spread through Germany and beyond.

In addition to Scivias she wrote two other

works of visionary writing: -Liber vitae meritorum (1150-63) (Book of Life's Merits)

- Liber divinorum operum(1163) ("Book of Divine Works"), in which she wrote about her theology of microcosm and macrocosm. Man as a mirror through which the splendor of the macrocosm was reflected.

She also wrote books on natural history

and curative power: Liber subtilatum ("The book of subtleties of the

Diverse Nature of Things").

Music was extremely important to Hildegard. She wrote hymns and sequences in

honor of saints and founded a vibrant

convent, where her musical plays were

performed

Healers and witches in The Middle Ages

Healers and witches were like doctors that

used to do magic to cure people. They were considered respectable,

but they were hated and feared too.

They practiced black and white magic in

their rituals, because of this their rituals

were considered satanic so, for this reason,

those women were persecuted.

Witches were very prone to use certain herbs and animal parts in order to

makepotions which, they thought, could healthe wounded or extend life as well as

otherspells.

Medieval people were especially scared of

this because of natural disasters and phenomena including

eclipses,earthquakes.

Healers were considered witches. Perhaps the church perceived these women, with their special, often esoteric, healing skills, as a threat to its supremacy in the lives of its parishioners. The result was the brutal persecution of unknown numbers of mostly peasant women.

The medicine in the middle ages was a mixture of existing ideas from antiquity

and spiritual influences. There was no

tradition of scientific medicine, and observations went hand-in-hand with spiritual

influences.

Ideas about the origin and cure of diseases were based on a world view in which factors such as destiny, sin, and astral influences played as great a part as any physical cause.

If we had lived in the Middle Ages, we would probably have helped a witch, because it wasn’t fair the “witches-hunt”, they were human beings and didn’t deserve being burnt at the stake. We could have been arrested but we

think that it is more important to save people from death if you can.

Marina DomínguezRafael FernándezJavier GrossMiguel Angel Martínez

1º Bachillerato Sociales 2

I.E.S La Rosaleda Málaga 2009