Unquiet Women

by Adams, Max;

  A much more robust and proactive role is, very naturally, offered by the illustrators of Christine de Pizan’s fifteenth-century allegorical treatise Le Livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies),π in which Christine herself – always in a blue gown, with a white headdress – is seen reading and writing in her study or out on the building site of her imagined metropolis, trowel in hand: a deliberate artistic counterpoint to the idealised women who drift in and out of the psalters and breviaries. Here is the woman as thinker, designer, project manager and actor on a public stage. This is not so fantastical as the allegory suggests: women in medieval towns frequently found work on building sites.

  In the Luttrell Psalter, an illuminated English book of the fourteenth century, women are variously promiscuous or chaste, melancholy, weak, grotesque and genteel: as saints, virgin mothers, virtuous wives, fallen daughters or idealised peasants. The lady wearing a widow’s hood and kneeling with a red squirrel at her feet might be a playful innocent; but to medieval eyes the image was lewd: the woman’s posture sexually provocative, the squirrel a symbol of promiscuity. In the same manuscript, a woman braiding her hair looks into a mirror held up by her maid: the former is to be read as a woman of sinful vanity – that is to say, Eve; the latter as modest and chaste: a proxy for the Virgin Mary.

  In The World of the Luttrell Psalter, the manuscript expert Professor Michelle Brown opens modern eyes to the coded messages embedded in both text and imagery by the book’s commissioning patron, Sir Geoffrey Luttrell III (1276–1345). Both the widow and the woman braiding her hair, and a mermaid also portrayed in the psalter shamelessly brandishing a mirror and comb, are thought to be depictions of Geoffrey’s daughter Elizabeth. In 1309, when she was eleven years old, she was living in fosterage with the family of Sir Walter Gloucester, to whose son she was betrothed. Around this time, or shortly thereafter, a young cleric called Thomas of Ellerker – he appears in the same scene as the woman with uncovered hair and her maid, symbolically catching a bird with a net on a long pole while his clerical tonsure grows stubbly – seduced and kidnapped her. Large sums of money changed hands; the young man was bought off and the original marriage contracted successfully – at least, so far as the family was concerned. Elizabeth was widowed in 1323; her appearance in the book seems to be intended as a cautionary tale, perhaps for other Luttrell girls wanting to avoid Aunt Lizzie’s fate. The temptations and dangers of sexual desire are also depicted in a scene that takes place within an enclosed garden, where a young nobleman and -woman play at backgammon – and love – flirting over their gaming counters in a scene that brings to mind the actors Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen playing sexually charged chess in The Thomas Crown Affair: all is risk and excitement, strategy and counter-strategy, entrapment and escape; mate and checkmate.

  The illustrations in the Luttrell Psalter are, above all, designed to accompany psalms. Geoffrey Luttrell’s wife, Agnes, and his daughter-in-law, Beatrice, sit at his feasting table in an image intended to draw humble parallels with the Last Supper and with Psalm 114 on the same page. Elsewhere a noblewoman, dashingly slender and seen only from behind, is perched on the shoulders of an acrobat while, from within a capital letter on the same page, a regal-looking lady looks askance at the pair. They are probably intended as references to Queen Isabella and Sir Roger Mortimer, lovers complicit in the overthrow and murder of Isabella’s homosexual husband, King Edward II, in 1327.

  Even when apparently uncomplicated and authentic images of peasant women appear in the psalter, shown carrying grain to the mill or reaping corn in the fields, their presence is intended to convey the virtue of work and the lord’s bounty in the fertility of both women and the land – land, that is, whose spiritual shepherd is God and whose temporal lord is their proud knight, Sir Geoffrey Luttrell. An equally idealised female character, a widow baring her breast in woe as she is beaten about the head, is a victim of the barbarity of war.

  It is only in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries with the rise of humanism and the Northern Renaissance that we see artists beginning to look away from explicitly religious imagery towards an interest in real people’s lives. The women portrayed by the Bruegels, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525–69) and Pieter the Younger (c.1564–1638), are townswomen and peasants: baxters, alewives, market traders and gardeners. They dance at weddings, shove unfaithful husbands into pigsties, gossip, kiss, laugh, suffer the pains of death and hunger; they cavort at carnival time and watch their children playing in the street or market place, scolding the naughty; above all, they inhabit credible landscapes of market places, fields, taverns and houses alongside the men who share their lives. They drink with them, talk with them – not, perhaps, as equals but as partners in life’s trials and tribulations. Their smiles express the pleasures of life, rather than inherent sinfulness and moral vacuity. These are the women who appear in the Coroners’ Rolls and in the judgments of manorial courts. They enjoy the liberating possibilities of urban life. They are the women householders of the Paris tax records rather than those of the idealised fantasies of the nobility. In Bruegel’s paintings, even when their presence is literally proverbial, as in the Netherlandish Proverbs of 1559, women are as likely to be associated with persistence and determination as with gossip or deception. They are no more and no less virtuous than their male counterparts.

  * See page 135.

  † See page 121.

  ‡ See page 121.

  § Daedalus, father of the hubristic Icarus, was a skilled craftsman.

  # Some scholars think that the first fictional work entitled to be called a novel was written by a female author, the Japanese courtier Fujiwara no Takato or, descriptively, Murasaki Shikibu (970s–?1020s), whose Tale of Genji is recognised as a masterpiece of romantic characterisation and of manners.

  ∫ See page 242.

  Ω See page 170.

  ≈ He was the friend and patron of Christine de Pizan, whose story is told in chapter 6.

  ∂ In the Book of Numbers of the Old Testament, the people of Israel are to wear blue; the Virgin Mary was invariably painted wearing a blue gown in Renaissance art. Mary Magdalene, in contrast, wore the red of the ‘fallen woman’.

  π See page 180.

  Chapter Six

  A room of one’s own

  ✥

  BÉATRICE DE PLANISOLES ~ BEGIN THE BEGUINES ~ MARGERY KEMPE: ALEWIFE, MILLER, MYSTIC ~ THE BOOK OF THE CITY OF LADIES ~ A TALE OF THREE MARRIAGES

  In her unforgettable essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf argued that for a woman to concentrate on writing fiction she must have one hundred and fifty pounds a year and a room of her own. That plea for financial independence and a space in which to write, or just think, without interference, would have resonated deeply with the women in this chapter, for whom independence was either hard won or an unattainable dream. Growing up in an all-female household in which such opinions, and the literature that underpinned them, were taken for granted, I find the stories included here still have the power to shock and inspire.

  Béatrice de Planisoles

  In an obscure hill village nestling in the wooded north-facing foothills of the Pyrenees, at about 1,370 metres (4,500 ft) above sea level, a woman named Béatrice de Planisoles (c.1274–after 1322) lived as the chatelaine of the village of Montaillou in the decades around 1300. As it happens, we know more about Montaillou’s inhabitants than we do of many other larger and more important medieval settlements because of its notoriety as one of the last bastions of the Cathar heretics of Languedoc. The Cathars had been largely – but not entirely – extirpated from the south of France during the Albigensian Crusade of 1209–29, initiated by the papacy.* And we know more about Béatrice than we do about most other medieval women because she was tried by the Inquisition of the energetic bishop of Pamiers, Jacques Fournier (1285–1342).† From her confessions and from witnesses who testified against her, we know the names and habits of her friends and enemies, her servants, husband
s and lovers. The incriminating contents of her baggage at the time of her arrest in 1320 are revealed to us. We know what she thought, said and did in considerable detail and in her own words – almost her own words: she gave evidence in her native language, Romance Occitan (the Languedoc region is named from its tongue, Lengadóc) and the bishop’s clerks transcribed them into Latin. Even so, and despite the intimidating and formal setting of a religious court, her testimony rings loud and clear across the ages, with an astonishing honesty and clarity.

  Montaillou was a typical hill village of terraces straggling up a gentle ridge. Its houses, many of them single-storey with shingle roofs, were shared by family and livestock alike. Wheat, flax, oats, turnips and leeks grew in small plots, while pigs, chickens and flocks of sheep mingled with their owners in small yards. There was just one weaver in the village and the nearest mill was several miles away. Shepherds passed through on their way to and from the high summer pastures of the mountains beyond. Domestic life was intimately centred on the foghana, a kitchen and living space from which other rooms led off, including cellars where dry goods were stored and which family members often made their private bedrooms. Curing meat hung from ceilings. Privacy was almost non-existent. Neighbours, servants – for those who had them – cousins, visitors, parents, grandparents and children knew each other’s business, a fact that frequently told against Montaillou’s heretics, lovers and cheats, exposed as they were to the forensic scrutiny of the Inquisition.

  In the 1290s Béatrice was married to a minor noble, Bérenger de Roquefort, who held the manor of Montaillou from the Comte de Foix. Physically and socially she looked down on the rest of the village from the walls of the modest château that capped the ridge. Even then, the handsome Béatrice attracted unwanted attention: first, from her husband’s steward, Raimond Roussel of the nearby village of Prades. He was a Cathar or ‘pure one’, believing in the equal opposites of God and the Devil, denying the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and committed to a life of purity – rather ironic, given his apparent sexual availability and that of Béatrice’s fellow defendants. Even while she was pregnant, she told the court, Raimond ‘often asked me to leave with him and go to Lombardy to the Good Christians [Cathars] who were there’, leaving behind her family and following Him – that is to say, Jesus – into the kingdom of heaven. Roussel’s arguments were attractive: Catharism offered women the chance to become ‘perfectae’, the elite of the faith, who could minister to believers and the baptised.

  Béatrice was unconvinced – on grounds, it seems, of practicality rather than any aversion to the idea of eloping with Raimond. He seems to have taken her demurral lightly:

  After having spread his heretical discourse to me quite liberally at several times and places and asked me to part with him, there came one night when we had dined together and he entered secretly into my bedroom and hid himself under my bed. I put the house in order and lay down to sleep and when all was quiet and everyone asleep and I myself was sleeping, Raimond came out from under my bed, placed himself next to me and began to act as if he wished to know me carnally.1

  Béatrice reacted to Roussel’s advances by throwing him out of her room. Then, in about 1297, she says, she was raped by Raimond Clergue, an illegitimate cousin of Montaillou’s curate. The Clergues were a powerful local family,‡ Cathar sympathisers, collectors of tithes for the comte and sometime agents of the Inquisition. The following year Béatrice’s husband died and, since the office and residence of a chatelain was held for a life interest only, Béatrice was forced to leave her home. Her husband’s family seem to have provided her with no dower to support her through just such an eventuality.

  Widows with property might maintain themselves and their household independently; Béatrice was forced to accept the protection of others and she told the court that, in her immediate widowhood, Raimond Clergue ‘publicly maintained’ her as his mistress. A year or so afterwards, she recalled two decades later, she attended confession at the village church§ at Lent:

  When I was there, I went to Pierre Clergue, the rector [cousin of Raimond], who listened to confessions behind the altar of St Mary. As soon as I had kneeled down before him, he embraced me, saying to me that there was no other woman in the world that he loved so much as me. In my stupefaction I left without being confessed.2

  Pierre Clergue was persistent, visiting Béatrice several times, preaching a sort of theology of free love to persuade her to become his mistress. Despite her reservations – the thought of sinning with a priest was evidently quite shocking – she eventually gave in. Béatrice and Pierre maintained a semi-clandestine affair during more than a year and a half, in the face of considerable enmity from the spurned Raimond. One night, when she was living in Prades in a small house abutting that of another Clergue, the village priest, she was summoned to the church by a servant. Here she found that Pierre had made up a bed ‘and that night he knew me carnally in church’. There was no shaming the man: the Inquisition recorded the names of many of his mistresses, including young girls and pairs of sisters. In response to Béatrice’s fears that she might become pregnant by him, he made her wear a sort of herbal charm around her neck when they had sex.

  In 1301 Béatrice left the high country of the Pays d’Aillon and moved to Dalou, where she married a second member of the minor nobility, a man named Otho Lagleize. Was she trying to escape the Clergues, their sexual predations and their dangerous Cathar beliefs? If that was her plan, she was nevertheless unable to resist her former lover Pierre’s attentions. He pursued her.

  …at the following harvest… entering my house, he said to me that my sister Gentille, who dwelt at Limoux, greeted me, and I let him enter. We went together into the cellar, and he knew me carnally while Sibille, the daughter of the late Arnaud Teisseyre, guarded the door of the cellar. She had brought me the preceding day a present from the rector, a blouse made in the style of Barcelona, which had one red and one yellow ruffle at the collar, and told me that he would come the following day. In order that no one would find us, and if someone did appear he would not believe that anything bad had happened between the rector and me, this servant placed herself near the open door to the cellar, in which we were uniting ourselves, the priest and I. This sin committed, I led him out of the house.3

  Béatrice’s testimony was intelligent, unselfconscious, prosaic: as a defence against accusations that might see her burned at the stake, it was either hopelessly disingenuous or brilliantly insouciant. Witnesses brought to bear testimony against her told the court of her poor attendance at church. They recalled how she would ask apparently rhetorical questions in company: how, if God was present in the sacrament, could he permit himself to be eaten by priests? Theologically, this was a very dangerous position, absolutely heretical. But Béatrice’s defence was always that she was only repeating what she had heard others say; that she herself was not a Cathar believer, even though she admitted giving some of their itinerant perfecti money and support on occasion. One gets the impression that Béatrice was passively orthodox, certainly superstitious, but essentially irreligious. When challenged with the contents of a leather sack found among her travelling baggage – unsurprisingly, she fled from her first summons to Fournier’s court – she had, or had rehearsed, a series of implausible but consistent excuses, delivered with sangfroid:

  I have the cords of the male children of my daughters, and I preserve them, because a Jewess, since baptised, told me that if I were to carry them with me and I had a lawsuit with anyone, I would not lose…

  …These linens stained with blood are the menstrual blood of my daughter Philippa because this baptised Jewess told me that if I were to save her first blood and give it in a drink to her husband or another man, he would never care for any another woman…

  I did not put these cloths with grains of incense with a view to casting spells. It is by chance that I have them at all. My daughter had a headache this year and she said that incense cured this malady better than anything
else…

  The mirror and the wrapped knife, no more than the morsels of linen, are not destined for casting spells or enchantments. As for the seed enveloped in muslin, it is the seed of a plant that is called ive. It was given to me by a pilgrim who told me that it would be efficacious against the falling sickness.4

  In another time and place, such objects might mark Béatrice out as a seeress or cunning-woman; in the eyes of Fournier’s inquisitors, they were damning evidence of heresy.

  The security of a second marriage and superficial conventionality did not last: Béatrice was widowed for a second time in about 1308. She now had four daughters, all of whom expressed great affection for her. If she was a caring mother, she was also still a passionate lover. In her forties, even as she entered the menopause, she fell for a much younger man, another priest, called Barthélemy Amilhac, who, she believed,