The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  As this shows, the leadership of a women’s community gave access to a considerable degree of political power; the medieval abbess of Kildare in Ireland, it was gratefully recorded, ‘turned back the streams of war’ by her skilful negotiation between warring kingdoms,11 and Catherine of Siena was personally responsible for the return of the Papacy to Rome in 1375. Nuns were also, in the words of Mary Ritter Beard, more than political figures:

  [They] were remarkable businesswomen. They were outstanding doctors and surgeons. They were great educators. They were feudal lords operating self-sustaining estates, and directing the manifold activities involved in producing goods, settling controversies as lawyers and judges settle them today, governing and participating in all the arts of social living.12

  Inevitably not all the nunneries and their inhabitants were as able, industrious and worthy as this wholesome evocation of feminine competence might suggest. The picture of European convent life during its thousand-year history is a complex one, and not without its dark and desperate moments. These lubricious and perfervid instructions from St Jerome to a young novice give some idea of the fetid atmosphere of imperfectly sublimated sensuality endemic to the life: ‘Ever let the Bridegroom sport with you within your chamber . . . When sleep overtakes you He will come behind and put His hand through the hole of the door . . . and you will rise up and say, “I am sick of love”.’13 The consequence of such overstimulation may be seen in one of the better-documented of the sexual scandals that have always surrounded communities of women, the harrowing story of Sister Benedetta Carlini. This Renaissance abbess, convicted at thirty-three of forcing lesbian acts on one of the younger sisters through her impersonation of a male angel, ‘Splenditello’, spent the last forty years of her life in solitary confinement in a prison cell within the abbey, fed only on bread and water ‘several times a week’, and only allowed out to hear Mass or to be whipped.14

  The Carlini story is a necessary reminder that the much-prized serenity of the ‘bride of Christ’ was not easily achieved; within the enclosed life, passion could build to murderous fury. After Radegund’s death, one of her nuns was so enraged at not being elected abbess that she mounted an armed attack during which the new abbess was captured and some of her followers killed. The abbess had to be rescued by a force of men-at-arms despatched by the local seigneur, after which the aggressor-nun continued to harry her supplanter with false charges of adultery, sorcery and murder until finally banished on pain of death.15

  Yet despite such events, and the tabloid-style sensationalization of their activities by later Protestant propagandists, the communities of women were always more significant for their intellectual rather than their sexual activity. Not all were equally distinguished. But there was none which ever neglected the basis of private scholarship, so much so that, along with the male religious houses, they were often the sole glimmers of light in the wastes of the Dark Ages when the lamps of learning were going out all over Europe. The knowledge they kept alive included the elements of all known arts and sciences. The study of languages frequently rose to a high level: in the tragic aftermath of their doomed love Abelard poignantly congratulated the nuns of the convent of the Paraclete on gaining in Héloïse a sister who was familiar ‘not only with Latin, but also with Greek and Hebrew literature . . . the only woman now living who has attained that knowledge of the three languages which is extolled above all things by St Jerome as a matchless grace.’16

  Exceptional though she was, ‘la Belle Héloïse’ was by no means the only woman to excel in her chosen field. Another twelfth-century abbess, Herrade of Landsburg, left 324 parchment sheets of unrivalled miniatures, while the amazing Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim two centuries earlier, during a quiet life of prolific endeavour, made history as Germany’s first poet, its first woman writer, and the first known European dramatist. Even more staggering was the achievement of Hildegard of Bingen – walled up in a convent cell with the last rites at the age of seven in 1105, Hildegard survived to become abbess, founder of a number of other religious houses, and political adviser of Henri II, Frederick Barbarossa and the Pope. A mystic and visionary, in her private work she distinguished herself in medicine, natural history, mineralogy, cosmology and theology. A gifted musician, she wrote hymns and the first European opera; her musical legacy alone consisted of seventy-four pieces. As a writer she produced poems, biography and mystery plays, and was still hard at work when she died in her eighties.

  The achievement of women like Hildegard, however, did little to improve the intellectual prospects of the rest of their sex. For the cripplingly low opinion of women’s intelligence entertained by even the dullest male of every culture showed little sign of abating with the passage of time. On the contrary, as the widespread sexual terror of women began to abate, it fed and fostered another damaging myth, that women’s brains were as weak as their bodies were believed to be. This was no new idea, since it is the complement and logical corollary of the belief that women were created only as bodily vessels – an incubator is not equipped with any powers of thought.

  This bilious notion of women’s innate mental inferiority crops up in the patriarchs’ earliest recorded pronouncements on the subject, like these ramblings of the dying Buddha to his faithful disciple:

  How are we to conduct ourselves, Lord, with regard to women?

  Women are full of passion, Ananda; women are envious, Ananda; women are stupid, Ananda. That is the reason, Ananda, that is the cause, why women have no place in public assemblies, do not carry on business, and do not earn their living by any profession.17

  A prejudice of this antiquity is not lightly overthrown. By the birth of the early modern period, it had found new life in a flurry of fresh reasons and observations: women had ‘but little brains’, their brains were ‘gruel’ not ‘meat’ like men’s, education dried up their innards and thinking drove them mad. Some of this, in an uncomfortable foreshadowing of science’s later attitude to the female, had its origins in the historical rebirth of interest in medicine, chemistry, surgery – women had wandering wombs, smaller skull capacity, weaker composition of ‘the elements’. It was also generally supported by daily experience of women whose highest knowledge was hard or trivial labour (working the land or the embroidery frame depending on their culture and class), gossip and old wives’ tales, and whose heads were literally empty of anything that could provide grist to the mills of the mind. The English lawyer who in the later sixteenth century wrote that ‘every feme covert [married woman] is a sort of infant’18 was consequently speaking no more than the truth.

  As this suggests, marriage itself was in general the enemy of any woman’s intellectual development. It is no accident that the brilliant Hildegard had escaped from the iron maiden of enforced wedlock. The convent movement as a whole, especially in its early days, had provided one bright thread in the history of women’s long imprisonment within systems that first denied them learning, then dismissed them as irredeemably ignorant. For denied they were, kept in ignorance of anything that might challenge the power of God the Father and man the husband, whose neatly dovetailing exactions were eloquently rendered by John Milton’s Eve in her submission to Adam:

  My author and disposer, what thou bidst

  Unargued I obey; so God ordains;

  God is thy law; thou mine; to know no more

  Is Woman’s happiest knowledge, and her praise.19

  Once locked into this structure, and as daughters of Eve located at the bottom of it, the majority of women had no access to education of any kind. Not for them were the classic avenues of advancement open to men, rising through the ranks of the clergy from the priest’s school for ‘ragged boys’, or being taken up by the local landowner to train as a secretary or ‘factor’. Nor is there, to this day, any general recognition of women’s educational deprivation and suffering – no accounts of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ or Jade the Obscure. Yet the women of these times paid heavily for their lack of learning. Their ignorance d
id not merely serve to confirm their inferiority; it put them at risk of harassment, torture and vile death. For in a fatal historical conjunction, fears of women’s filthy, inexplicable bodies, of their weak, suggestible minds, and of the brute evil of their intractable stupidity combined to provoke one of the worst outbreaks of gynocide ever known, the witch hunts of Europe and early America.

  From the very earliest stirrings of the first witches in the black lagoon of unconscious male fears, there was general unanimity that witches were female: a ninth-century decree of the Catholic Church identified ‘certain wicked women’ who ‘reverting to Satan, and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess that they ride at night with Diana on certain beasts, with an innumerable multitude of women, passing over immense distances.’20 The reason why witches were women, and women became witches, was obvious to any thinking man:

  . . . this is not due to the frailty of the sex, for most of them are intractably obstinate . . . Plato placed women between man and the brute beast. For one sees that the women’s visceral parts are bigger than those of men, whose cupidity is less violent. Men on the other hand have larger heads and therefore have more brains and sense than women.21

  There was no answer to that. Other soi-disant experts scrambled to support this pronouncement of the French jurist Jean Bodin, one of Europe’s leading intellectuals and largest brains; women were ‘monthly filled full of superfluous humours’ and ‘melancholic blood’22 – note the resurfacing of the theme of women’s ‘evil courses’ and dangerous blood in a new and damning context. But the real issue was one of brain, not body, as Europe’s leading witch-finders, the German Dominican inquisitors, explained in their highly influential catalogue of sadism and perversion, the witch-finders’ handbook Malleus Maleficarum, ‘Women are more credulous . . . women are naturally more impressionable . . . through the first defect in their intelligence they are more likely to abjure the faith . . . for men, being by nature intellectually stronger than women, are more apt to abhor such practices.’23

  The man who believed that would believe anything. And the irony of using this as a basis for the final solution to the witch problem is that, whatever witches were, they were not all dull-witted or ignorant. The old images of the witch as a demented hag or malignant old bat have been undermined by more recent discoveries that they were very often self-possessed, highly purposive, and above all young. Hysterical or paranoid personalities maybe; yet the women punished for ‘the darkness of their ignorance’ had in fact an extensive repertoire of their own form of knowledge, incorporating elements of religion, chemistry, alchemy, botany, astrology, natural science and pharmacology. Their knowledge of herbs and poisons, for instance, would be likely to exceed that of even the most highly qualified male medical practitioner.

  For witchery was a craft, an ancient discipline. As such it had to be studied, and in the days before general literacy, or freely available writing materials, committed to memory. Some women undoubtedly became highly proficient in manipulating people and potions, procuring an abortion here, taking credit for a conception there, and the greater the degree of their skill, the greater would be the satisfaction of their customers and consequently, as with all successful rule-breakers, the less likely they would have been to get caught. In fact, to reverse the traditional historical formula, the truth seems to have been not that witches were ignorant, but that ignorant women were more in danger of being taken for witches. One prime candidate would have been the wretched female castaway who appeared one day at the door of Elizabeth Walker, a minister’s wife and a noted philanthropist – she was ‘almost eat up with scabs and vermin, with scarce rags to cover her, and as ignorant of God and Christ as if she had been born and bred in Lapland or Japan.’24 To the witch-finder, that in itself would have been the mark of the beast. Elizabeth took her in, cured her of ‘the Itch’, taught her to read, and finally found her a good home with a rich farmer.

  But Elizabeth, though devout, was an open-minded woman – significantly, she also believed that ‘Blacks and Tawnys as well as Whites were descendants of the first Adam.’ Sadly, these centuries had too many women at risk, and too few Elizabeths; the indictment of 21-year-old Ellinor Shaw, hanged for witchcraft in Northampton as late as 1705, explicitly states that her parents were ‘not willing, or at least not able to give their Daughter any manner of Education’, so that she had been ‘left to shift for herself from the age of fourteen years’.25

  The persecution of the witch-hunts, arguably the first sustained use of terror as a political weapon, has been seen as the last convulsive throes of the dying Middle Ages, the final revenge of its grim, archaic form of patriarchy on anomalous or nonconformist women. Certainly the early design for the subjection of women to God and man, however pure in outline, was all too often less than perfect in execution, and the frenzy of the witch-burnings strongly suggests the convulsions of societies racked by an inexplicable dread of the aberrant female, together with a desperation to reassert the rightness and normality of patriarchal rule.

  Can it be only historical accident that the witch-finders’ campaign of gynocide coincided with the centuries which saw an astonishing upsurge of women’s political power worldwide, as the following table makes clear?

  962 Adelaide became queen of Italy and Holy Roman empress

  1010 The Saxon princess Aelgifu born, who, as mistress of Cnut of Denmark, regent of Norway, and mother of King Harold ‘Harefoot’ of England, ruled in three countries

  1028 Zoe became empress of the Byzantine Empire in her own right

  Asma, the ruling queen of the Yemen, succeeded by Queen Arwa, her daughter-in-law, bypassing the Sultan, Al-Mukarram, with his consent

  1105 Melisande born from Melisande’s girlhood to the death of Agnes in 1185 these two ruled as crusader queens of Jerusalem governing its development for virtually the whole century

  1136 Agnes of Courtenay born

  1226 Blanche of Castile, queen of France, became regent for her son, St Louis, and dominated European politics for the next quarter of a century

  1454 Caterina Corner born, later to rule as queen of Cyprus

  1461 Anne of Beaujeu born, princess of France, later queen of the Bourbons and de facto ruler of France for her weak brother Charles VIII

  1477 Anne of Brittany born, ruler of her own territories from the age of eleven, and later, through her marriage to two ineffectual kings, of France as well

  1530 Grainne Mhaol (Grace O’Malley) born, Irish princess, war-leader and naval commander in the struggle against the English invasion

  1560 Amina, Nigerian queen and war-leader born; as her father’s heir she became a warrior, refused all husbands, and enormously extended her country by conquest

  1571 The Persian Nur-Jahan born, later Mogul empress of India, ruling alone for her opium-addicted husband

  1582 Nzinga born, ruling queen of Angola, Endongo and Matamba for over half a century of successful resistance to Portuguese invasion

  All these were ruling women, not consorts. None of them was the only female monarch her country knew in the first half of the second millennium, for most of them came from countries where the tradition of women rulers was well established, indeed growing in political importance. Aelgifu, for instance, followed in a long line of Saxon queens like Bertha (d.616), Eadburgh and Cynethryth (fl. eighth century) and the pivotally significant Aethelflaed:

  Daughter of King Alfred . . . the ‘Lady of the Mercians’ as Aethelflaed was called, rebuilt the fortifications of Chester, [built] new fortified towns of which Warwick and Stafford were the most important, fought in Wales, led her own troops to the capture of Derby, and received the peaceful submission of Leicester. Before her death in June 918, even the people of York had promised to accept her governance.26

  By uniting England and ruling it in her own right, Aethelflaed became one of the few English women who have permanently affected the course of history. Similarly the Empress Zoe of the Byzantines succeeded in
a long line of women who showed no signs of believing themselves rightly subject to men. Her predecessor Irene had seized power in 780, retaining it by blinding and imprisoning her own son. The tenacity and longevity of these women was quite extraordinary – Queen Adelaide outlived five kings of Italy, two of them her husbands. It is not difficult to see how the continuity that such a woman provided could be a political advantage, indeed a necessity enabling her to tighten an already formidable grip.

  Clearly the female monarchs won some advantages for women as a whole during the so-called ‘Age of Queens’. Insistence on women’s inferiority, or on doctrinal warrant for women’s subjection to men, was inevitably undermined by the sight of women on all sides whom God had patently called to the highest earthly office. Their success as rulers, too, would have to be construed as further evidence of divine favour. As a final lesson, the ruling queens taught women and men that no patriarchal systems were monolithic and absolute, but contained cracks and openings through which a confident woman could move to master a decisive moment of personal or national history.

  These women were always the exceptional few, each one an example but hardly a viable model to her less privileged sisters. But in the wider world, events had set in train a slow series of changes whose effect was to ensure that a woman did not have to be a queen to begin to enjoy status in the eyes of men. The cult of courtly love in early modern Europe had begun as a reaction against the patriarchal denigration of the second sex. In defiance of a hostile Church, it elevated women, affirmed the value of romantic not religious passion and glorified sexual relations in which women, not men had the upper hand: