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Those inclined to see our era as a feminist golden age will find a timely corrective in “The Once and Future Sex,” medieval historian Eleanor Janega’s accessible and entertaining study of how women were viewed in medieval society. In surprisingly essential ways little has changed between then and now. Though medieval women undoubtedly had it worse (lacking the benefits, Ms. Janega wryly notes, of birth control, legal equity and Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five”), there are depressing areas of overlap.
Most medieval thinking about women, she points out, was “written by men, for men, based on readings of work by men.” From Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, the male body was considered the human prototype; the female body, with its internal genitalia, simply an inversion of it. Not only were women inside-out men, but in the medieval theory of bodily “humors,” men were sanguine, rational, hot and dry, while women were phlegmatic, lascivious, cold and moist. Eager to be warmed up by sexual contact, they were forever trying to lure the poor rational male into fornication (the current idea that women have a lower sex drive than men would have been news to Aquinas).
Viewing the female body through a medieval lens instantly exposes how transitory, not to say absurd, all such androcentric ideas are. While modern western culture is fixated on large breasts and tiny waists, in the Middle Ages, Ms. Janega reveals, the ideal woman had small breasts and a pot belly. Unlike the sages of today’s diet industry, “medieval writers were emphatic that they in no way favored women skipping lunch.” For a long time, bushy eyebrows were in—think of the 11th and 12th centuries as an extended 1980s, eyebrow-wise—but then went out of fashion thanks to the French scholar Matthew of Vendôme, whose popular work “Ars Versificatoria” (“The Art of the Versemaker”) contained a master class in how to describe a beautiful woman. Matthew raved about this uber-hottie’s red cheeks and the “white and clear” space between her eyebrows where “the separated arches do not allow the hairs to run rampant.” Soon, everyone had ditched the monobrow in favor of rouging and plucking.
Depilation and cosmetics were anathema to the medieval theological mind because they were used to seduce the unwitting male through trickery. And what if a man engaged a sex worker in good faith, only to discover later that she had used makeup? Ms. Janega explains that for 12th-century ethicists a woman using cosmetics was “essentially selling falsified goods and should have to return any money that she had received for sex.”
In passing, Ms. Janega demolishes modern “scientific” studies telling us that the human male is programmed by evolution to prefer a certain “waist-to-hip ratio” as a clue to a woman’s reproductive potential. If these preferences are driven by evolution, she wonders, why are our current ideas of beauty so different from medieval ones, and so changeable? Her sensible conclusion: “Justifying social beauty norms through scientific means is as much a social construction as Matthew of Vendôme’s effort was, and we can pay them exactly as much heed.”
What about the female mind? A medieval woman’s best chance of getting an education was to join the religious life. The works of the Benedictine abbess, composer, and medical practitioner Hildegard of Bingen are noteworthy not just because of their brilliance but because surviving manuscripts by women are so rare. Ms. Janega doesn’t cite Hildegard’s tart reminder that “woman may be made from man, but no man can be made without a woman,” though she does mention that this polymath published her own recipe for a barley-water face cleanser that would give your complexion “a beautiful color.” If founding the Germanic school of natural philosophy didn’t get you a pass from tedious beauty regimes, nothing could.
We treat the working woman as a recent innovation, yet in a pre-industrial age, Ms. Janega observes, women “worked and indeed expected to work,” and not just at never-ending domestic tasks such as cleaning and repairing the family home, making and mending and washing clothing, and bearing and tending to children. They labored, often in self-sufficient religious houses, at baking, ploughing, harvesting and brewing. In urban areas women mastered skilled crafts such as textile weaving and the making of stained glass.
The misconception that medieval women didn’t work stems from the age’s understanding of women “less as individuals than as commodities,” whose labor—productive and reproductive—was typically subsumed within the collective of the family, church, farm or guild. “The idea that a woman would need to be credited for being a worker in her own right was alien to medieval people,” because women, those flawed versions of the male, “didn’t necessarily exist in their own right.”
While some of these constructs have shifted, modern society continues, often insidiously, to treat women as ancillary to men. We persist in attaching inordinate importance to how women look; in seeing women’s relationship to sex as problematic, women’s domestic labor as valueless, and women’s bodies as divergent from a male norm. Not only is the female body underrepresented in medical data gathering, but discredited neurosexist theories such as Simon Baron-Cohen’s in “The Essential Difference” (2003) are still sometimes cited as evidence of the existence of a “female brain.” Ms. Janega’s witty but merciless dissection of medieval misogyny is a welcome challenge to us to stop recycling the same old prejudices.
Ms. Lowry is the author of the novels “The Bellini Madonna,” “Dark Water” and “The Chosen.”
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发表于 2-18-2023 13:11:41
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