#'oh he was a medievalist' yea he was drawing from medieval literature. you know. where there is often artifice. famously he knew about that

[gothprentiss]

there's a post i've seen maybe twice that's got i think at this point 20k notes. it's about how, like, fictional depictions of medieval women Get It All Wrong (true); how our notions of medieval misogyny are relics of the victorian age, not historical reality (eh??); how class is a more realistic way of understanding premodern womanhood than gender (to some extent!); and here are some ways you might consider writing medieval women, e.g. "tip #2: remember that for medieval women, wife and mother wasn’t the ideal, virgin saint was the ideal. By proving yourself “not like other girls” you could gain significant autonomy & freedom".

the idea that victorian people had particular essentialist ideas about the genders (e.g. the angel-in-the-house-style separate spheres philosophy) and either a) medieval people didn't, not to that extent or in that mode OR b) that has overdetermined our notion of what all the past looks like strikes me as more of a starting point than a conclusion.

like, okay, the idea that there was a singular ideal for women (and that it's virgin saint, lol), even just women in a particular period in a particular area of the medieval christian world-- that does run so categorically against the idea that class is more explanatory than gender here. what you might say, though, is that you can extrapolate this as the sole ideal for women from the historical record (i don't think you can, but let's play) as a result of class and social position. christine de pizan was a court scholar for numerous members of the french royal family. most of the writings that survive of medieval christian women are the products of either noblewomen or nuns. but second of all-- you can't say that the virgin saint was the female archetype rather than the mother or the wife. the virgin saint is literally both of those things: she figures the virgin mary, whose virginity is important because of her maternity; she figures the church, which is allegorically the bride of christ. it's also worth noting, of course, that the virgin saint (i.e. the nun, presumably?) is not the same sort of ideal as the wife or the mother in any material way.

all of this is emblematic about how much of the historical record works and is made to work. in terms of real, factual women who were either able to write at great length or written about with any interest, you have the inevitable upper-class bias, as the post tacitly notes: "Often as nuns, saints, mystics; sometimes as warriors, queens, & ladies; always as businesswomen & merchants, women could & did forge their own paths in life" (odd groupings). in drawing in literary sources, as studies of medieval womanhood always do, you have the additional problem of fabulation, which you are trying to read a theory of womanhood or at least an account of gender roles out of. (medievalists, due to the size and conservatism of the field, are also notably not very good readers when it comes to gender.) e.g. the post cites a thesis which is, as i am looking at it now, significantly about the roman de silence (reading it out of the context of hagiography and alongside the roman d'eneas). the desire for fiction to work as historical record is common in medievalism (really in all premodernism), and understandable, and has some foundation. it is rare to see this foundation meaningfully established in this work.

the other problem you have for the concept of medieval women-- whether you just want to, like, depict one, or have some baseline understanding of what their lives were like, or do them justice-- is the privileging of the individual and the outlier. "women could do this in the middle ages" is often a sentence backed up with, like, five truly good examples, one of them legendary. the desire for a history of empowered women gives you a certain kind of returns; the expectation of a history of misogyny gives you a certain kind of returns. this sort of "THIS IS HOW MEDIEVAL* WOMEN REALLY WERE (*LIMITED TO A SPECIFIC SETTING, AREA OF INTEREST, ETC.)" trumpeting is naturally not about all women of that particular context, and to do so-- beyond the really quite blunt-headed approach to the dynamism of both gender and misogyny-- strikes me as a great disservice to this object of study, delimiting womanhood to solely that of the wealthy and, by that same token, empowered. if nothing else it's certainly telling about the state of gender scholarship in pop medieval history (if not also medieval studies) that feminist interventions get you to about the mainstream scholarly feminism of the 80s, where gilbert and gubar write a whole book named for bertha mason that is only really interested in jane eyre.

#i got like no sleep so i have no filter. sorry or whatever #this post drives me INSANE.... you can't use tolkien as your best example of the medieval status of women #'oh he was a medievalist' yea he was drawing from medieval literature. you know. where there is often artifice. famously he knew about that #imo if you assume that misogyny is not a dynamic ideology your feminist historiography will inevitably suffer