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Children in the Middle Ages

Today I read this post on Medievalists.net debunking certain common myths about the Middle Ages (the one about tomatoes being poisonous was a new one for me), and it got me thinking about another common myth that I hear all the time: people in the Middle Ages didn’t love their children.

This reminded me of a paper I wrote a few years ago tracing the concept of childhood through time (however, for the purposes of the class I was in, it did not extend back beyond the 16th century). Out of curiosity I spent a little time today looking at different sources where children were mentioned in medieval writing to briefly outline the ways they were viewed (and I am purposely not looking at other representations via other forms of art, even though I am sure they would produce a bevy of marvelous sources).

I actually began by looking at Philippe Aries’ theory of childhood (since he pretty much started it all) and then Nicholas Orme who counters Aries’ argument almost to a point of literary attack. Orme (among others) believes Aries argued that children didn’t exist. Of course they existed. He simply postulated that it wasn’t until the mid seventeenth century that children, and by extension childhood, were seen as they are now. In other words, the idea that children are fragile, innocent beings in need of coddling and extreme protection is a modern convention. While he may have overstepped in his analysis when stating that children did not at one point in history receive love from their parents, he never outright stated this as can be seen from the very first page of his book, and his overall argument for the most part relied on the treatment of children and not the emotional implications of having them. I think this is the key to correcting the myth about parents’ lack of love for their children in the Middle Ages – it was not that they loved their children any less than they do now, but it was simply not exhibited in the same ways.

children

(A child is depicted in the Massacre of the Innocents in the middle, and at the bottom three boys are playing a board game. It is the bottom picture that is of interest – children taking part in what would appear to be normal childhood activities. MS Ludwig IX 2).

Children were sent off for apprenticeships or marriage at young ages, but for the most part, even if only through letters, they maintained contact with their parents who inquired frequently about their well being and at times even took action to rectify wrongs against their children. When conducting some unrelated research on the Yeoman in the Canterbury Tales I came across an article describing the relationship between the Yeoman and the Knight and Squire. Despite the title of the work (see below in Sources), the article is mainly concerned with the father/son relationship between the Knight and Squire, attesting to the unusual nature of a kin pairing at a time when most young men were sent off to fulfill their service under the tutelage of another. Basically children left the home at a very young age, and when they didn’t, their roles in the home would in modern times be regarded in a negative light, feeding the notion that children were either unimportant, unloved, and even abused. Yes, children would play (see above), their imaginations would get the best of them (considering the amount of medieval toys and infant instruments that we have catalogued), but they were also expected to fulfill certain roles that extended beyond keeping their rooms neat and picking up their things. No one had time for fantasy when there was water to be brought, bread to be made, wood to be cut, laundry to be beaten, and numerous other chores. However, delegating responsibilities earlier in the life of a child than is common today does not denote lack of love or emotional investment.

Another contributing factor to this myth is the shortage of children depicted in manuscripts. Aside from those of notable birth, few babies or small children can be seen gracing medieval manuscripts in illumination or text. A few have argued that this is due to the high infant mortality rates, meaning parents did not want to become attached to a child they could potentially lose. However, records indicate that many parents went to great lengths to save their children when possible, and R. Finucane shows evidence of parents going on pilgrimages to pray for their ill children or severely grieving their loss.

children1

(Although this is the baby Jesus, and not a “common” child, the interesting part of this portrait is the baby walker being depicted. Not to mention this picture comes from an entire manuscript filled with domestic scenes that most of us would recognize today. Hours of Catherine.)

I also noticed a few pieces discussing the more natural order of infancy and motherhood, namely in regards to nursing a baby – a debate that continues well in our day. Le Chanson du Chevalier du Cygne et du Godefroid du Bouillon touches this subject in depth. 

children2

(Nature forging a baby. British Library, Harley 4425.)

 

Haggadah

(From the Golden Haggadah. A family portrait as everyone, including children, partakes in different chores).

This is a very brief discussion, but for more information (and a lot more manuscript pictures) go here, and/or see my direct sources. Enjoy!

 

Sources

Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood.

Crawford, Sally. Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England.

deMause, Lloyd. The History of Childhood: the evolution of parent-child relationships as a factor in history.

Finucane, Ronald. The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles.

Hanawalt, Barbara. Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History.

Orme, Nicholas. Medieval Children.

Scala, Elizabeth. “Yeoman Services: Chaucer’s Knight, His Critics, and the Pleasure of Historicism”

Shahar, Shulamith. Childhood in the Middle Ages.

The Female Scribe

My research interests have always been on the process of writing, and I am generally concerned with how the manuscripts we have, have come into existence (scribal authority, authorship in general, codicology, paleography, etc). A more or less recent development in manuscript studies has been scribal identification, while scholars trace their contributions to different manuscripts and make predictions about their lives in order to better attribute intentions to their emendations. However, something that I had not encountered, and for whatever reason hadn’t considered was the idea of the female scribe.

I began earnestly looking at women as manuscript creators oddly enough after someone on Twitter posted this picture from the Trinity College Cambridge collection:

annunciation

He asked what the instrument on the table next to Mary was. Honestly I had no idea, I was very tired, and I jokingly replied “a slingshot?” (it really does look like one, and as I have said before, after I reach a certain point of exhaustion I probably should have the Internet taken away from me). Several other people replied with actual answers, and as it turns out, it is a pen case with an inkwell. As that question was answered, another one emerged: why does Mary have writing instruments? I have never seen her depicted with them, and the majority of Marian depictions, even of the Annunciation do not include these.

Here is another similar picture from a Book of Hours that was painted in a Paris workshop circa 1412 and currently resides in a private collection in Japan:

annunciation1

There are no writing instruments anywhere near Mary. However, I have on very few occasions really studied female interactions with books in the Middle Ages outside of seeing images of them reading, with few notable exceptions including  Margery Kempe, Marie de France, Christina of Markyate, Christine de Pizan, and Anna Bijins (but for my purposes here I am not referring to the ones who have become common knowledge). I was very much under the impression that these women were rarities, and that writing somehow had only belonged to men (and not because I ever thought women were illiterate, but simply because I assumed it was something they didn’t do regularly).

pisan

(Christine de Pizan. Harley MS 4431)

To clarify further, I am not looking at what are now referred to as famous female authors of the medieval period such as Hildegard of Bingen (see below), but rather scribes, practically anonymous, yet doing works comparable to those done by men and providing us not with manuscripts they wrote, but rather that they copied. The importance here lies with my understanding of how scribes operated. Despite the numerous jokes of scribes being the medieval equivalent of Xerox machines (also see below), they had considerable control over their respective texts. While authorship is of great concern to me, it is intricately tied in with scribal activity. There are times when I will make arguments that scribes could not have altered a certain text (an argument I will be presenting later this year in October on an unrelated topic), while in regards to other manuscripts I will argue that it was most certainly scribal hands that altered the piece (which I will also be presenting in January of next year on another unrelated topic). In short, there is no clear cut answer to what scribes have or have not done. Nevertheless, scribes played a significant role within manuscript creation: they corrected simple errors; performed the medieval equivalent of fact checking; edited; provided incipits, explicits, and marginalia; and created or recreated material out of either necessity or preference. So while I have been aware of female authors of the medieval period, it was the purely scribal enterprise that has remained rather murky for me since I had not previously heard of women doing any of the above.

hildegard

(Hildegard von Bingen receiving a vision which she writes down – depicted within Scivias)

xerox machine

 

(an example of the joke of a scribe as nothing more than a glorified Xerox machine – while this is a pretty funny cartoon, it is not entirely accurate)

Since a large part of manuscripts were written in monasteries, I began looking at how (and if) the Rule of Saint Benedict applied to convents. Even though the rule does not overtly prescribe manuscript creation in the monasteries, it is implied that it would be one of the works monks performed, and was interpreted as such during the Middle Ages. Monasteries were of three kinds: all male, all female, or mixed. The all male and mixed types regularly had scriptoriums and/or libraries for reading and manuscript making. However, the all female convents often lacked the funding or space for scriptoriums (even though they did have libraries of various sizes – beginning in the fifth century all nuns were required to be able to read and devote at least two hours a day to religious study). Yet it must be noted that since the convents lacked the funds of all male monasteries, it can be inferred that the nuns had little choice but to copy their own books.

aberdeen

(The Burnet Psalter, University of Aberdeen, MS 25)

There are strands of scholarship that believe the differences between male and female handwriting can be discerned, and various assumptions about predominantly female writing have been made, with the idea of making it easier to identify those texts written by women.  Supposedly, if one were to believe these theories, women have more careful, dainty, and slanted writing. Honestly I don’t believe this, and have found most conjectures about female writing are based more on attributes associated with women in general rather than their writing, and seem to have no basis on paleographic evidence.

Not to mention, some female scribes were illuminators, such as Thomase from France in 1313, which complicates the matter of tracing their work, even if only slightly. In this case handwriting is no longer the determining factor, but rather artistic style that often depended on where they were taught, and/or (if any) atelier where they worked. Several illuminators, male and female, could have used identical styles with only slight variances, making it rather difficult to discern who worked on what outside of personal signatures or subtle indications.

Another part of the problem was that so few scribes (male or female) signed their names to their works, and even when colophons were included, they were often ambiguous. However, there are a few instances where this is not the case. One of the earliest known scribes to indicate a name happens to be a woman, Irmingart, in the twelfth century. Another instance I found was of Mechtilde of Diessen. While there are numerous mentions of her genealogy and her performance of miracles, only one mention of her writing exists.

Not all manuscripts worked on by females, however, originated in the church, or had religious affiliations. This is yet another example I found:

roman

roman1

The second picture reads: “The lower margin of a mid-fourteenth century Roman de la Rose shows a man and a woman sitting at separate desks writing out and illuminating the manuscript with little racks behind them on which the newly made pages are hanging up to dry. These may well be self portraits of the husband and wife team of booksellers in Paris, Richard and Jeanne de Montbaston.”

An additional husband and wife team of scribes created one Book of Hours of the Use of Besancon around 1410. The scribe Alan signed the manuscript and stated that his wife provided the illuminations (Paris, Bibliotheque National, MS Lat. 1169). I am unable to find pictures of this manuscript to verify this, but from what I am gathering, the illuminations, and manuscript as a whole was of inferior quality and most likely intended for private use by the family.

Another study I found I do not have full access to so I can’t really comment on, but it seems very interesting, outlining the role of female scribes during the editing process of Dutch “father confessor sermons,” that were apparently completely handed off to these women to copy, and who consequently took some liberties with the texts.

Personally, the most fascinating instance of female scribal activity (and one that I would love to look further into for a later project) is the earliest dated Lancelot manuscript from 1274 (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale MS fr. 342).  The scribe’s identity remains unknown, and the manuscript ends with a normal enough request that the reader pray for the scribe, but it reads “pries pour ce li ki lescrist,” and “ce li” is a feminine pronoun. This may well end up being another one of my dead end research projects as I have already exhausted my university’s resources with no more luck than two sources that provide little more information that what I have stated in this paragraph. I am going to have to do some backtracking and find other manuscripts written around the same time and place and begin comparisons, which of course this means I am going to have to rely solely on digitized manuscripts. In all honesty I am not sure how feasible this will be at this point, especially since I am actually supposed to be conducting other research right now. But I am pretty sure if I keep at it I can get it done within the next year (Hopefully!).

As can be seen, this is still a preliminary exploration of the role women played within the scribal community. Even as I find instances of their activities there is yet more to be found on the extent to which they participate within the complicated editing process of their respective manuscripts. In the meantime, I hope this helps someone somewhere.

Sources:

Backhouse, Jane. The Illuminated Manuscript.

Beach, Alison. Women as Scribes: Book Production and Monastic Reform in Twelfth Century Bavaria.

Brown, Michelle. “Female Book-Ownership and Production in Anglo-Saxon England: the Evidence of the Ninth-Century Prayerbooks.”

De Hamel, Christopher. Scribes an Illuminators.

— A History of Illuminated Manuscripts.

Fisher, Matthew. Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England.

Hamburger, Jeffrey. Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent.

Havice, Christine. “Approaching Medieval Women Through Medieval Art.”

McGrath, Robert L. “A Newly Discovered Manuscript of Chretien de Troyes’ Yvain and Lancelot in the Princeton University Library.”

McKitterick, Rosamond. “Women and Literacy in the Early Middle Ages.”

Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

Putnam, G.H. Books and Their Makers in the Middle Ages.

Smith, Julia. “Gender and Ideology in the Early Middle Ages.”

Wilson, Katherina and Nadia Margolis. “Scribes and Scriptoria (c. 400-1500).”

A Collection of Motives and Characters

pinter

I am going to be teaching Harold Pinter’s The Collection which is essentially a mystery play concerned with Stella’s infidelity and James’ seeming attempt to embark on a quest for truth. Note, his attempt is “seeming.” I want to explore the ways in which James is as much a fabricator of the truth as Stella, and paradoxically, neither of them function in ways one would assume.

In the play the two characters who would in fact know if Stella was unfaithful, Bill and Stella herself, seem to find it necessary to avoid acknowledging it one way or another. When they negate having an affair, it is deemed almost normal. What else would they say? Yet, at times, they actually admit to it, to the audience, and to James. This makes the whole business rather ambiguous. The act itself is never dramatized, and even the majority of Stella’s confessions are related to the audience second hand, through James.

The alleged confessions prompt James to contact Bill to verify Stella’s story. However, the need for verification insinuates that James might not fully believe Stella and needs confirmation. Think about this for a second. James’ wife just told him she had an affair, and he doesn’t believe her.

Bill believes women are “bound to have an outburst of… wild sensuality at one time or another… it is part of their nature.” The two men continue their conversation and it becomes clear that neither care whether or not Bill and Stella were together, but rather the fact that Stella could do it. And both agree that, yes, she could. But did she?

So, being left with the impression that Stella is intrinsically sexually sinful it would seem that James would attempt to prove Stella’s innocence, but the play reveals his most obsessive need to verify her guilt. In James’ first encounter with Bill, James insists upon the affair, refusing to believe it never happened. While Bill at first appears genuinely confused it brings the audience to question whether Stella’s earlier alleged confession did ever occur, of it was influenced by James’ need for it.

Also, I suppose now would be a good time to point out that at no time during the play does James want to leave Stella for her infidelity. He simply wants to believe it happened, making the whole thing even more bizarre. Why?

At this point Stella confesses to Harry (Bill’s partner) that she never slept with Bill, and even more noteworthy, that she never confessed anything of the sort to James. According to Stella, James “dreamed up such a fantastic story, for no reason at all.” There is always a reason, and the main question now shifts from whether the infidelity occurred to why James would want to portray his wife as a whore. However, this question would mean that “wife” and “whore” are direct opposites and that is exactly what James believes when he says to Bill “when you treat my wife like a whore, then I think I’m entitled to know what you’ve got to say about it.” What James inadvertently implies in this statement is that a wife can also be a whore and the two are not mutually exclusive, and he seems genuinely frightened by this. Yet, when given the option to separate the two, he continues insisting upon Stella’s infidelity.

There is also a lack of knowledge on the part of the audience and the characters. Aside from the obvious question, several more come up. Bill’s question to James “do you know her well?” echoed later by Harry’s observation “women are very strange. But I suppose you know more about that than I do; she’s your wife” depicts this disruption of knowledge that is created by the idea of adultery. By collapsing the idea of “wife” and “whore” into one existence, knowledge, or the perception of what is known, is lost. It becomes apparent that engaging in a marriage, or any intimate relationship, is not equivocal to knowing the other person. Intentions or acts outside the immediate relationship are always ambiguous. Actually, intentions and acts even within the relationship can be just as perplexing.

The act of adultery in the play is no longer important, but rather stands in for the gap in knowledge that the characters experience. They could, in theory, be fighting over whether or not Stella drank the last of the milk for all anyone cares. James wasn’t home, he returns, and there is no milk. Stella says she didn’t drink it, then changes her mind and says she did, and next thing you know James is outside riffling through the trash for empty milk cartons. And once he finds one she can contest whether she put it there or not.

Basically it all becomes reduced to a battle for control.

The play as a whole insists on Stella’s guilt. Even the version of Stella and Bill having only talked about committing adultery is considered just as negative as the actual deed since it may occur again. Her motives for having committed adultery, or confessing an adultery which may or may not have occurred, seem to be merely because she can. Ironically, the very thing James tries to use to assert his dominance is what gives Stella her power. In making her into a whore to suit his own purposes (whatever they may be), he demonstrates Stella’s dominance over him.

If she did actually confess to James and did so only to manipulate him, all his actions following the confession were due to her. If the confession did not happen, then James’ demand for its occurrence denotes her threatening actions that forced *him* to act, and in either scenario she is the one really in control of the relationship.

In an attempt to regain control, James tries to reduce Stella’s voice. As he reiterates her confession to Bill he is in fact speaking for her, if not blatantly placing words in her mouth. There are times when his statements send her into silence, and even tears. However, her silence at the end, at the exact moment when James’ need for dominance demands she speak, is her refusal to accept the burden of enclosure. Her silence forces the audience to reevaluate her relative silence throughout the play. An imposed silence may place her in the role of subordination, but in the final moments of the play it becomes clear that silence and subordination may not always be equated. Her passivity engenders empowerment since she actively and deliberately assumes it, essentially mocking James’s authority; it is not because of him that she is silent, it is her own doing.

Although Bill seems to have a negative view of woman-nature, he is asserting his authority in very much the same way as Stella. He plays the feminine role in his relationship with Harry, and thus he is also subject to similar ideals. By changing his story so often he is in fact playing with, and manipulating the other characters, perhaps for his own amusement. His motives seem to be even more ambiguous than Stella’s.

Stella is not the only one who in reality knows what happened, if anything. Bill was either there or not, so Bill’s motives for withholding the truth are his way of empowering himself against Harry and James.

Simultaneously, the same type of battle of control occurs between Bill and Harry.

Harry at first tries to make Stella into an adulteress in his confrontation with her to demonstrate Bill’s putrid nature in the seduction, only to reduce him, which empowers Harry. Harry must do so because he feels threatened by Bill’s infidelity, not with Stella, but what it signifies as a liaison with James. As with James, Harry’s demand for the affair only works against him. In trying to use the affair to reduce Bill, he is giving life to a sexual interaction between Bill and Stella which inadvertently means that by sharing Stella, Bill and James are brought together to forge a different type of relationship; Stella brings James and Bill together, not just by potentially sharing her, but within physical proximity when they meet. James immediately takes the dominant role within this relationship and thus replaces Harry when he progresses from intruder to guest in Bill and Harry’s home. Had he maintained the role of intruder, Harry would, ironically, have had less of a reaction, continuing to view James as an outsider.

In the end both James and Harry are forced to believe the final narrative told by Bill of what really happened at Leeds the night of the alleged adultery, and that is, that it never happened. However, the truth is never discovered, and the audience is left with the same ambiguity about the infidelity as in the opening scenes. Bill’s story at this point is as good as Stella’s previous one, and neither really answer the question. The characters have no choice but to believe what each one feels is most beneficial to the preservation of their current relationships. The even larger question of why each character had several different scenarios throughout the play is never revealed. Again, each offers their own reasons, but considering their narrative skills thus far, it is doubtful that they are now stating their true feelings on the matter. Yet even though motives can be abundant, true intentions are never known, or understood, clearly demonstrating the human condition of unknowing the other. And in this case, unknowing the self. Can it be argued that these characters even know their own intentions? Do they really understand why they chose to believe in the end? And what about Stella? After Bill’s last narrative she is not heard from again. Would she refute it, bringing the whole play right back to the beginning?

Is the end of the play really the end? Or has it simply just come full circle?