Young and Single in the Middle Ages

Katherine J. Lewis, Noël James Menuge, and Kim M. Phillips, eds. Young Medieval Women. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. xx + 202 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-312-22130-4 (cl).

Medieval society categorized women as maids, wives, or widows--titles that revolved around a woman's age and marital status. While the second and third categories have received much scholarly attention, there remains a great deal of ignorance about the lives of single and young women. Young Medieval Women explores the meaning of the category of maid. The editors of this collection define maidenhood as the time of a woman's life between menarche and marriage. This concept is especially intriguing in the context of northern Europe where most women did not marry until their early twenties, as opposed to women in southern Europe who married at the onset of menarche. Northern European women, therefore, spent significant portions of their lives young and single, and many worked outside their homes.

This books contributes to two fields: women's history and the study of youth. As the editors argue, one major innovation in women's history since the 1980s is the awareness "of certain groups of women, and the recognition of the differences in identity between one group and another" (ix). With this in mind, the contributors explore some experiences of and cultural attitudes toward young women in the Middle Ages. By studying youth, this collection provides further evidence that, in the Middle Ages, childhood and youth were separate stages of development. Female children and youths were not "little adults" as some earlier scholars have posited, a claim that is often repeated by nonmedievalist scholars and nonhistorians.

It is commonplace to say that medieval sources are scarce, and those dealing with women especially so. The study of young women is no exception, yet the authors in this collection have the advantage of a new subject. They turn fresh eyes to documentary, literary, and visual sources which have a long tradition of scholarship to make explicit young women's lives, their place in society, and attitudes toward this period in the life cycle. To create a broader context for investigation, the contributors employ an interdisciplinary approach. The editors ask, "Do the depictions of young women to be found in a variety of literary and visual sources reflect or distort the actual experiences of young women as revealed in documentary sources?" (xiii). Addressing this question, the contributors offer not only new information but also interesting methodologies.

The collection opens with Kim Phillips's article, "Maidenhood as the Perfect Age of Woman's Life." Phillips explores what maidenhood is and how it fits in with the medieval discussion of the "Ages of Man." Discussions of the human life cycle and the relative merits and faults of each stage was a common theme in medieval writing, but it was one that talked almost exclusively in terms of men's lives. Looking at women saints' lives, Phillips argues that maidenhood was the perfect age of a woman's life. It was at this point that most women saints suffered martyrdom and became saints. This essay sets the theoretical underpinnings for the entire book by showing that maidenhood was a highly valued stage in a woman's life.

With the exception of two essays, this collection deals with some aspect of maidenhood in medieval England, although several authors seek to situate England in the larger culture of northern Europe. Kristina Gourlay looks at representations of young women's sexual power over men in the fourteenth-century Malterer Embroidery from Freiburg. This lengthy piece of embroidery contains scenes from four famous love stories in which young women get the best of men, such as Phyllis riding Aristotle like a horse or Delilah cutting Samson's hair. Yet the embroidery also includes scenes from Ywain and the Lion, a romantic legend about one of King Arthur's knights of the Round...