A Double-Edged Sword: Women and Power in the Middle Ages

Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds. Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. 269 pp. ISBN 0-8014-4112-9 (pb).

In 1988 Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski co-edited a volume titled Women and Power in the Middle Ages, a group of essays examining the nature of women's power during a time when popular opinion held that women possessed none. The strength of this volume lay in its recognition that medieval women accessed and wielded power differently from men, as well as in its explorations of the specific contexts in which they did so. Fifteen years later, Erler and Kowaleski have produced a second volume on the topic that makes clear the intervening developments in medieval women's and gender history and provides a fascinating example of approaches to studying women's power in 2003.

What ties together virtually all the essays in this volume is, as Erler and Kowaleski outline clearly in their useful introduction, sensitivity to both the advantages and disadvantages that medieval women faced. In 1988, the emphasis was on the positive, on recovering the access to power that medieval women did enjoy. In 2003, however, the authors here recognize that the same structures and relationships that might have empowered women on the one hand could have subjugated them on the other. Three examples suffice to highlight the way that all the authors in the collection acknowledge this duality. Dyan Elliott's "Women and Confession: From Empowerment to Pathology" argues that the thirteenth-century development of confession as central to women's spirituality empowered some women, who "could make tactical use of confession to achieve certain personal goals" (37). At the same time, this development disenfranchised others by constructing women penitents as sources of temptation to their male confessors. Holly Hurlburt, in "Public Exposure? Consorts and Ritual in Late Medieval Europe: The Example of the Entrance of the Dogaresse of Venice," discusses how the entrance procession of the doge's consort worked both to confirm and to challenge the patriarchal structure of Venetian society. Only married women participated in the procession, and only when chaperoned by men; additionally, the entrance mirrored many of the characteristics of traditional marriage processions. At the same time, however, the dogaresse appeared independently of the doge and, since she was usually past the age of childbearing at her accession, was not associated with fertility in the same way that most medieval European queens and consorts were. Finally, examining churchwardens' accounts in late medieval England, Katherine French finds that women's economic contributions to the upkeep of the parish gave them increased visibility—for example, through the purchasing of seats within the church—at the same time that their roles frequently drew on traditional female duties—for example, laundering and mending the linens associated with the church.

The essay that most explicitly "genders the master narrative," fulfilling the promise of the volume's title, is Jo Ann McNamara's "Women and Power through the Family Revisited." The editors have dedicated the volume to McNamara in recognition of her "pioneering work" and her support of a generation of feminist medieval scholars, and McNamara's essay is an important reexamination of traditional historical periodization. McNamara revises her previous argument that in the absence of strong centralized government in the early Middle Ages aristocratic women gained power through their families, and that this power subsequently declined along with the role of the aristocratic family. Instead, McNamara argues that the entire first millennium was "a time when the sexes collaborated for good or evil more closely than they did in the millennium that followed," (30) pushing the beginning of women's influence within the family back to the Roman period. According to her new argument, this influence declined around the year 1000 because the imposition of celibacy on the clergy created "a womanless space within which men could discourse and...