"Dones que feyan d'homens": The Construction of Gender in the Writing of Medieval Catalan History

"DONES QUE FEYAN D'HOMENS": THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER IN THE WRITING OF MEDIEVAL CATALAN HISTORY Dawn Bratsch-Prince Iowa State University In the fourteenth-century Crown of Aragón, society considered a "good" woman, regardless of social class, to be a silent one who restricted herself to the domestic duties of the home. Once married, a good wife was to be chaste, bear many offspring, educate her children, manage the household, act piously, and uphold the good name of the family in all that she did.1 Equally important was her obligation to serve as peacemaker and alliance builder, both inside and outside of her immediate family, by virtue of "her docility and capacity for submission " to her husband and his kin (Vecchio 109). Women of the nobility had additional expectations to fulfill. On occasions they were "expected to participate in political councils and their advice was often sought and considered in planning familial strategies and alliances" (Lois L. Huneycutt 189). A nobleman's wife was expected to serve as intercessor for those petitioning favors from her husband. By choosing an appropriate woman in marriage, a nobleman sought to ensure the loyalty of his vassals, augment his landed holdings, and polish his foreign policy. In sum, it was widely held that a woman's honor resided in her submission to her male kin, and her physical and verbal chastity. 1 Manv ofthe expectations ofa "good wife" are taken from the biblical model ofSarah in Tobias 10: 12- Ui: "Her parents, after hugging and kissing her, let her go, recommending that she honor her mother- and father-in-law, love her husband, look after the familv , run the house, and behave irreproachably at all times" (Silvina Vecchio 1 05). Sec Bonnie S. Anderson andJudit h P. Zinsser (31-44) for additional examples oftraditional behaviors expected ofwomen. U coros'ica 32.3 (Summer, 2004): 35-47 36Dawn Bratsch-PnnceLa coránica 32.3, 2004 These tenets of normative female behavior, based on an essentialist notion of gender and disseminated dirough popular literature, ecclesiastical institutions, and die law, made it impossible for a woman to act in the realm of official culture, for to speak in the public arena was a man's purview. Likewise, to oppose, rather dian support, the political will of one's male kin was to be transgressive and aberrant. In this essay, I would like to examine the gendered construction of two transgressive women in the pages of medieval Catalan history, Sibilia of Fortià, queen and fourth wife of Peter IV of Aragon, and Violant of Bar, duchess of Girona and wife to the future King John I. Each of diese women participated significandy in the unruly political intrigue that came to characterize the Crown of Aragon in the last quarter of the fourteenth century. To be sure, neither Sibilia nor Violant fulfilled the behavioral expectations of the submissive wive, for both were ambitious and unafraid to use their positions of influence to target personal social and economic goals. Their unorthodox behavior, nevertheless, has to be reconciled with die traditional narrative structures available for writing women into history, namely the typologies ofthe good mother, the bad wife, die enchantress, the saindy Griselda, etc. Insofar as modern historians (e.g., Salvador Sanpere i Miquel, Josep M. Roca, E.L. Mirón, Ferrán Soldevila, Rafael Olivar Bertrand, Rafael Tasis i Marca, Alberto Bóscolo, Thomas N. Bisson, and Carme Badie) have written diese women into their narratives, they have done so in specifically gendered ways, channeling the complex and untidy stories of these women's lives into stereotypical structures of female behavior. Uncritical, perhaps even unaware, of their biases, traditional historians have presented as "natural" and essential the gendered roles acted out by these women, eschewing the "conflict, ambiguity and tragedy" (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese 1982, 28 cited in Gayle Greene and Coppèlla Kahn 21) so central to the historical process , and ultimately robbing them of any historical agency. A Tale ofTwo Marriages In 1375, shortly after the death of Peter IVs third wife, Eleanor of Sicily, the fifty-six year old monarch took as his mistress a young widow of die lesser nobility of Ampuries, Sibilia of...