40 over 40: Medieval Women Edition
In a culture that celebrates youth while marginalizing those that age, let us intentionally make space for the indispensability of the knowledge possessed by those lucky enough to grow old—after all, isn’t that what we as humans are meant to do?
Since this is the month of 30 under 30, I present to you—40 over 40: Medieval Women Edition, a patriarchy-confronting zine to close out the year. (Though some of these women are just within their 40s, the reality of the medieval world was one of a shorter average lifespan.) Cheers to every woman growing in power, then and now.
40 over 40: Medieval Women Edition
In Jacqueline Felice de Almania’s world, the month of August was one of harvest. Relying heavily on the remedies Nature provided alongside the demands of any domestic space, wheat and herbs would have filled Jacqueline’s senses—tired fingers from sorting grain, the crinkling of dried herbs finding more permanent homes within clinking containers, sharp tinctures wrinkling nose-flesh. In France, where Jacqueline found herself in 1322, grapes would be harvested the very next month, the extensive drying time occupying the region’s collective conscious as much as their tabletops.1
However, this scene of domestic tranquility was far from reality for Jacqueline.2 Instead, on August 11th 1322, Jacqueline was forced into court by a group of university trained doctors—men, of course—on accusations so steep they threatened excommunication. Jacqueline’s accused crime?
in brevi:
Challenging the idea of patriarchal authority alongside challenging the monopoly of the practice of medicine by men.
ad nauseam:
Practicing medicine without a university degree, nor any sort of license, and being audacious enough to charge a fee for such services. Jacqueline “visited many sick people suffering from serious illness…examining their urine both jointly and separately, taking their pulse, feeling, palpating and holding their bodies and limbs.” Jacqueline also made “an agreement with them to cure them” by providing them “syrups to drink, pain relievers, laxatives and digestives, both liquid and non-liquid, as well as aromatic, and other potions.”3
Paris of the 1320’s was home to some 200,000 souls, with only 84 of those souls having a degree to practice medicine.4 In roughly 30 years time, the Black Death would creep into Paris for its inaugural visit, revealing just how devastatingly low this number of trained physicians was in any real time of need. Your odds of seeing a doctor? 2000(ish) to 1, and that is if you could afford the services rendered. Needless to say, most weren’t getting cared for by university trained physicians.5
But before the plague caught the Parisian physician’s with their pants around their ankles, the learned men were adamant about securing their privileges by fiercely litigating anyone that practiced medicine without a university degree.6 As women were restricted from those very same universities, this meant any woman practicing any degree of healing was at risk of persecution, which could result in a penalty in the form of a fine, excommunication, or—in an extreme case with multiple offenses—death.7
Though it would be a couple centuries before the fervor of the witch-hunt would take hold of Europe, court cases such as this set a dangerous precedent for women in a multitude of ways. First, it set to establish a correlation between obtaining a university degree with the ability to posses effective knowledge of healing, which efficiently removed women from the category of persons educated enough to heal. (This completely disregarded the reality that those same physicians relied heavily on midwives within their everyday work, and had for centuries.) It also set to establish a hierarchy within the highly privileged and gate-kept medical field, ensuring that a patriarch would be positioned as the authority of the Body.8 A secular boon to man’s dominion on the spiritual realm.
I think it important to stop and note here that regardless of their lived reality—regardless that men heavily relied on women as healers within and without the house, continuing to do so long after any related contemporary court cases—creating intentional documentation at the clerical level ensured the Patriarchy would possess complete control over the narrative, allowing it to be manipulated in any way deemed necessary, both then and in the future. As Luis García-Ballester rightly argues within “Documenting Medieval Women’s Medical Practice,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, our inherited androcentricism has limited our ability to rightly perceive the past. “Another, more profound limitation lies not in the data but in our methodology: the very criteria we use for identifying practitioners themselves preclude documentation of women's medical practice.”
Patriarchal histories would lead us to believe that the uniqueness of Jacqueline’s case lies within her gender—the anachronistically placed misogyny relying heavily on the biases imposed through hundreds of years of anti-feminine literature. When in fact, the singularity of this case lies within the extensive documentation and willingness to identify Jacqueline both as a medical practitioner and as a subject acting with agency and intent within the andro-controlled chronicles.
It is for this exact reason Jacqueline’s fate was likely predetermined: she needed to be reminded of her place within patriarchal society regardless of the skills she possessed or the immense need those skills were able to meet within the shortcomings of that very same patriarchal society. For within the rules of Patriarchy, women are always the object.9
We possess multitudes
Within Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins offers evidence to the inevitability of harm binary thinking imposes upon our lived reality: “In binary thinking, one element is objectified as the Other, and is viewed as an object to be manipulated or controlled…white/black, male/female, reason/emotion, culture/nature, fact/opinion, mind/body, subject/object.” One need not look far within our patriarchal presence to identify how this has manifested itself within the modern world. Though we like to think ourselves far removed from medieval mentalities, this strict adherence to the and/or was forged of antiquity and made perfect by the medieval church, we are but explicit inheritors.
Two thousand three hundred some-odd years ago a man named Aristotle disseminated a lecture titled Politics. Aristotle argued that a culture of Patriarchy is a necessity of the human condition—not just the ideal, but the inevitable. The issued lecture argued the prerequisite of both women’s subjugation and subjectivity, as a hierarchical structure was the only natural outcome to compensate for women’s less rational, more emotional minds.10 Aristotle posited that man holding dominion over woman, husband over wife, was the ideal formation of community. This very treaty—one in which it is argued that women are inherently lesser than and only seen necessary to render men free of domestic duties while passively providing progeny—formed the foundation for the modern day practice of national government, and we couldn’t even come up with a different name.
In this antiquarian binary, which was then reaffirmed in the medieval west by a culture that placed ultimate authority within institutions idolizing the father, son, and an androcentric holy spirit, women were firmly affixed to each inferior side of the binary.11 If men claimed dominion over reason, culture, mind, and authority, it follows (in binary thinking, and only in binary thinking) that women, the not-man, occupy the remaining spaces of emotion, nature, body, and opinion—all of which could be possessed and manipulated.12
As the name suggests, within Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black bell hooks argues for those that have been subjugated into an objectified existence to challenge the idea of an authoritative voice. She writes “as subjects, people have the right to define their own reality, establish their own identities, name their history. As objects, one’s reality is defined by others, one’s identity created by others, one’s history named only in ways that define one’s relationship to those who are subject.”
With hooks’ words in mind, it is clear who was granted subjecthood within medievally-remixed patriarchy by way of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s 1413 ordinances: “no barber, his wife, son, daughter, apprentice, or servant work at haircutting or shaving on Sundays within the freedom of the city.” Though seemingly an entire household could be included in a craft, only one individual was treated as a subject, the rest orbited about his gravitas. As Pernell de Rasyn understood in the 1350s, she could be arraigned alongside her husband for medical malpractice, but it was he that was designated as practitioner within the clerical documents. García-Ballester accurately identifying this common-place patriarchal anachronism: “The assumption that because married women are not identified by an occupation title they were ‘merely’ housewives (i.e. that the absence of an occupation label in fact proves that women did not engage in any economically significant labour) seems to owe more to modern nineteenth- and twentieth-century middle-class ideals of the leisured, idle wife than to anything we know about medieval women’s labour patterns.”13
Though men such as Aristotle, and his teacher Plato before him, worked tirelessly to further assert women’s fundamental subjecthood, the long-standing cultural grasp of male-superiority is owed more to the everyday contributors of Patriarchy: the every man.
The Nature of depreciation
On Jacqueline’s day in court back in that fruitful August of 1322, eight witnesses came forward on behalf of the woman-practitioner and the skills she possessed. Each of them attested that Jacqueline was not only a capable healer, but an empathetic one at that. She had an “immutable policy of charging no fee unless cure followed treatment.”14 Regardless of the many positive outcomes cited, Jacqueline was found guilty, charged with a steep fine and excommunicated from the church.
“The prosecution's entire case rested not on Felicie's proven incompetence but on her failure to be properly licensed by the university. By academic definition, the absence of formal training credentials implied a lack of qualifications to practice medicine. Not a single effort was made to test Felicie's knowledge and understanding of disease and its management. That she, as a woman, was ineligible to attend the university was ignored. In her behalf, at least eight witnesses testified to her medical skills, all declaring that she successfully treated illnesses that had failed to respond to the ministrations of numerous licensed physicians.”15
In a culture that was keen on minimizing women’s contributions, the clerics of early 14th century France offer us much to the contrary here. Jacqueline’s identification as a non-trained, practicing physician granted subjecthood to a woman not often seen within these documents. Though there is much evidence indicating women (of course) worked in the middle ages, this information is often identified in implicit ways (see: The Archbishop of Canterbury’s earlier words). This explicit acknowledgment also highlights a woman’s ability to become a subject matter expert with far less access to resources—for not only did the documents indicate she could heal what the university trained physicians could not, it laid bare the vulnerabilities of patriarchal power, for they feared she would rob them of their wealthiest patients.
Eighty-three years later, in a slightly changed kingdom of France, Christine de Pizan would write “god has given women such beautiful minds to apply themselves, if they want to, in any fields where glorious and excellent men are active.”16 This argument, though spoken by another woman well after her own death, was one Jacqueline Felice de Almania intimately knew to be true. “In her own defense, Felicie argued fervently for the right of wise and experienced—even if unlicensed—women to care for the sick.”17 Had Jacqueline lived in a post-Malleus Maleficarum world a century and a half later, she likely would have been tried as a witch rather than an unlicensed medical practitioner, as Dr. Minkowski notes, “women who had been called physicians in the 13th century were branded as charlatans and witches in the 14th and 15th centuries.” The progression of patriarchy.
In the binary of patriarchy, the abled male body is seen as both the default and ideal.18 As bodies begin to change with age, they further stray from the desired range of ability within a culture built on domination. While men progress through life, their masculinity ensures attachment to the positive side of the mind/body, culture/nature binaries. Older women, existing outside of both the male gaze and the hierarchical abled male system, transitioned from the ‘wise and experienced’ healers Jacqueline mentioned in 1322, into the hags, witches, and monstrous figures of the early modern world through the “progressive discrediting of their traditional medieval occupations, such as healer and midwife.”19
Jacqueline was not only a woman subverting patriarchal control, she was an older woman subverting patriarchal control, leaving clear trace of female-agency in a time often considered void of such a notion. This visible transition of women physicians and midwives from necessary to dangerous within the collective conscious allowed patriarchy to become the authority of women’s bodies. Though men had long positioned themselves as such (see, once again: Aristotle), women’s healing-hands were commonplace in every stratification of class within the middle ages and ancient world alike.20 From doctor-mom to midwife and herbalists, women were directly associated with healing and care—particularly older women, as domestic burdens lightened with age as well as allowed for required time of practice to become an expert in any given field. Wise and experienced.
Marginalizing older women helps maintain male-dominated hierarchies and the continued perpetuation of stereotypes about women’s capabilities as they age. As the longest standing victims of patriarchal violence, their stories have the power to cripple empires—thus, they must be pushed to the margins and kept there. Telling women they lose value as they age—when in reality they are often growing into their power outside of the strict confines of patriarchal gender roles and the male gaze—serves only to dampen the fierce spirit of resiliency of a disillusioned woman.
Henisch, Bridget Ann. The Medieval Calendar Year. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 1999
Nor anyone, really. Including all tradwives.
Maggs, Sam. Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History. Quirk Books. 2016
Minkowski WL. Women healers of the middle ages: selected aspects of their history. Am J Public Health. 1992 Feb;82(2):288-95. doi: 10.2105/ajph.82.2.288. PMID: 1739168; PMCID: PMC1694293.
To be fair, the plague caught that half of the world with their pants around their ankles. This wasn’t unique to France, though they had just intentionally penalized care givers prior.
Minkowski WL. Women healers of the middle ages: selected aspects of their history. Am J Public Health. 1992 Feb;82(2):288-95. doi: 10.2105/ajph.82.2.288. PMID: 1739168; PMCID: PMC1694293.
Luis García-Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham. “Documenting Medieval Women’s Medical Practice,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994. pp. 322-52
Ibid.
Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. 2000.
Stauffer, Dana Jalbert. “Aristotle’s Account of the Subjection of Women.” The Journal of Politics 70, no. 4 (2008): 929–41.
Juárez-Almendros, Encarnación. “The Disabling of Aging Female Bodies: Midwives, Procuresses, Witches and the Monstrous Mother.” In Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints, 83–115. Liverpool University Press, 2017.
Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. 2000.
Luis García-Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Andrew Cunningham. “Documenting Medieval Women’s Medical Practice,” in Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994. pp. 322-52
Green, Monica H. "Getting to the Source: The Case of Jacoba Felicie and the Impact of the Portable Medieval Reader on the Canon of Medieval Women's History." Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 42, No. 1 (2006) : 49-62.
Ibid.
de Pizan, Christine. The Book of the City of the Ladies. Translated by Rosalind Brown-Grant. Penguin books. 1999.
Minkowski WL. Women healers of the middle ages: selected aspects of their history. Am J Public Health. 1992 Feb;82(2):288-95. doi: 10.2105/ajph.82.2.288. PMID: 1739168; PMCID: PMC1694293.
Juárez-Almendros, Encarnación. “The Disabling of Aging Female Bodies: Midwives, Procuresses, Witches and the Monstrous Mother.” In Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints, 83–115. Liverpool University Press, 2017.
Minkowski WL. Women healers of the middle ages: selected aspects of their history. Am J Public Health. 1992 Feb;82(2):288-95. doi: 10.2105/ajph.82.2.288. PMID: 1739168; PMCID: PMC1694293.
Cilliers, Louise. The healing hand: the role of women in Graeco-Roman medicine. Acta Theologica Supplementum. 2005.
This is awesome work and very interesting. Sobering as well. I just read another post about how there are no women leading federal gov’t committees, first time in two decades: a coincidence?
Same shit, different century. Sigh.