Medieval reading culture and gender constructs: a chat with Dr. Lacey Bonar Hull
*Bonus Episode* -- The Women of the Hundred Years War
Hello lovely readers! It has been a little while since I’ve met you in video form and am not just some disembodied voice in the voice-overs — so, hello! I am so incredibly grateful for you, lovely reader, and the gift of your time and attention throughout publication of the Women of the Hundred Years War series. What an honor to be able to write about these women and share their influence with you! What a gift, truly. Thank you for your presence.
I am so excited for today’s post – Dr Lacey Bonar Hull over at the Historian’s Desk took time from her schedule to sit and chat with me about:
Her dissertation: It’s Written All Over Your Face: A Cultural and Gender History of the Face in the Middle Ages, 1150-1500
Physiognomy
Christine de Pizan
Conduct manuals
Love is Blind
Medieval power structures
How the kingmaker (Richard Neville) is Lacey’s historical nemesis (—but, same.)
Primary sources, patriarchal biases... and so much more!
This was a gift of a conversation and I’m so excited to share it with you as a BONUS EPISODE of the Women of the Hundred Years War series. This conversation was meant to provide deeper context into literary practices of the medieval world with a specific focus on women readers/literary consumers... and while we accomplished that, it was so much more — it was a chance to talk through our passions and what connects us to each other and these women who lived so long ago.
Please be sure to check out Lacey’s incredible curations and courses over at the Historian’s Desk.
Quick accessibility note: The video is without captions, however, the transcript of our conversation is available below.
Lacey: Awesome. So hi everyone, my name is Lacey Bonar Hull and I am a medieval historian from the United States. I have a PhD in medieval history where my dissertation was all about cultural and gender constructs aimed towards women in the medieval period and particularly focused on women’s faces so I looked a lot at at women’s reading material and how women’s faces were discussed as being able to reflect like their inner goodness or their. They’re worse. So the idea in the medieval period that I found, and a lot of these written materials that were directed towards women is that a woman’s morality or immorality could be literally read on their faces by people who looked at them. And it’s, it was such a fascinating. Research topic, and it was so much fun digging through the sources. I’m a big reader myself, so it was kind of like a dream to be able to focus on medieval women’s reading material. It was a lot of fun, and now that I’m done with grad school and I have my PhD under my belt, I have shifted a little bit more into public facing work and public writing. So I do a lot of that over on Substack. I run a substack called the Historian’s Desk, which has been so much fun and it’s how I’ve met really incredible people like you. And then I’m also working on some trade book writing, so can’t officially announce anything yet. But hopefully soon I’ll be able to share some -- always about, you know, history and women. That’s kind of my area. The medieval and early modern women ran. They stole my heart and I just I ran with it, you know, I can’t, I can’t abandon them now. I think that’s the boat that I’ll be in for the rest of my. Career and I would have it no other way.
Kate: I love that -- it’s a great boat to be in, a powerful boat to be in.
Lacey: Yeah. And an exciting one right now like there’s there’s so much really cool work being done and especially in spaces like substack where people can collaborate, they can get to know each other, they can share their research. You know what they have found, maybe in the archives might fit really well with something that a contact of theirs on sub stack is reading about or writing about. And then you can kind of like share that material and it’s it’s just such a great space for kind of like Co-thinking and Co-writing and Co-working, you know, stuff like that. It’s such an exciting time. Like it to be a historian for sure.
Kate: Shout out to everybody that reads something and says, ohh, my gosh, I thought of you when I read this because they are like librarians-- they’re a gift to all of us.
Lacey: Yes, Ohh, my gosh, we need more. We need more of that. You know, let’s let’s team up and keep, you know, bringing this history to life for people because it is -- I mean, it’s just so fun to feel like you get like a bit of insight into the lived experiences of people who might have lived 500 or 800 a thousand years ago. But I mean, at the end of the day, you know, there are obviously going to be differences there because differences pop up, you know, over centuries and generations. But I mean, at the end of the day, yeah, they do. But people are people. And it’s cool to be working to bring some of those insights to modern people that we can learn about our medieval counterparts, which is really cool.
Kate: Absolutely. So, one thing that I fell in love with. When I started kind of going through your dissertation and the title of it, I don’t know if you said it, so I’m going to read it. It’s Written All Over Your Face: A Cultural and Gender History of the Face in the Middle Ages, 1170-1500. I forget. I have to lean to the microphone this way. I’m sorry. There was a moment where -- I loved you could really hear your authorial voice in your dissertation. And I loved that because something that I think history writing sometimes lacks is the person writing it. And you, of course, are not trying to insert yourself into the narrative. But to never address the biases that human nature and human experience brings is also harmful. And there was a moment where you pause and you wrote “The texts analyzed in this chapter were largely composed by men for the use of men.” And that moment I just like, I stopped. I started snapping. I was like, yes, like that is such an important note to make. Like -- who was this writing for? And really was it that kind of maintenance of male supremacy, even if it was intentional or not, right? Like because that was the genre and you’re writing into the genre of what? To be popular, every writer sometimes wants to write the popular thing. You know, exactly. That’s untrue for our medieval counterparts either.
Lacey: And I love that. I love that you picked that out. And you know, I think there’s something to be said for that, not just on behalf of the of the medieval authors, which, you know, the vast majority. Are men, and, you know, a lot of the audience would have been comprised of men, but definitely, you know, there were women readers. And that’s something that I’m very passionate for sharing about. But, you know, I think there’s something to be said for like the actual authorship of these primary sources. But then we take and we run with and that’s, you know, that forms what we think we know about the medieval period, but also for the historiography of it. So the, the historians, you know, especially like the Victorians, the antiquarians, you know, they again, predominantly men who were reading these medieval sources. Written by men, often for men. And, you know, we we get a lot of that knowledge of what we think we know from the medieval period handed down to us by historians from, you know, a century or two ago. And I think if we can revisit these primary sources that we think we know a lot about, and this is something that I tried to do, you know, especially early on in my dissertation, because a lot of it’s on physiognomy, which is this really popular idea in the medieval period. And you know, it’s much older than the medieval period even. But in the medieval period, people really ran with this – that you can know a person’s inner workings through their external appearance. And the sources that I was reading, definitely in the medieval period, you know, they were written by men for men to try and use this art or this science to try and -- it was often like to to surround yourself with good advisors. It would have been like a court setting and and the. Historians who have studied these sources, they’ve done a great job of reconstructing physiognomical beliefs for men and how it was used by men to analyze other men in the medieval period. But something that was largely missed, at least in my opinion and with my research, and something that I kind of tried to, you know, address kind of the basis of my dissertation is that physiognomical beliefs were also applied to women. Now we don’t, we can’t say that women used physiognomy to analyze other women or to analyze men. Although, you know, I don’t think it’s a stretch. To say that these ideas were floating around and that women were probably aware of them. But I think what we can say and what I try to say with my dissertation is that it might not be these physiological treatises, these scientific treatises that were popular at courts, you know, in the medieval period, they might not come out and say, you know, here’s a physiognomy for women. But the sources that do construct a physiognomy for women were women’s reading material and like popular literature that women and men would be reading, and there’s just like this – this kind of like ideal that’s presented of what women should look like in this literature and and what they should look like if they’re good women versus if they’re bad women. And this is something that that popped up for me first in a medieval conduct book that I was just reading because I was, you know, I was a master student in my at my university and I was really interested in medieval women. And I wanted to know like what are some of the constructs that women, how did women like know how they were supposed to act and how they were supposed to behave in the medieval period? Because that’s, you know, what I was interested in, but I was reading this conduct manual. Kind of for fun. Yeah. And as you do, as you do your history nerd like me, you know, you know what I’m talking about. And it was, it was an English translation. I’m not like, I’m not crazy enough to just read and, like, medieval French for fun. But, you know, I started noticing how women’s faces were used. Throughout this manual, like in so many different places, it was just, it was kind of, no pun intended, but like, hitting you across the face with this trope that just kept popping up chapter after chapter in this conduct manual about how a woman’s face could communicate like, her inner goodness or her inner worth. You know, and it’s something that I started to, I started to look for it and other first other conduct manuals and then, you know, I started to expand into like just other works of popular literature that women would have had access to in the medieval period. And it’s there, it’s there. And, and so many of them, I mean, this is not – it’s not like a one and done type of thing. It’s not one weird author of a conduct manual who’s like obsessed with woman’s faces, which at first I was like, what’s wrong with this guy? Like, buddy relaxed. And we can get into some of those examples if you want, but I’ll issue a warning because they’re very like this guy was, you know, he he didn’t hold any punches he really kind of let it rip as far as like violence against women’s faces went. And this in this particular conduct manual was popular one -- you know, so people weren’t turned off by it. You know, they, they read this book extensively across generations, but you know, it’s not he wasn’t alone. He was actually drawing on just a pretty popular practice of describing women in this particular way to get a point across. I mean, it’s something that, you know, I was able to track it back really far into the central Middle Ages, which is, you know, why I start my dissertation there because. It was like I just kept going further and further back in time and I was finding this same trope, you know, which is kind of like a gold mine when you’re a historian and you have this like, weird idea that it’s just prompted by a primary source that, I mean, I just lucked out that that, you know, was one of the conduct manuals that I read and I read it-- it’s so good, like it’s, it’s like a like juicy medieval source that I read it over like a day or two. And so all of the examples were fresh in my mind because I just couldn’t get enough of this book. I just sat down and like couldn’t stop reading it. So it made like. At repetition, really obvious yeah to me. And then I was my, you know, my dissertation advisor is just amazing. And she was so supportive. And I mean, my whole committee, they were really supportive of me just testing out this idea, just kind of running with it, you know, like going through other types of sources and just kind of. Seeing what I could find in my university, they were really, you know, they were excited about the project too, I think. And so I was given like some financial support from my university and then from some external organizations like in the UK to be able to go and do like actual like archival digging in the sources and like London and Oxford and Paris, and I mean, it was just like I was living the historian’s dream working on this project and it was so fun and so interesting that I’m one of those really lucky people who I never got tired of my dissertation topic and it can be really easy in grad school to have burnout because you’re working on this on this one topic for years, you know, and it can that can be really difficult and I consider myself incredibly lucky. That I was, you know, I was in a supportive space and I was able to find a topic that like that I cared about, you know, I really cared about. And I still, I do. That’s why I’m still harping on this stuff, you know, a year after I’ve submitted my dissertation. But it’s, I think it’s just really illuminating to think about how medieval women would have understood themselves, you know, and how, like, your face is something that, like, you can’t really change. I mean, they had cosmetics and they got to do some digging and like, medieval cosmetic treatises too. And that was super cool. But yeah, it’s also something so public facing, you know, like you can’t run away from it. It’s just kind of it’s there and you’re being perceived in a certain way. And for women who would have had access to this literature or even just, you know, to the societal ideals that came out of this literature, they would have been aware of that, you know, and it – it just, it feels like it gives like a little bit of insight into medieval women’s lives that we don’t often get from other types of sources.
Kate: Yeah, absolutely. I find myself – and again, this is when you’re like in history and just like La La land thinking of things that you wouldn’t put on paper because really it’s just you kind of going off on your own tangents in your head. But someone like Christine de Pizan, I think about her often, obviously, I think I write about her often, but where she was creating almost like permission structures because she was so insistent on the imagery and really kind of dictating the imagery that was in the manuscripts – the the archival evidence, right? And how in like Othea there’s... there’s women goddesses who are kind of leading the body politic of, of Hector, but also of all of them, the patrons that she gave that that text.
Leah: Yeah.
Kate: And really just like not just creating these women, but also creating permission structures consciously for women to perceive women in those positions. And I get really lost in like, how would that have felt seeing that ... But like, yeah, the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy, I think Louis of Orléans, I know she gives it to the king at the time. So it’s like those are going to very prominent men, very prominent circles that are really into learning. And yeah, she is presenting this woman goddess who’s kind of dictating body politic and giving all this moral advice and it’s just really interesting. How would women have felt in those circles listening and seeing that.
Lacey: Exactly! And how would that have impacted the men too? Like how, how is this impacting how people understood like power structure and the – even like the different capabilities, you know, things that were possible in these like really upper echelon political circles that you know then would have likely found its way to trickle down like in the in the popular like consciousness and mindset. I mean, it almost gives you like cold chills to think about someone like Christine and the the impact that she had and you know, a lot of what we think we know about the medieval period also comes down to source survival. And you know, we know about Christine because we have so many of her manuscripts that have survived to down to us and then manuscripts that talk about Christine. So we know how influential she was, but there, you know, I don’t think it’s necessarily a stretch to think that there may have been other women doing similar work that we just don’t have, you know, surviving. I think she certainly was kind of working to pave the way a bit to have other women taken seriously. You know, as authors as well. And you know, we have we have some examples of women who were who were writing things that were, you know, popular reading material at courts like Marie de France, but we know nothing about her. You know, like she’s such sort of like an enigma. We have a ton of material that she wrote and we know it was popular and we know that, you know, royalty, they were reading it and likely paying her for it and being her, you know, supporters at court. But we, we don’t know anything about her. And it’s, you know, it’s like you’re kind of doing – someone on my dissertation committee said it’s sort of like recovery work, you’re kind of like rescuing women and women’s experiences because they don’t often survive in the same way that men’s written material survives, you know, so it’s like you’re ... you’re working to like recover it and to--like you’re saying, you know, you’re thinking like what impact could this have had? Because we know it had an incredible impact. It’s just it’s hard to definitively say anything because we don’t have the sources saying that, which is it’s like one of the Catch-22s. Focusing on women in the medieval and early modern periods.
Kate: Yeah. There’s a lot of that thought, that lost thought that can’t be realized. But we get to witness to the best of our ability.
Lacey: Exactly. And we get to discuss it, you know, and we get to to like, collaborate on this kind of stuff. And it’s just so it just, it feels like... You know, not to be like corny, but you know, we’re taking about these women’s like their stories and their experiences and we’re trying to puzzle them out, you know, to the best of our ability to still be faithful to the sources, you know. But I think something like women’s reading material gives us pretty good insight into, you know, a lot of experiences that these women might have had. And sure, you know, you can only extrapolate so much from, like, fiction, which some of the sources, you know, that I use in my dissertation were fictional sources. Even if they they say, like in the prologues, like this is all based on a real story. It’s like, you know, probably not... They’re like dragons and stuff. But it’s still, you know, it’s literature that was produced in like a certain context, right? Like a certain period of cultural consciousness. And it’s always going to be reflective of that. You know, the the written works that we have, that we do have access to, they can’t give us like a super complete idea of what it would have been like to be a woman in the medieval period. But it can get us, it can get us close if we know how to read them and sometimes have to read against the grain for that sort of thing. But I think it helps. It does help illuminate woman’s situations, which is is certainly what I’m interested in.
Kate: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. I think the first time I cried reading historical evidence was when I saw Jacquetta of Luxembourg’s signature... Like her, her name--her motto-- her signature in Christine de Pizan’s manuscript--Ohh. My. gosh--And I’m just so grateful that we get Internet archives, right? That we have this access -- for folks that can’t go and dive into the archives, for those of us that so wish we could. Right? How how lucky are we for that Internet world of being able to kind of go through and really look at those pages in a way that our ancestors did not?
Lacey: It’s really incredible. And I mean, it really opens up access, you know, to which I think is so important when you’re thinking about kind of getting down into like the nitty gritty of people’s lives in the past. I think you want people, you know, like you were saying at the beginning that you know, you you are bringing a particular viewpoint. You can try and be as unbiased as you can. And I think you should, you know, I think yeah, to, to kind of like do it justice, you know, you need to try and put your bias to the side. But even if we put our bias to the side, I mean, like, I hate the Kingmaker if we’re going to start like naming enemies. Not my guy, but when I’m writing about in a serious context--you know, there might be like a hate piece or two that I could write that could actually be a lot of fun--But if I’m writing, you know, in a serious context about Edward IV and, you know, how he went about assuming the throne, the kingmaker is going to play a role in that -- a really integral role. I mean, that’s why he’s called the kingmaker. He kind of made that happen for Edward IV, who I do like, obviously I specialize in his wife, Elizabeth Woodville. It’s one of the historical women who – that’s my specialty. But when I’m writing about that, you know, I put my own assumptions about the kingmaker to the side. I mean, yeah, I think he was like a like a not ideal kind of guy. He, you know, almost single handedly --really, I mean, he did a lot of damage to Elizabeth Woodville and her family – Jacquetta. You know, he’s he’s kind of you can place, you know, a lot of blame on him for that. And I think it’s deserved there. And I mean, he he killed Elizabeth’s father and brother. And I mean, it’s just and, you know, chased Edward IV out of his Kingdom and Elizabeth and her mother had to take sanctuary. You know, it was just not not the best guy. There’s no love lost between me and the kingmaker. But he he’s a fascinating historical figure and you know he’s he deserves to have his story told in a fair way. When someone like me who clearly is not a fan of him, is you know, writing about that time period, you know, I try and be – and I do like in conversations like this and you know, I teach these virtual classes on substack and when we’re having conversations, you know, I will say, hey, spoiler alert: this isn’t my guy right like he’s not. Yeah, I know a lot about him. I do think he’s really interesting. Probably like a super charming guy, you know, to me, if you -- if you were alive at the same time as him, but you wouldn’t want to be on his bad side, you know. But I do try, like when I’m writing to give him a fair assessment, even though I bring my own opinions, they’re always there in the back of my head. But you know, I separate that out when I’m writing things. And that’s kind of a goofy example, right? Because the kingmaker is kind of like my historical nemesis. But I think the same thing applies when you’re doing this type of work. And I think that people, they, they might have some biases. You do try and separate yourself out from that, you know, to give like a reliable account as close as we can get to the reality of the medieval period. But also I think where that can be a strength is that especially, and this is something that I don’t mean to harp on too much, but you know, it is, it’s something I’ve thought about a lot... Is what women can bring to the table to the understanding of history. And I think that, you know, there are some like unique viewpoints that women historians can bring to these primary sources. And we very well might read them differently than modern male historians. And maybe some of the takeaways that we can have from things like women’s conduct literature from the medieval period – some of those takeaways that we can bring to the table might help enrich our understanding, right? Or it might help us get a little bit closer to the takeaways that medieval women would have had to these sources because we have a different set of life experiences and spoiler alert: a lot of the opinions that we can see like in some medieval sources about women’s – especially like their external appearance – we are not far off from those today. I mean we haven’t done like a ton of evolving. You watch like any reality show today, like Love is Blind, which is, you know, one of those big dating shows on Netflix. You know, you watch that and a lot of the stuff that’s being said, you know, it’s like they were saying this. 700 years ago, you know...like we we haven’t evolved as much like in our social thinking in some cases as we would like to think.
Kate: Not to see the medieval in everything but yeah...
Lacey: But it’s there... like we’re not, you know, we’re not super far removed. And I think when you’re--you know, and with with my dissertations example--I think when you’re thinking about something just like as basic as faces, you know, we like a lot has changed from the medieval period, Sure. But when you’re thinking about like physical appearance, people’s faces, you know, that’s something that like bodies are pretty standard. We might be a little taller. You know, then they were in the medieval period. We might live a little longer, although you got people like Cecily Neville.
Kate: Ohh. My gosh. Yes. Yes.
Lacey: She popped out a ton of kids, and she lived to be really old. Yeah. But then you have people like, like Elizabeth of York, you know, that grew up as a princess, became a queen. She should have had access to, like, the best nutrition. And she died at age 37. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a give and take with the medieval period, but things like.. like, you know, interpreting something about someone based on their physical appearance, that kind of stuff hasn’t really changed. And there are these examples of like... some of these conduct books, I mean, it’s all about finding a Good Wife, right? Yeah. That’s just, that was the reality of a lot of these books, or at least on the surface. That’s why they were written. And they say that like, they literally say, like, read this book, you know, if you want to be able to find a Good Wife. And it’s all about external qualities. And how, like, you know, woman’s face or body can suggest not just something like fertility, which, you know, you could maybe make a case for that, I guess, as yucky as that sounds, but things like, if she’s going to be trustworthy. Yeah, like, you can read that on a woman’s appearance, and it’s grossly close to some of this stuff people still can say today,
Kate: Absolutely. And I don’t think that that is too far off either from like, white supremacy culture and eugenics culture and those conversations of perceiving people on qualities that we have no control over. Right.
Lacey: Very, very true. Yeah. And you can see the root of that, you know, in a lot of these medieval sources, which is interesting. Interesting to say the least.
Kate: Yeah. It is important, I think, to note in this current moment where you can see those similarities and understand, like we all have a lot of unlearning to do. It’s not any one person, It’s all of us. We all have to unlearn a lot of this because, oh my gosh, is it so deeply rooted. Generationally deeply rooted.
Kate: I beef with history writers that are long dead in this same capacity.
Lacey: Those dang Victorians -- do it!
Kate: I’m going to get his name wrong...He’s probably 1950s. I think he was publishing. Is it Paul Kendall Murray or Paul Murray Kendall?
Lacey: I think, I think it’s Paul Kendall Murray. I don’t know. But, you know, maybe he deserves for us to not know his name.
Kate: It’s our turn to not know his name, but every time when he describes Elizabeth and she has “cold eyes,” it’s like, honey, how are you describing? She’s looking at him with cold eyes from across the table? And we’re just reading this as if this is, like an actual account of how—
Lacey: And people take that stuff is like gospel truth. And that’s where it gets dangerous is like... people take that stuff and they really run with it and and I mean that’s you know, you can say that that has happened with men throughout history. Sure, like it definitely has, but that happens a lot with medieval women and it’s like have we? So are we still like kind of like stuck in that mindset where, you know, these women are somehow like vilified? I mean, it’s it’s something that-- so I specialize in and, if we’re shifting like a little bit to just like popular history. So like the the kind of stuff I write about now, which I talked about, you know, with the kingmaker thing, but I specialize in the Wars of the Roses time period. That’s like my chosen, like historical, you know, home. That’s my – that’s my like couple generation of people that I’m kind of like obsessed with honestly. There just like so many twists and turns and like Inns and outs with the wars of the roses. And it’s so fascinating. Like I will never get tired of that. And I mean Elizabeth Woodville has always been, you know, her and Anne Boleyn have always been kind of like my two women that I focused on a lot. And then as you know, as I’ve kind of really dug deep into their worlds, there is this time period I’m kind of obsessed with like all of these women like Margaret of York-- so cool--Cecily Neville...so like they’re all just like really, really cool and all of them at one time or another have been made to be the villain, especially like Margaret of Anjou. I mean, she is, you know, this She-Wolf for whatever. Like it’s just.. like let’s let’s not typecast women. Let’s not put women into like a good or bad box anymore. We don’t have to do that. We didn’t have to do that. We’ve never in the medieval period, but people did and that is something that I mean, it’s very cut and dry and that that conduct manual, which I keep going back to just because it’s such like a kind of like a tunnel into these women’s lives. And and like kind of like what the culture like dictates that they lived by because I mean, this guy, he covers it all in this conduct manual. So like literally you can almost relate anything to this conduct manual because he’s talked about it. But you know, it’s like we don’t have --there isn’t that dichotomy. So it’s not like a like a mutually exclusive thing, like a woman either has to be completely good or completely bad. Like, it’s not, you know, let’s move past that a bit. And we just haven’t really moved past that when it comes to some of these. Even, you know, modern historians, they do still fit women into this, like, good or bad box. And it’s like, it’s so much richer and so much more accurate to take a more nuanced view of someone like Margaret of Anjou. I mean, she was like, like, damned if you do, damned if you don’t kind of thing She couldn’t win.
Kate: She couldn’t win. She was a French woman in a time when there was so much hostility.
Lacey: And she can’t help...can’t help her husband’s situation. He couldn’t. He couldn’t help his situation either. We don’t think. We think that that was all down to mental health issues, you know, for Henry VI. What did you want her to do? Like, if she didn’t do anything, you would have criticized her. And then she thought that would be wrong. Yeah. And she tries to take up her husband’s cause. And for the love of God, her son...
Kate: Her son! I’m like, she’s doing this type of mother role!
Lacey: Exactly! And then instead now she’s a villain because she she did too much and she was French and she, you know, had these women role models growing up who who took political control and were appreciated for doing so.
Kate: You put her next to the women who she learned who she witnessed, right?-- Navigating court politics and culture in her very young impressionable time. And then she applied that to her own life and was vilified forever now for it. Like, what--
Lacey: Exactly! Yeah and and Margaret and her contemporaries are the women who would have been alive when that conduct manual was having like a ton of popularity. So it’s like they certainly would have had access to it likely would have read it because it was it was an incredibly popular text, we think likely one of, if not the most popular woman’s conduct manual at that time period. And it it’s French. So Margaret of Anjou, you know, likely would have been reading it in its original. And then it was also translated into English during the reign of Margaret’s husband, Henry VI. And then again during Edward IV’s reign. And it was, it was incredibly popular and impactful and a lot of people formed, you know, their understandings of women and men and relationships from, you know, literature like this from reading material and it’s-- just it gives us a good insight into like how Margaret of Anjou would have understood these different concepts of the appropriate and inappropriate behavior, which I find really fascinating.
Kate: So fascinating. Again, when you hold it up to the women that she witnessed and it doesn’t quite apply because – ohh, my goodness, you think of like, Yolande and all these women before her that were in her ancestral line. There was, I mean, I think, and please forgive me, it has been some time since I spent there, but there is a point in that manual where women can’t even turn their head right? Like, they’re not even allowed to look from side to side. You can only look forward. And it’s like, yeah, imagine telling somebody in a position like Margaret that she can’t even observe her environment.
Lacey: Yeah, because it’s inappropriate and it suggests to people that you’re not, you know, a serious woman or a pious woman and that is a great example because it doesn’t just show up in that conduct manual, it shows up in a ton of different examples. So there’s this didactic poem How The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter --and it talks about that it talks about turning your head from side to side and how an appropriate woman, you know, you’re supposed to to stare straight ahead. And I mean it, it gets into like the nitty gritty of of women’s lives and like the dos and the don’ts – and it it was a you know, we think that that was a pretty popular poem. I mean, it was just, this this stuff was invasive – you could not escape it. You know, you, you had these really strict rules and guidelines that you were expected to live by and it’s like if you stepped outside of that like prescribed behavior, you know, you ran a big risk to your reputation. And for women, you know, their reputation was kind of their worth in the eyes of society. And, you know, sure, that’s unfair, but it was the reality that they, you know, we’re living in. And I mean it, it could, you know even exclude you from being like a potential wife for someone, which, you know, it might kind of sound ichy to us today, but in the medieval period, you know, that was kind of definitely a major concern for women was to make a good marriage. You know, it’s just one of those things that’s – um-- that, you know, thankfully is probably not the same today, but you know, if we if we’re putting ourselves in the mindset of the women who were reading these things, it was really scary to be deemed like a like bad, you know, bad wife material because that, I mean so much of women’s worth in the eyes of society came from her married status. Which is unfortunate, but the reality, absolutely.
Kate: There’s a letter in the-- ohh, goodness, I don’t know if I have it in front of me, and I likely don’t -- but someone put together all of the translated letters of Margaret of Anjou and I’m so sorry, I’m blanking on who did this but I will link it down in references when I actually post. But one of the letters, uh, Margaret meets a woman and it’s somebody who one of the Paston women knows. And so it comes up then in, in the letters over there. But she deems this woman a Good Wife, though she’s not – I don’t think that the woman ended up marrying whoever Margaret was kind of pushing on her, but she said that this woman would make a Good Wife. And then you see it on the flip side where they’re like, oh, my goodness, she said this about so and so. This is so great. And it’s like, wow, so much was riding on the perception of your wifely duties that didn’t even exist yet, right? Like for this woman who was, I think maybe a widow, a young widow.
Lacey: I think she was a relation, I know the letter that you’re talking about, and I wish I had it in front of me, too. I have read it from the Paston viewpoint where Margaret had come to visit and she met this – It was a relation of the Paston’s... and maybe Elizabeth. I can’t. I can’t remember? Because, I mean... We like, we live with this stuff, right? Like we, we, we do a lot of digging into these kinds of records. But I do remember it was like, well the queen said that you would make a good partner. And it was kind of -- it was like a victory, you know, for the Paston’s to have the queen say that someone who you introduced to the Queen - you know, would would make a Good Wife for this match that Margaret of Anjou, I believe had in mind for the young woman. And I mean the Paston’s are kind of like a treasure trove for like women’s behavior because there’s one daughter who got married against her parents will – and I mean, that was, you know, not unheard of. I think it probably happened way more than we even know because the Paston’s are so unique with having this, like, treasure trove of rich material. -- So much documentation, which like, thank God they do because it gives us such great insight. But, you know, this is some thing that certainly would have happened. And that women would have faced, like, real repercussions, kind of being like ostracized from your family. And in that instance, I believe there may have been what we today would see as being probably physical abuse. You know, which at the time would have been viewed very differently and likely not as problematic and again, something that comes up in that conduct manual is a lot of physical -- like I call it corrective violence because I think that’s how it was viewed by the author, which is hard because to us it’s very much like it’s, it’s unnecessary. It’s um, very extreme. It’s, you know, you read it and it’s very much like to a modern audience, it’s like, you know, like, what is this? Yeah, it’s really, it’s really hard like you have to like kind of grapple with it because it’s.... Is this, you know, is this just meant to be memorable? So he’s, you know, kind of forcing this violence and making it like really extreme. But, you know, unfortunately, I think that women did often experience violent repercussions if they acted outside of gendered constructs of behavior, yeah. And it’s it’s something that there are there are scholars who are doing really incredible work on this going back through medieval court records, in particular about women who, you know, would petition for like a divorce because of things like domestic violence and finding, you know, record of like how in particularly it would have been husbands who were trying to justify those acts of violence against their wives because their wives, you know, acted outside of a mode of behavior. And it’s just, you know, it’s heartbreaking to read this stuff and to read how it actually played out for real women. Because the sources that I work with and that I worked with for my dissertation in particular, they, we think they’re probably fictional, right? Like this conduct book, it’s and the guy that wrote it, he was a knight. He was a French knight. And he, you know, claims that there that the women that he talked about, that he talks about were real women, right? Often he’s like, this is the woman that I knew 10 years ago and she lived down the street and my friends were her friends, you know, so he does -- he tries to make it, he tries to make the case that these are real women, but it’s because he’s writing this book, I mean, he says he’s writing it for his daughters. Their mother has passed away. He he needs to be able to raise up these young women to be good women. So he writes this book is kind of I mean, it’s a manual. It’s a, like I said, a guide to conduct and he says that he’s writing it for his daughters. We think he was likely writing it with like a much bigger audience in mind. And he certainly got that bigger audience. And, you know, it was incredibly impactful. It was very widely read, really popular. But you know, he’s, he’s trying to make this immediate. And he’s trying to say, you know, I knew these women that these really bad things happened to you don’t want it to happen to you. So make sure you act a certain way. Yeah, it’s cautionary tales. And he tries to make it seem really realistic by saying that this stuff really happened. It’s a lot of – it is like very farfetched, you know. So it’s like it’s, you know, probably a work of fiction, but it’s one of those examples that it kind of like like it tows the line. Like we can’t really, you can’t say 100% that this was all fiction. And maybe it’s a mixture of the two, maybe a couple of his examples--he has a lot of examples--but maybe, maybe a couple of them, you know, are rooted in reality. But then he like kind of named drops, like a particular king of England and a particular king of Hungary. And it’s like that’s not based on real people as far as we can tell, based on the actual historical kings of England and kings of Hungary that he could be referring to so you know it’s like we know a lot of it is he took some creative liberties but he tried to – probably as like a scare tactic. You know honestly he tried he tried to say, you know this stuff did happen and this will happen if you act like this. We do know that kind of stuff did happen in like domestic violence types of situations. So just to take it back to the past tense, that’s where we started and I go off on tangents. Hey, I’ll try, I’ll try to circle it back. I do. I do try to go back to the original thing when I can. Sometimes I don’t remember, but we were talking about the Paston’s and we were talking about the daughter who married outside of her parents wishes and she married a guy they, he very much was an employee, you know, like they were like he’s beneath us, like class status wise, like he’s not.. you know, you’re going to make the family look bad if you marry this guy. And the daughter didn’t care. She married the guy and then, you know, she is ostracized from her family and unfortunately we think based on some other letters from a third party we think that she was met with you know physical violence for that choice that she made. Now she did marry him and I like to think that they lived happily ever after you know and that she didn’t regret it. She was her own person and she made that decision. But she certainly faced consequences for that decision. You know, that that are really unfair.
Kate: So when we talk about these behavior guide books – and I’ve had you for quite a while now and I’m so grateful and if we need to cut it right now, we can. So one last question because I really want to give context -- I’m talking through, this is going to get tacked on with the 100 years or series and so I really kind of want to provide context around what it would have meant to be a female reader, right, a woman reader not just on the actual act of reading but the listening and kind of the court practices of popular texts at the time, where would they have been hearing these type of guidebooks? Would this have been a private affair, a public affair? Like please, if you don’t mind going into that.
Lacey: Yes. So I think it’s kind of a combination. So this stuff, and this is the case for a lot of written material, not just for conduct literature, this would be the case for like popular literature, you know, obviously like Arthurian romances, which we also have examples of woman’s faces in particular conveying something about themselves in Arthurian literature. I mean, it was just pervasive. It’s everywhere. But when you’re talking about these conduct manuals, they were written for a specific group of women to read and they, they spell that out like in the prologue for the book of the Knight of the Tower, the William Caxton translation, you know, he says, I was asked by a certain noble woman. And you know, historians have tried to like to, to identify that particular noble. And some think it might have been Elizabeth Woodville, which I find very cool. Others say, you know, maybe like Margaret Beaufort, it’s someone who has power and influence. Yeah, yeah. Supposed to have daughters, which Margaret Beaufort, of course, didn’t. But the the line of reasoning there is that by saying daughters, they were they were referring to women who were living in her household, like the the practice of sending your daughter to another noble household to kind of like learn like, you know, the lay of the land type of thing. And so I mean, it’s I think it’s more likely to have been Elizabeth Woodville or Cecily Neville or someone like that, you know, if we’re thinking about those very upper echelons or alternatively, William Caxton may have been saying that to kind of give it like a little bit of extra gravitas. You know that this very noble woman asked me to write – asked me to do, you know, the English translation to write this book and publish it for the use of others. You know, young women around the realm. So it is very geared towards young people. Women explicitly are mentioned in that prologue. But we know that young men would have also been, you know, reading or would have been aware, you know, of something like the book of the Knight of the Tower people. You could have read them individually. It’s written from the viewpoint of a father advising his daughter. So you kind of have like a feel for like the family context that maybe this is something that parents would have either read to their children or had read to them with their children. Because obviously, you know, literacy rates, not everyone could read and if they could read, they might not be able to read something as complex as a super long manuscript that was written in French and then translated into English and German. But there’s also this thought that women and, you know, men, but if we’re if we’re focusing on women then why not? That women in the medieval period, you know, that reading was like a pastime, it was a method of entertainment. And that this is something that it didn’t just apply to religious works, which we often have examples of this happening with religious works because, you know, that kind of makes you look good. And it’s, you know, if you say like Cecily Neville, she used to have different religious works, you know, mostly books of hours, stories of different Saints -- she would have that read out loud for entertainment at meal times. So you know these especially young women in her household would all gather at a table. Yeah, they’re eating and they instead of like talking, you know, amongst themselves, like about their day, they would have like a saint’s story read to them and then they would reflect on it. And I don’t think that it is far fetched to think that something like that would have happened with popular literature, conduct literature. I mean reading was a source of entertainment. Group reading was a source of collective entertainment and at this time we know with like with religious texts because again, this is what people mostly reflect on. But I again don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this very well could have applied to other types of reading material too. But we know that these religious texts, especially, people were really engaging with them on a personal level. So people weren’t just reading and then walking away from it. They were reflecting on it. They were personally engaging with it because it was a very popular form of entertainment. I mean, you know, you have you have the court, you know, festivities and these big moments in the court calendar when you’re talking about these members of the nobility where sure they might go to a tournament, you know, there might be like a mask, you know there might be music and dancing happening decently regularly in the royal calendar but in between people were still, you know, looking for methods of entertainment that might not be as regularly recorded as some of these bigger moments that they would have like at court or in different noble households. But the things that would happen day in and day out, the things that would happen at mealtime you know at one of Cecily Neville’s castles, right? Or the young women to learn again how to be good and virtuous young women, which is exactly what this conduct manual touches on. I mean, it is entertaining. That’s why someone like me, you know, 600 years later, I sit down to read this thing and I’m like, oh my gosh, like I can’t stop reading this because it’s really entertaining. So then imagine like it’s, it sounds goofy to say, but kind of like a medieval book-club type of thing. People they’re collectively reading. Whether that’s, you know, actually reading or probably more likely listening to a certain book being read and then they’re discussing it and it’s a book that, I mean, it’s been described as like the medieval equivalent of, like, Cosmopolitan magazine, back when, like, advice magazines used to be big, like before the internet took over and everything. Like a lot of young women, that they would learn -- I know we’re getting close on time. Sorry about that.
Kate: No, I’m sorry. I’m so grateful! I’m eating it up over here!
Lacey: I talk a lot about this stuff, but I love it so I can’t help it. Feel free to cut me off anytime. But hey, I’m happy to talk to someone who’s just as passionate as I am. But if you think like, you know, in the 90’s--the 1990s, not the 1490s--but in the 1990s, women would learn from these popular magazines, how they’re supposed to act and what they’re supposed to look like and how they should do their makeup and how they should act. And a lot of it was based on how to get the guy you want. Right? This is their body for marriage.
Kate: Yeah.
Lacey: And this is the same concept. But it’s just it’s the medieval version of it, it’s a conduct manual. It’s teaching, especially you know who we would think of as being like young adults and teenagers, how to present themselves, how to act, how to behave, how to make themselves good marriage material, but also like how to be a good daughter. How to be a good friend, how to be a good sister. Right. It’s teaching women from examples of good and bad behavior how they should and should not act. And it’s just, it’s such a cool source. And it has, I mean, it’s been translated into, you know, 15th century English and then also you can access it in very modernized English. Yeah, they’re like e-book copies. I mean, you know, you can read this kind of stuff right now if you’re interested in it, you know, just look up the Book of the Knight of the Tower and you should be able to find... you know, if you want a printed book, you should be able to get that through like a library system. They might have to request it. It’s not like every, you know, local library is going to be like “our medieval conduct section is just this way.” But you know, you should be able to get your hands on something like that. It’s been printed a ton. And you know, I would encourage if you’re interested in this time period and if you really want to get like some insight into how women – here’s my cat – but if you want some insight into how women knew how to behave and I think just as interestingly, if not more, how not to behave, I 100% suggest the Book of the Knight of the Tower. But I will issue like kind of like a content warning because it is... it’s hard. It’s hard to get through. And there are, I went through several examples and my dissertation of some very extreme examples of corrective violence that resulted in like permanent facial disfigurement for the women in the they’re called exempla – it’s examples right that’s just the like the literary mode that this guy was writing in but he’s you know, he’s trying to make it impactful he’s trying to make it memorable for his women readers because they might read something like this or listen to it it like aged 12, 13 or 14 you know and he wants them to internalize it. And it’s just it’s really -- I think when you think about, and this is something that just I tried to do in my own time and then if we go back to an earlier conversation, we had kind of separate this out for myself, like when I’m actually writing but you know I think to understand the mindset of the women, you know that we study, I think when, when you think about like a 12 year old, umm, reading this stuff and listening to this stuff or even like a modern like 16 or 17 year old, it’s such an impressionable age now and we have so much more autonomy now than women likely would have had in the medieval period. You know, you think about them reading this stuff and how this informed their worldview and their self worth. And it’s just like, you know, it’s hard. It’s hard to kind of put yourself in that mindset. Because it is, you know, kind of foreign to us. I mean, Cosmopolitan or like 17 magazine, it’s not going to say like if you criticize your husband in public, he’ll curb stomp your face and break your nose for the rest of your life and he’ll divorce you and your families in ruin. And that is an example that that you know, that this guy gives in this conduct manual. But when you think about the women who would have actually like internalized this stuff, and just the impact that it would have had on their understandings of themselves and their own behavior and the behavior of other women in their lives and men, it was often men’s job to “correct” these women. it’s just like you can kind of start to think about how impactful something like this would have been. Even though we don’t have, you know, we might not have like a diary of a girl in like, 1390 saying, hey ,I read this conduct manual and I’m scarred for life – but I certainly. Yeah, I will not act out. You know, we we don’t have women reflecting on this. But they would have certainly reflected on it. It’s just, it’s hard to say how like emotionally impactful something like this would be .But I think if you read it, and if you try and read it by putting yourself in the mindset of the young women who would have been reading this in the medieval period, it is shocking. And it was so popular and it was so widely read. And I mean, Caxton, if you can get your hands on the Caxton version you can read his prologue leading into it saying, you know, like it’s my duty to help make good young women in the noble classes across the realm. I mean, it’s it was really a respected text and a text that a lot of people consumed to kind of influence how they view women.
Kate: Yeah, and how to perceive others. And then policing behaviors, not unlike how we have today.
That is the end of our chat. Thank you so much for the gift of your time, lovely reader. And to Dr Lacey Bonar Hull, thank you for such a phenomenal afternoon! 💜
Until next time — be well!
