XI.   Christianity and Women

                                  How to punish misbehaving women
                                    From England's Grievance Discovered by R. Gardiner

From: Not in God's Image. edited by Julia O'Faolain and Lauro Martines. Harper and Rowe, Publishers, Inc., 1973.

    "The [Christian] law responds to social demand by setting up external curbs, but oral tradition and manuals of conduct directly express the internal taboos, and these are more constantly at work.  The following texts deal mainly with questions of decorum and deportment but conclude with three documents whose realities serve as a foil to the abstract advice.

Franco-Italian source, c. 1420.

    At parties or gatherings, let them [girls and young widows] not venture in among the men but hang back with their mothers and other women, and let them have a sedate expression and be sober of speech, bearing, and smile; moreover, let their glance be reluctant, decided, neither wandering nor unsure but direct and simple. [Christine de Pisan] 75.

Paris, 1393.

    Keep your head straight, your eyelids lowered and unflinching and your glance directed straight in front of' you, eight yards ahead and towards the ground, without moving it about. [Le Menagier de Paris]76.

France, thirteenth century:

     Women should not learn to read or write unless they are going to be nuns, as much harm has come from such knowledge.  For some men will dare to send or give or drop letters near them, containing indecent requests in the form of songs or rhymes or tales, which they would never dare convey by message or word of mouth.  And even if the woman had no desire to err, the devil is so crafty and skillful in tempting that he would soon lead her on to read the letters and answer them....[Illicit intercourse] is different for men.  For they ... preen themselves vaingloriously when it is known that they have a young or pretty or monied mistress.  Men's families are not affected, but women shame and dishonor themselves and their children when they incur blame for the like. [Philippe de Navarre, Les Quatre Ages de I'Homme]77.

The French Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry (1371), translated into English and published by Caxton in 1484, became very popular in France, England, and Germany.  The knight speaks to his daughters:

    "Fair daughters, when you get up in the morning, start at once to serve the Great Lord ... and say your prayers with all your heart before breakfasting, for a gorged heart is never humble or devout.  Afterwards, hear all the Masses you can, as this will bring you great benefit ...."

    "Throughout your married life you ought to fast three days a week to keep your flesh down and yourselves chaste .... And if this is too much, fast on Fridays in memory of Christ's passion ... and if you can't keep to bread and water, at least eat nothing that has to be killed ... and it is good to fast on Saturdays for love of Our Lady and reverence for her virginity, praying her to keep you chaste ....

                                                      Christian Chastity Belts
Women who fall in love with ... married men, priests, servants, and such ... are worse than whores in a brothel.  For many women have been brought to the sin of lechery by need or poverty or the trickery of pimps, but a gentlewoman who has enough to live on and yet takes a lover among the kind of men we have mentioned ... does it from nothing but the carnal heat of lust. [Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour-Landry]78.

Paris, 1393. [How to hold a husband.]:

    "Cherish your husband's person and make sure you keep him in clean linen, this being your office.  For men have to look after things outside the house and husbands have to go abroad in all sorts of weather, at times getting soaked in rain, at times dry, and sometimes bathed in sweat .... But he puts up with it all and takes consolation from thinking about the good care he will have from his wife, when he gets home, as she warms him by a good fire, washes his feet, fetches fresh shoes and stockings for him, good food and drink, gives him plenty of attentions, a comfortable bed, white sheets, a nightcap, fur covers, and the cheer of other delights, privy frolics, lovings, and secret matters which I shan't mention."

    "Indeed, fair sister, these are the services that make a man wish for home and long to return to it .... Remember the rustic saying that there are three things which chase a good man from home: a roofless house, a smoking chimney, and a quarrelsome wife ... and don't be quarrelsome but sweet, gentle, and amiable.

    Christian Europe's controlling devices for quarrelsome women.

In the summertime make sure that there are no fleas in your re that there are no fleas in your bed or bedroom.  There are six ways of getting rid of them [recipes follow] ... and if you do all this, he will keep his heart for you and for the loving service you render him and he will care nothing for other houses or other women. [Le Menagier de Paris] 7 9."

In addition to giving advice to women, which after all expressed half a world view, our moralists, remembering the more important half, also had advicefor men.  Thus Paolo da Certaldo (fl. 1330-70), a family man, a Florentine, and a small-time entrepreneur, in his Handbook of Good Customs (c. 1360) :

    "The female is an empty thing and easily swayed: she runs great risks when she is away from her husband.  Therefore, keep females in the house, keep them as close to yourself as you can, and come home often to keep an eye on your affairs and to keep them in fear and trembling.  Make sure they always have work to do in the house and never allow them to be idle, for idleness is a great danger to both man and woman, but more to the woman ...."

    "If you have a female child, set her to sewing and not to reading, for it is not suitable for a female to know how to read unless she is going to be a nun.... Teach her to do everything about the house, to make bread, clean capons, sift, cook, launder, make beds, spin, weave French purses, embroider, cut wool and linen clothes, put new feet onto socks, and so forth, so that when you marry her off she won't seem a fool freshly arrived from the wilds. [Libro di buoni costumi] 80."
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We follow with a condensation from the ledger cum diary of another Florentine merchant, Gregorio Dati (b. 1362).  Our selection comprises the entries concerning his four wives and a slave.  The laconism--which should not be taken to signify lack of affection--does show the woman's role with skeletal simplicity: she brings a dowry, gives birth, and sometimes dies in childbearing:

    My beloved wife, Bandecca, went to Paradise after a ninemonth illness started by a miscarriage, July 1390.

    I had an illegitimate male child by Margherita, a Tartar slave whom I had bought.  He was born in Valencia on 21 December 1391.

    We [business associates] renewed our partnership on 1 January 1393, when I undertook to invest 1,000 [gold] florins.  I did not actually have the money but was about to get married --which I then did--and to receive the dowry which procured me a larger share and more consideration in our company....

    I married my second wife, Betta, on 22 June.... On the 26th of that same June I received a payment of 800 gold florins from the bank of Giacomino and Co. This was the dowry.

    On Sunday, 17 May 1394, Betta gave birth to a girl....

    On Friday evening, 17 March 1396, the Lord blessed our marriage with a male son.

    12 March 1397, Betta gave birth to our third child ....

    27 April 1398, Betta gave birth to our fourth child.

    1 July 1399, Betta had our fifth child.

    22 June 1400, Betta gave birth for the sixth time.

    On Wednesday, 13 July 1401 ... the Lord lent us a seventh child.

    On 5 July 1402 ... Betta gave birth to our eighth child.

    After that my wife Betta passed on to Paradise....

    The [business] partnership is to start on 1 January 1403 and to last three years.... I have undertaken to put up 2,000 florins.  This is how I propose to raise them: 1,370 florins ... are still due to me from my old partnership .... The rest I expect to obtain if I marry again this year, when I hope to find a woman with a dowry as large as God may be pleased to grant me ....

    I record that on 8 May 1403, 1 was betrothed to Ginevra, daughter of Antonio Brancacci .... The dowry was 1,000 florins: 700 in cash and 300 in a farm at Campi.

    On Sunday morning at terce, 27 April [1404], Ginevra gave birth to our first-born son....

    Altogether Ginevra and I had eleven children: four boys and seven girls....

    After that it was God's will to recall to Himself the blessed soul of my wife Ginevra.  She died in childbirth after lengthy suffering.... God bless her and grant us fortitude.

    I then took another wife, Caterina, the daughter of Dardano Guicciardini [30 March 14211 .... The dowry was 600 florins.

    Caterina, my fourth wife, miscarried after four months.

    On 4 October 1422 . .. Caterina gave birth to a daughter...

    On Friday, 7 January 1424, Caterina gave birth to a fine healthy boy....

    20 March, 1425, Caterina had another healthy and attractive child ....

    26 July 1426, Caterina, had a fine little girl....

    Monday, 28 August 1427, Caterina gave birth to a fine little girl....

    2 June 1431, Caterina gave birth to a girl...[at this point, with about nine of his children still alive, he stops keeping his diary and dies in 1435.] [G. Brucker, ed. Two Memoires of Renaissance Florence] 82."

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From: Elizabeth Gould Davis, The First Sex. Penguine Books Inc., Baltimore, Maryland, 1973.

    On Christianity and  women philosophers Davis writes:

    "At Alexandria they also pillaged the great School of Philosophy, from which had emanated one of the last lights of learning in the gathering darkness of the brave new Christian world.  The head of this great school of Neoplatonism was Hypatia, "a remarkable woman of great teaming and eloquence, the charm of whose rare modesty and beauty, combined with her great intellectual gifts, attracted to her lectures a large number of disciples." 33. This great woman, mathematician, logician, astronomer, philosopher, naturally inspired the fanatical hatred of Cyril, the Christian bishop of Alexandria, and he resolved upon her ruin.

    After a defamatory and Paulistic sermon on the iniquity of women in general and of Hypatia, who presumed to teach men, in particular, he urged his congregation not to allow such an unfeminine, un-Christian monster to live.  Fired with Christian zeal the congregation poured out of the church and, finding Hypatia alone with but one pupil, Synesius of Cyrene, they tore off her clothes, cut her to pieces with oyster shells, and then burned her body piece by piece.  Synesius saved himself by professing to be a Christian--and he later became bishop of Ptolemais.34."

   "Wherever Christianity went it carried with it the deadly germ of antifeminism, forcing civil governments to adopt the harsh and woman-hating laws of the church.  Men, of course, accepted the new ideas more readily than women, who resisted longer and more tragically than their brothers.  Women, as James Cleugh observes, had been the revered sex in Europe, and "they were as determined to remain so as the Church was to demote them." 37. Yet their determination was of no avail.  Men had always harbored in the depths of their subconscious a fear and dread of women, and to turn this dread into active hatred and contempt became the mission of the all-male Christian hierarchy."

    "Abuse was lavished upon the sex," writes Jules Michelet.  "Filthy, indecent, shameless, immoral, were only some of the epithets hurled at them by the Church." Woman, announced the Christian clergy, were naturally depraved, vicious, and dangerous to the salvation of men's souls--a commodity women needed not to worry about as they were possessed of none.  "Woman herself", continues Michelet, "came eventually to share the odious prejudice and to believe herself unclean; . . . woman, so sober compared to the opposite sex . . . was fain to ask pardon almost for existing at all, for living, and fulfilling the conditions of life." 38.

   "The miracle is not that the church finally succeeded in its purpose of degrading women.  With the might of the empire behind it at first and the even greater might of the pope behind it after a while, it could hardly have failed.  The miracle is that it took the church so long to humble the once stronger sex.  For it was not until after the Protestant Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the triumph of Puritanism in the seventeenth that woman's status reached the low point at which we find it today.  After the church had succeeded in its mission of teaching men to regard women as brute and soulless beasts, the civil law stepped in and placed woman in the absolute power of men.  Her enemy became her master, and the obscene design of the Christian fathers was finally and completely achieved."

    "Our curiosity is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained its remarkable victory," writes Gibbon.  "It appears that it was most effectively assisted by the inflexible and intolerant zeal of the Christians, derived from the Jewish religion." 39.  And the Jewish religion, as expressed in the Old Testament, says John Stuart Mill, is "a system in many respects barbarous, and intended for a barbarous people." And this barbarous religion, steeped in wornan-hatred and superstition, continues Mill, is the basis of so-called "Christian morality." 40.

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            To be continued...