Life in a Medieval City by Frances Gies, Joseph Gies

except those who are being trained for the clergy, law, or medicine. Among the landed gentry, women are better educated than men. In the romance Galeran a boy and girl brought up together are given typically different schooling—the girl learning to embroider, read, write, speak Latin, play the harp, and sing; the boy, to hawk, hunt, shoot, ride, and play chess.
    Women work outside the home at an astonishing variety of crafts and professions. They may be teachers, midwives, laundresses, lacemakers, seamstresses, and even members of normally male trades and occupations 4 —weavers, fullers, barbers, carpenters, saddlers, tilers, and many others. Wives commonly work at their husbands’ crafts, and when a man dies his widow carries on the trade. Daughters not infrequently learn their father’s craft along with their brothers. In the countryside girls hire out as farm workers. The lady of the manor takes charge of the estate while her husband is off to war, Crusade, or pilgrimage, and wives run businesses while their husbands are away.
    Women do suffer from an inequity in respect to wages, which are lower than men’s for the same work. An English treatise on husbandry says, “If this is a manor where there is no dairy, it is always good to have a woman there at much less cost than a man.”
    Politically, women have no voice. They do not sit on the Town Council or in the courts, or serve as provosts or officials. Basically, this is because they do not bear arms. Yet women play political roles, often with distinction—Empress Matilda of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen Blanche of France, Countess Jeanne of Flanders, Blanche of Champagne, and many more. Countess Marie, wife of Henry the Generous, was asked to arbitrate claims between the churches of St.-Etienne and St.-Loup, and with her brother-in-law, William of the White Hands, archbishop of Reims, to decide important cases, including the seigneury of Vertus. In war, or at least sieges, women often play the heroine.
    Women occupy positions of power and influence in the Church. The abbess of a convent such as Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains 5 is invested with important executive responsibilities. Usually such posts are accorded to ladies of high rank, like Alix de Villehardouin, daughter of the marshal of Champagne. Abbesses are not afraid to assert their rights. A few years hence an abbess of Notre-Dame, Odette de Pougy, will defy the Pope’s excommunication and lead a party of armed men to defend what she regards as the rights of her abbey. This establishment owes its extraordinary prestige to its ancient origins, which are believed to date from the third century. The abbess actually enjoys rights over the bishop of Troyes. When a new bishop is installed, he must lead a procession to the abbey, mounted on a palfrey that is handed over, saddle included, to the abbess’s stable. Inside the convent, the bishop kneels and receives cross, mitre, and prayer book from the abbess’s hands. He recites an oath: “I…bishop of Troyes, swear to observe the rights, franchises, liberties, and privileges of this convent of Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains, with the help of God and his holy saints.” The bishop spends the night in the convent and is given as a gift the bed in which he has slept, with all its furnishings. Only the next day does his installation as bishop take place in the cathedral.
    Women achieve distinction outside the cloister, too. Marie de France is the most gifted woman poet of the Middle Ages, and “wise Héloise” the most noteworthy bluestocking, but there are many more. The contemporary scholar Albert the Great, debating whether the Virgin Mary knew the seven liberal arts, resolves the question affirmatively.
    The cult of Mary serves to elevate the image of women and to counterbalance the misogyny of ascetic preachers who bestow such epithets as “man’s confounder,” “mad beast,” “stinking rose,” “sad paradise,” “sweet venom,” “luscious sin,”