Women in virtual landscapes
The women who appear in the Coroners’ Rolls are absolutely real; but in medieval art women featured in overt and covert visual and pictorial narratives that tell us something about both the real and imaginative landscapes that they inhabited.
In religious paintings and in the marginalia of books, they are busy fulfilling objectified roles. Peasant women are depicted in an idealised countryside, toiling at work that authors and illustrators thought it fitting for them to carry out; nuns are seen praying or reading; Madonnas cradle infants. The more genteel ladies of the court make music, pick flowers, play at lovemaking and backgammon and indulge in other suitably noble pursuits, while mermaids, hags and grotesques provoke, punish or suffer for all manner of sins. All medieval pictures carry complex suites of symbolic, non-literal meanings and for women a range of messages is carried in their dress, their attitude, their gestures, occupations and companions.In the brilliant manuscript known as the Très riches heures, commissioned by John, Duc de Berry≈ (1340–1416), a calendar of the months, whose backdrops are the duke’s own magnificent castles and palaces, begins with a New Year’s feast to which no women seem to have been invited. In February they appear, warming themselves by a roaring fire while their menfolk toil with axes in snowy woods or tend sheep huddled in their pens. In March’s countryside they are again absent while men plough, sow seed and plant vines. In April, noble ladies of the duke’s court are out in his gardens in all their finery, soaking up the springtime sunshine and the flattery of their menfolk. In May they mount their horses and, garlanded with spring flowers, attend their lords’ progress through their estates. At last, in June, women are shown working in the fields, their skirts hitched into their belts, raking hay while men mow grass in the background.
In July we see the back of a blue-dressed – and therefore virtuous∂ – woman shearing a sheep in company with her husband, while reapers cut corn behind them. August sees the noble ladies out hawking with the gentlemen of the court, one of them doubling up on her beau’s horse. Naked peasants swim in a lake in the discreet distance – the gap is understood to be as great socially as it is physically. September’s women are gathering grapes with men, while another carries a basket of goods on her head towards the duke’s Château de Saumur in the Loire Valley. In October, a plough horse is exhorted by its master while another man sows corn in the shadow of the Louvre palace. November is unmistakeably autumn; men drive pigs into the woods to fatten on acorns and beechnuts while the women have, perhaps, retreated indoors; who can say? In the last month of the year, it is the men who are out hunting with dogs. For the nobles of the court, then, working women played bit parts in their lives; they might notice them while they were riding through their lands but the labours of the dairy, hearth and weaving shed are literally and figuratively beneath their gaze. Gentlewomen have their restricted place, too: as decorations, as prospective marriage partners or lovers.A much more robust and proactive role is, very naturally, offered by the illustrators of Christine de Pizan’s fifteenth-century allegorical treatise Le Livre de la cite des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies),π in which Christine herself – always in a blue gown, with a white headdress – is seen reading and writing in her study or out on the building site of her imagined metropolis, trowel in hand: a deliberate artistic counterpoint to the idealised women who drift in and out of the psalters and breviaries. Here is the woman as thinker, designer, project manager and actor on a public stage. This is not so fantastical as the allegory suggests: women in medieval towns frequently found work on building sites.
In the Luttrell Psalter, an illuminated English book of the fourteenth century, women are variously promiscuous or chaste, melancholy, weak, grotesque and genteel: as saints, virgin mothers, virtuous wives, fallen daughters or idealised peasants. The lady wearing a widow’s hood and kneeling with a red squirrel at her feet might be a playful innocent; but to medieval eyes the image was lewd: the woman’s posture sexually provocative, the squirrel a symbol of promiscuity. In the same manuscript, a woman braiding her hair looks into a mirror held up by her maid: the former is to be read as a woman of sinful vanity – that is to say, Eve; the latter as modest and chaste: a proxy for the Virgin Mary.
In The World of the Luttrell Psalter, the manuscript expert Professor Michelle Brown opens modern eyes to the coded messages embedded in both text and imagery by the book’s commissioning patron, Sir Geoffrey Luttrell III (1276–1345). Both the widow and the woman braiding her hair, and a mermaid also portrayed in the psalter shamelessly brandishing a mirror and comb, are thought to be depictions of Geoffrey’s daughter Elizabeth. In 1309, when she was eleven years old, she was living in fosterage with the family of Sir Walter Gloucester, to whose son she was betrothed. Around this time, or shortly thereafter, a young cleric called Thomas of Ellerker – he appears in the same scene as the woman with uncovered hair and her maid, symbolically catching a bird with a net on a long pole while his clerical tonsure grows stubbly – seduced and kidnapped her. Large sums of money changed hands; the young man was bought off and the original marriage contracted successfully – at least, so far as the family was concerned. Elizabeth was widowed in 1323; her appearance in the book seems to be intended as a cautionary tale, perhaps for other Luttrell girls wanting to avoid Aunt Lizzie’s fate. The temptations and dangers of sexual desire are also depicted in a scene that takes place within an enclosed garden, where a young nobleman and -woman play at backgammon – and love – flirting over their gaming counters in a scene that brings to mind the actors Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen playing sexually charged chess in The Thomas Crown Affair: all is risk and excitement, strategy and counter-strategy, entrapment and escape; mate and checkmate.
The illustrations in the Luttrell Psalter are, above all, designed to accompany psalms. Geoffrey Luttrell’s wife, Agnes, and his daughter-in-law, Beatrice, sit at his feasting table in an image intended to draw humble parallels with the Last Supper and with Psalm 114 on the same page. Elsewhere a noblewoman, dashingly slender and seen only from behind, is perched on the shoulders of an acrobat while, from within a capital letter on the same page, a regal-looking lady looks askance at the pair. They are probably intended as references to Queen Isabella and Sir Roger Mortimer, lovers complicit in the overthrow and murder of Isabella’s homosexual husband, King Edward II, in 1327.
Even when apparently uncomplicated and authentic images of peasant women appear in the psalter, shown carrying grain to the mill or reaping corn in the fields, their presence is intended to convey the virtue of work and the lord’s bounty in the fertility of both women and the land – land, that is, whose spiritual shepherd is God and whose temporal lord is their proud knight, Sir Geoffrey Luttrell. An equally idealised female character, a widow baring her breast in woe as she is beaten about the head, is a victim of the barbarity of war.
It is only in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries with the rise of humanism and the Northern Renaissance that we see artists beginning to look away from explicitly religious imagery towards an interest in real people’s lives. The women portrayed by the Bruegels, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525–69) and Pieter the Younger (c.1564–1638), are townswomen and peasants: baxters, alewives, market traders and gardeners. They dance at weddings, shove unfaithful husbands into pigsties, gossip, kiss, laugh, suffer the pains of death and hunger; they cavort at carnival time and watch their children playing in the street or market place, scolding the naughty; above all, they inhabit credible landscapes of market places, fields, taverns and houses alongside the men who share their lives.
They drink with them, talk with them – not, perhaps, as equals but as partners in life’s trials and tribulations. Their smiles express the pleasures of life, rather than inherent sinfulness and moral vacuity. These are the women who appear in the Coroners’ Rolls and in the judgments of manorial courts. They enjoy the liberating possibilities of urban life. They are the women householders of the Paris tax records rather than those of the idealised fantasies of the nobility. In Bruegel’s paintings, even when their presence is literally proverbial, as in the Netherlandish Proverbs of 1559, women are as likely to be associated with persistence and determination as with gossip or deception. They are no more and no less virtuous than their male counterparts.
* See page 135.
† See page 121.
‡ See page 121.
§ Daedalus, father of the hubristic Icarus, was a skilled craftsman.
# Some scholars think that the first fictional work entitled to be called a novel was written by a female author, the Japanese courtier Fujiwara no Takato or, descriptively, Murasaki Shikibu (970s–?1020s), whose Tale of Genji is recognised as a masterpiece of romantic characterisation and of manners.
∫ See page 242.
Ω See page 170.
≈ He was the friend and patron of Christine de Pizan, whose story is told in chapter 6.
∂ In the Book of Numbers of the Old Testament, the people of Israel are to wear blue; the Virgin Mary was invariably painted wearing a blue gown in Renaissance art. Mary Magdalene, in contrast, wore the red of the ‘fallen woman’.
π See page 180.