What did historians use to learn about the lives of women in the middle ages?

Answer 1

Historians have a number of sources to draw from.

First off, there are things written by the people themselves. Though there were few medieval women whose writings survive, there are a few who commented on their lives in ways that are valuable to the historian. Among these were Anna Comnena, Hildegard of Bingen, and Julian of Norwich. For example, Julian of Norwich, whose writings are mostly of religious visions, describes herself in various ways, including as unlettered. Since she was writing her visions herself, the term meant something different from illiterate, and since she was a common woman, her writings are indicative of the fact that some common women were literate.

Next, there are things written by people of the times; in this case, that means mostly fiction intended to be believable, as in the case of the Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. There are portraits of a number of women in this book, and there are observations about them that are valuable. For example the Wife of Bath is a woman who has been married several times to men of varing social status, and the fact that Chaucer would portray such a person tells us something.

Evidence of fantastic fiction, which is not intended to be believable, such as the stories of the Knights of the Round Table, have little of value in them, but incidental material in it, such as comments on the clothes or habits of women, can be valuable.

There are histories of a number of important medieval women, from Cynethryth and Ethelfleda to Eleanor of Aquitaine and Queen Margaret I of Denmark. These histories, however, even if they are accurate, have to be taken as unindicative of the situation of women in general.

There are laws, and these reveal a lot. For example, buried among the language of the legal codes of such places as Frisia and Lombardy is a set of prescribed fines for doing such things as molesting a woman. One such legal code places a fine of 72 pence, about two month's wages for a working man of the time, for lifting a woman's hat to expose her head to view. Other legal codes, which prescribe weregeld or fines for causing unlawful death of a person related to the person's rank, prescribe fines for causing the death of a woman ranging from half to double that of a man of equal rank. We can learn a lot from examining such things.

I have read that an extant set of contracts relating to the construction of a church revealed that about half the skilled carpenters and masons of the particular time and place were women.

Books illustrated in the Middle Ages and sculpture used to decorate churches tell us what people wore. They go further than just telling us the ways medieval people saw their saints, because they show men and women at work and performing other daily activities. I have seen a medieval picture, illustrating a book, in which people feasting at a public bath. They sat in bathtubs, one couple in each tub, with a long plank of food running down the middle of a group of tubs set side by side. They wore only their jewelry. We might learn from this that women's jewelry was different from men's. Or we might conclude that our ideas of the lives of women of the Middle Ages is different from what it they were really like.

Estate inventories of things owned by people who died are examples of a number of different things written at the time that tell us stories. For example, people who lived in towns were very unlikely to own cooking impliments. This tells us that at a time in the Middle Ages, people who lived in towns tended to buy prepared meals. The people who cooked these meals were of a class of merchants who are largely unrecorded in history.

Artifacts are of enormous value. There is a lot to be told from the handiwork of women. The Bayeaux Tapestry tells us more than just how medieval people viewed The Battle of Hastings. The evidence from the tapestry tells us who made it, based on the stitches they used - it was probably made by Anglo-Saxon artists who did such work professionally, and were renowned for such work all over Western Europe.

But simpler and much more mundane artifacts also tell their stories, and the ability to derive facts from such things as pottery is well known. You can also learn a lot just by sitting down on a medieval pew in a church, where such pews still remain. People were smaller in those days.