Gone Medieval - Medieval Women with Eleanor Janega

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

What made for the ideal woman in the Middle Ages? In her new book The Once and Future Sex, Dr. Eleanor Janega looks at what beauty, sexuality, work and social status meant for medieval women. Despite the expectation of their primarily being mothers, they were also industrious farmers, brewers, textile workers, artists and artisans.In this episode of Gone Medieval, for International Women's Day on Wednesday 8 March, Dr. Cat Jarman finds out more from Dr. Janega  about an era that paved the way for new ideas about women’s nature, intellect and ability.This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. The 8th of March is International Women's Day, which of course gives us a great excuse here on Gone Medieval to delve into what we know about women and women's roles in the medieval world. What were the sort of expectations that were placed on them by their contemporary? society. What could they actually do and how did they live? What were they supposed to look like and how were they meant to behave? And importantly, does any of that actually matter to us in our society today? So I have the perfect person, of course, to come and talk to me about

this. My guest for today's episode is someone I've spoken to before on the podcast. I've got medievalist Dr. Eleanor Janager who's based at the London School of Economics. Talk to me today. Because Eleanor has a brand new book out just now, which is absolutely brilliant on this topic. It's called The Ones and Future Sex, Going Medieval on Women's Role's in Society. So for Women's Day, I thought, why not drag Eleanor back and talk to us? So welcome back to the studio, Eleanor. Thank you so much for having me, Kat. It's such a delight. And congratulations on the book, which I very much enjoyed reading, I have to say.

Thank you so much. It's really exciting for it to be out in the world. after, I think, years of it living in my head and more years of writing it. Yeah, it's like that, isn't it? You just sort of spend all this time thinking about it, and then it's a word document for a while, and then all of a sudden it's a real product, which is great. But I do have to ask you, though, why did you write this book? Is this something that we need today?

Ah, that's a question that I ask myself every time I write a book in the first place. Why did I do this? But for me, I think that it's actually important to have a book like this, out in the world because the way that oftentimes people talk about our society and women is as though we are on this permanent path towards things getting better. Things were bad in the past and we're always working towards a more equitable society where women have greater freedoms. And perhaps people will add onto this as an addendum except in the medieval period when things got much worse because it was very religious. And so essentially people just ignore women's roles

in the Middle Ages because they are so sure of what they're going to see if they go look at it that they just don't even bother doing it at all. And as a result, sometimes I think you can be forgiven for thinking that the medieval world is populated by about two women. You got Eleanor of Aquitaine, Hildegard of Bingin, and there you go, maybe Heligarne, something like that. So people just have this inability to know about these things. And actually when you start delving into the whole thing, you realize that actually certain things for women, were much better, I would argue, than they are, for example, in the early modern period, which is a pretty dark time, actually, for women. And also, women are doing all kinds of really

interesting things that people don't assume that they are. Having said that, there are these kind of almost, I won't say unchangeable because they change all the time, but there are certain things that women are dealing with constantly. So policing of the way that they look, the assumption that what they're going to do in society is essentially be a wife and mother, and also a real desire to police their sexuality. So all of this kind of comes out to making a really complex picture of the Middle Ages. And I think that it's one that really troubles obvious narratives about what it's like to be a woman and simply just doesn't get said to people very often. Now we're going to be talking about the content of your book today. And you go into so many

different things about not just what women could actually do practically, what sort of roles of work they did, but also a lot about what contemporary medieval society, the water about women's, what they were meant to do, how they were meant to behave, what they were meant to look like and all of that. But you start out with something I really enjoyed reading, which was to discuss actually where those ideas came from in the first place. And you make the point that those ways of seeing women and thinking about women in their society didn't just sort of come out as a blue and ready form, but they were building on earlier sources. So I wondered if you could talk us through. What were the sources that the medieval minds and thinkers

and writers, we're basing it all on. Yeah, see, what really surprises a lot of people if they don't work with medieval sources very often is actually how so much of this is ancient. Aristotle is as much to blame as Thomas Aquinas is for the ways that people thought about women in the Middle Ages. The way that they're thinking about knowledge is very much as though it's a constant process of attempting to rebuild the perfect knowledge that existed in the Garden of Eden. So, one of the things that they really like to do is go back to ancient thinkers, ancient philosophers, because ancient philosophers existed closer in time to the Garden of Eden, so they have a more perfect knowledge. And they've got real reverence for these ideas. So if they want to know something that they consider to be a great

and universal truth, they're going to say, oh, you've got to go back to ancient thinkers to learn more about this. Plato, Aristotle, even physicians like Galen or people from out of the Hippocratic school, not to say Hippocrates himself, individuals like this, really build up ideas about what it is to be a woman for medieval people. And for them, what it is to be a woman is you're not a man. So that's step one, right? Because for them, the sort of a default character of a human is a man and that all humans in a kind of ideal world would be a man. So for example, Aristotle uses this in his own philosophy to say, men are the standard and that's what would happen ordinarily. But women sort of happen when something goes wrong.

during gestation. So something happens and then women mutate out of men. And he uses the kind of mutation or change quite often where he'll call women malformed men or sometimes inside out men as well. And the conception of women being inside out is really common across the ancient past. For example, the physician Galen, he says, oh yeah, the way to think about a woman is she's an inside out man because if you look at the genitals, essentially the vagina is a turned inside out penis. and the scrotum would then become the uterus, and the testicles would become your egg sacks. And he's not particularly wrong. We do know with how sexual dimorphism works, that these are things that change during gestation.

But we know now that the opposite is actually true. Everyone starts off as female and something happens and sometimes they become male. And sure, those things do change. But the way that they see it in the ancient past is women are just secretive, aren't they? these inside out men and there's all these things about them that you can't see that are internal. And as a result, women are these kind of suspicious men, is how it works out. So women aren't like the opposite of everything that's good about a man. And men, because they are the default, are good.

Men are stoic and they're ideal citizens and they're logical and they can overcome the kind of mental anguish that women fall prey to. And so women, as a result, are defined as being not men. So they're emotional and they're silly. and Aristotle says they're more a retentive of memory, which he says is a bad thing. And they're overly sexual and they are just silly. So women as a result can never be what men are. A medieval people love this, right? So medieval people are like, yes, absolutely. And who am I to contradict Aristotle, who they all have this great reverence for? But what I say the kind of thing about medieval thinking you have to understand is that it's the equivalent of doing improvisational theater. So the rule in improvisational theater is you always say yes and, right? So medieval people take everything from the classical past and they say yes and Christianity.

So then you slap some Christianity on the top. And you will notice if you go and look at the book of Genesis, right? Not a big difference in terms of thinking about women where it's God made Adam. I was like, congratulations, that's what a human is. But Adam gets a bit bored. And so God says, I guess I'm going to make a woman. And women are this kind of afterthought that are formed for men and they are therefore not men. It's a sort of dark mirror where, you know, everything is inverted.

Women are all the bad things, right? Because Eve also falls prey to temptation. She starts talking to snakes. She eats the fruit of the tree of knowledge. And this is what causes the downfall of men. So Christians can say, again, look, women are so easily swayed. You can talk them into anything. Women aren't sufficiently, but they will go against what God tells them.

to do. Women are sexual, silly, just unsurious. These people who constantly have to be marshalled. And I think these are really important things to think about because there's this tendency to believe that it's always Christianity that is the reason why women are treated badly. And I'm like, I just really don't think Aristotle has my best interests at heart. I would say that. Yeah, I think that's such a good point because that is the thing that we all come back to, isn't it? That it must be the coming of Christianity and the church's influence on society that costs all these attitudes. And in some cases, as a mystery for women, but is that not really quite right then, would you say? Yeah, the church isn't exactly a champion for women, I wouldn't say that, but there are all of these ideas about women as

these kind of less than that had already existed for thousands of years before the church ever came along, and all the church does is capitalize on those extant ideas. And indeed, there are certain things that the church does, which people are quite surprised to learn about it if they go dig into it. For example, in the medieval period, the church is really much more comfortable for example, with abortion than the modern church is. This is largely because the medieval world has absolutely no possibility for birth control, really, other than abortion. And so for the church, you got about a three-month grace period in the first trimester, and they're like, that's nobody's favorite thing. I'm not inviting you to go out for an abortion to celebrate on a Saturday night.

You know, that's not what they think. But they do think if what is going to happen is you really can't be pregnant, then I'd prefer that you do that than the alternative, which is infanticide in the medieval period, which is quite right. You can see the medieval church really thinking about issues for women and issues for women's bodily autonomy and how you're going to approach these things in a really interesting way. Similarly, you also see certain ideas and assumptions. People think that ideas about women's bodies in the medieval period really suffered because dissection is banned by the church. And indeed, in the classical period, dissection was banned. Galen, when he's talking about how women are inside out men, is doing work on pigs in order to understand that, because ancient people didn't want you

cutting open corpses because they thought malhumors would come out of them and poison everything. In some places, people would say, oh yeah, there's a dissection ban. Please don't figure out what's going on with women. At other times, for example, in the Holy Roman Empire, it would be mandated that you have to have a certain number of dissections in order to treat physicians so that they know what a wound looks like, right? So there are all these interesting myths about why these ideas about women come about that are nothing but myths. And I think it's really helpful to unpack those. Brilliant. And you do that really well in the book. I enjoyed reading a lot of that. But one of the things I wanted to move on to that you also write about is ideas of beauty and what that meant for women back in medieval society.

So I think that's one thing that we don't necessarily know what they would have thought at all. I mean, do we have much evidence, really, for what beauty standards were in medieval times? Interestingly, we do, but from the high medieval period onward, where it becomes an obsession to catalog and say exactly what a beauty is. And it's quite funny because if you look at ancient sources, once again, almost nothing is said about what is beautiful. We can take a look, for example, at statues and say, okay, there appears to be this sort of woman that people keep carving as Aphrodite, so I guess they must have thought that was beautiful. Okay. But anything that's written down, there's this big sort of thing in ancient text. which is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder

and you can't really categorize it. And this holds true for literary sources in the earlier medieval period until you hit about the 12th century and what we call the 12th century Renaissance. And suddenly there's this huge interest in explaining how it is you're going to write things. And medieval people love a set of rules.

So there's a couple of guys who come along, Jafria Vinsoff being one, and he writes all about how it is you describe a beautiful woman in poetry. And he makes rules for this And it's that so women, you scan from the head to the toes. This is how you would describe people in a poem. They are blonde.

They have incredibly white skin. They have eyebrows that are not a monobrow. They're really not keen on a monobrow. And eyebrows should also be black, which is interesting. So you want blonde hair, black eyebrows. Eyes eventually become gray is what they settle on as the prettiest eye color. Your cheeks are like roses. Your teeth are white and even.

Your breath smells like high. honey, you have a mouth like a rosebud, and then you have a neck like a swan, small shoulders, high tight breasts, a delicious little belly, thick thighs, long legs, and tiny little feet. And this is such a powerful description that everyone is, yes, absolutely, that's a hot woman. To the point where you just will not see women described as literally anything else, unless they are occasionally being described from life. And then sometimes they'll be like, yeah, but she's a brunette, a shame. But if you look at medieval art and medieval images of women from the high to late medieval period,

they literally all look like this. To the point that, you know, as I include in the book, the Ghent Altarpiece, which is one of the best paintings of all time. But it shows this scene at the end of the world where all of the saints and martyrs come out to worship the Lamb of God. And it's got a big parade of all of the Virgin Martyrs in the background. And the only way that you can tell them apart is that Agnes is holding a lot. her lamb and Barbara's holding her tower and Catherine is wearing a dress that has wheels on it. But otherwise, they're completely interchangeable. They're blonde. They have a high forehead.

They have all of the things that Jeffrey says is what makes a woman hot. So they're completely interchangeable. Okay, there's this one way to be hot for hundreds and hundreds of years. That's interesting. But at the same time, you see all this stuff crop up in medieval literature where they're like, and I swear to God, ladies, if you try to look like this, you are going to hell. If you pluck your eyebrows so you don't have a monobrow or pluck your forehead because they really like a very high forehead, there are hell visions that people have of women in hell who are having their foreheads and eyebrows gnawed on by demons because God hates that you try to do that. Wearing makeup means that you are like Jezebel. Presumably you are like a murderous, terrible person.

It's a bit awful, right? And so the thing is that you're just supposed to naturally live up to this incredibly constrained, really rigid idea of what beauty is, and you're supposed to be completely unaware of it, but everyone demands it of you. I find that really interesting because I think women now will really relate to that. Obviously, we have an incredibly different idea of what beauty is. If you see images of beautiful medieval women online, people will say, why is she pregnant? That's the thing that I always get. I was like, oh, no, she's not pregnant, but she's got a pot belly, which is really sexy. And it's just completely different. And I think that is just really worth highlighting how we completely change what we think is beautiful all the time. But the thing

that we keep the same is, I swear to God, women, you better be like this thing, but completely effortlessly. That's really, really interesting. And is this something that seems to be the case for all parts of society, or is it an elite thing? Is it mainly sort of wealthy women who are expected to look like this? And for peasants, maybe it's not so important. Or how does that work? This is a great question, because essentially this beauty ideal favors the wealthy. Having white skin, that means you're not a peasant, right? Because you're not out in the field working all day in the sun in all weather. Having small breasts also favors the wealthy because wealthy women oftentimes have wet nurses, for example.

So if they have a child, they just bind their breasts up. They hand the child over to someone else and then it keeps your breasts smaller and higher, which is what they really like. Having a pot belly is a lot easier if you're not doing manual labor or 12 hours a day. and if you have access to things like white bread or a lot of meat, which wealthy people do. So basically, all of these are standards that simply apply to the wealthy. Now, ideally, a peasant girl would look like this as well. But again, there is this, you better not try to accomplish that ideal.

So, for example, we see Chaucer, one of the bigger jerks for the Middle Ages, write about women from the lower ends of society. So Allison, one of his characters in the Canterbury Tales, lives up to this ideal. but she's doing it on purpose. So she plucks her eyebrows and she wears lipstick and she wears clothes that accentuate the fact that she's got a small waist and a pot belly. And this is brought out to show us that she's foolish and it doesn't matter if she is beautiful. She's not a real quality woman. So there's a real class idea about what it means to be beautiful and to the point that women from the lower ends of society can't ever be truly beautiful because it's assumed. that it's contrived on their end. Whereas noble women, for example, who don't necessarily need to go outside all the time are seen to be doing this naturally, right?

So you're always going to find poor women are in the wrong on this one. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon? Without the bra. You can expect answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from History Hit, Patented History of Inventions.

Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians, and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to Patented History of Inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. Now, we need to move on to talk a little bit more about relationships and the topic that we talked about before on this podcast. which is attitudes to sex in the Middle Ages, and especially now in terms of your current book, attitudes towards women having sex and what specifically they were expected to do or not to do

and think about it. So let's move on to that. I mean, first of all, was the general idea that sex was a sinful thing and that women shouldn't really be having sex unless they absolutely had to? Yes, absolutely. The way that people...

think about sex is that sex is a direct result of the fall of man. St. Augustine says that when Eve bites into the apple and Adam bites into the apple, the thing that happens, the knowledge that they get about being naked is actually sexual. So they suddenly realize that they're naked and they're turned on by it. And suddenly they realize that sex is sexy. Whereas if the fall of man had never happened, sex would exist, but no one would find it sexy. It would be like shaking hands. And then that would be how you got people. because sex exists is because women are sinful. So in the first place, women are on the hook for sexuality in the first place, which is perceived of as being bad. And the only time that sex is seen as being acceptable is between married individuals who are specifically attempting to procreate.

And then that's the only time it's all right. And then even in an ideal world, you wouldn't do that. In an ideal world, you'd join the church and you would be a virgin for life. and that would be the thing that God really likes. But the church understands that most people aren't up to that marriage is the way to get around that. But there are all kinds of rules from the church's point of view about what you should do on top of that. For example, don't have sex on Sundays. You can't have sex during Lent or Advent.

You can't have sex on Wednesdays because you're supposed to be giving confession on Wednesday. Things of this nature. You can't be pregnant. You can't be on your period. You can't be breastfeeding. You can't be all of these things that make conception less less. And then you'll also note within this, so for example, older couples are not supposed to be having sex. Any woman who's been through the menopause, she's out of the game. That's it, because there's not

going to be an acceptable way of you having sex. So you've got this really short window of time in which it's okay. And basically, because women are seen as being responsible for sex, and also women are the bad gender. So good men who are the ideal human, they can do things like restrain themselves and join the church and not have sex. But women are bad, so they can't do that. And as a result, a big way that sexuality is looked at is just reining in women and just policing women who are these overly sexual creatures that require men to look out for them so that they just don't go around shagging everything in sight. Like to the point where it's very much a father's lock up your daughter's kind of deal. And women's sexuality is perceived as ideally being controlled by man and

passing from the control of one man to another. So, you know, you are controlled by your father when you're a girl and then eventually you get married and then it's your husband's job to look after you. But you have to be very much looked after because it's presumed that you're just going to try to shag anybody who shows up. And that's just how women are because sex is bad and so women like it. It's as simple as that. And so does that mean then that even in those few circumstances where it's okay, so you're married woman and all of that, in that context, Are women allowed to want and enjoy sex? Or is it meant to be just a sort of practical thing, serving a purpose?

So you're allowed to want sex, provided that it is reasonable to do, quote, unquote. There's this conception, which is called the marital debt, which is that when you marry someone, they have a right to ask for you to have sex with them in reasonable circumstances. Now, the reasonable circumstances are everything I just noted. You know, it can't be Saturday morning and you're in an empty church together and you can't say, how about it, you know, while you're also on your period, right? That would just be an outrage and completely unthinkable. If it's a Tuesday night and you're at home with your husband and you're in bed and no one can see you anything, fine. You're allowed to do that. Having said that, this assumption of desire is one that needs to be really constrained, according to them. So Thomas Aquinas is really big on this. He says it's absolutely fine to be having sex in a marital context in order to have children. But it needs to be as unsexy as possible. He's got this big thing about how there should be no lascivious kissing. You shouldn't be naked. That's like a big one because that's simply too sexy. And you shouldn't be caressing each other or doing anything like that. It should

just be insert tab A into slot B and then just get out of there as quickly as possible. And it is really seen as like the ideal is keep pleasure to a minimum. And pleasure is an issue. Pleasure is a problem and pleasure needs to be constrained because that pleasure is a result of the downfall of man. And it can trick you into having more sex. The idea is that the more sex you have, the more sex you want. And then if you have too much sex, then you become stupid and depleted. And it takes away from men. And also, it makes women more like men because women are seen as being interested in sex because they're cold and wet, whereas men are hot and dry. So the more sex they have, the warmer they become and the more like men. And then it's just madness out here, right? So there's this real desire to

keep a watch on it and keep it constrained and make sure that pleasure is kept to a minimum. And I think this also leads to some questions about things like adultery. And what I'm particularly interested in is how society treated those who were unfaithful and had sex and relationships outside of marriage. And how is that different for men and women? Were they treated differently? The woman was found to be treated differently. The woman was found to be cheating on her husband. Was that different from a man or what sort of happened? Yeah, so neither is good. Fair enough. But we see, for example, actual court cases about this. So for example, in late medieval Italy, this is something that you could take to court if your spouse cheats on you. And there are

fines then that are imparted to that spouse if they are found to have definitely been engaging in adultery. But the fines for men are much lower than the fines for women. So the fines from women are incredibly high. And it usually is also said, well, it has to come out of the woman's dowry, which is to say like the money that she controls so that nothing necessarily happens to your husband. And that kind of gives you a hint of what's going on here. For example, men cheating, sure, that's bad. It's a sin. But it doesn't endanger the conception of the kind of linear passage of property from one individual to another. So the worry about women cheating is that you'll have a mother man's child, essentially. And the entire point,

of marriage in the medieval period is just, it's a going business concern. That's what it's for. It's for making children, passing property on, and it is a business arrangement, which is why people were cheating a lot. If you're just married to someone because it's a management decision, then, you know, other people are going to be looking pretty good. But at the very high echelons of society, this really comes into play. For example, if we look at courtly love literature, which is written all about nobles, making eyes at each other essentially, everyone in courtly love literature is usually married. Women are married. The men are unmarried, but women are married. And so there's a lot of illusion in courtly love literature to having forms of sex that will not result

in pregnancy. The Roman de la Rose is a bestseller of the medieval period in terms of courtly love literature. And it is a meditation on romance, but it's also a reference to oral sex. There is this kind of thing we all know that we're cheating on each other because nobody is attracted to their husband or wife. But there are limitations. You can't go around having a full penis and vagina sex with someone that you are not married to. And so we see this compounded in literature, for example, Arthuriana, right? So when Guinevere and Lancelot have sex, that's what brings about the fall of Camelot. So there's a line of when it's okay, but that's secular, right? The church says a lot of things about sex and pretty much nobody listens to them. Let's put it that way.

you have to really read between the lines to understand what's going on. And even when I say, oh, this courtly love literature and everyone's kind of cheating on each other, that's fine. But court cases exist where you get in trouble if you're cheating, right? So all of these things can be true at once. Cheating is probably going on to a really extensive point. But at the same time, there's plenty of people who are not going to be getting involved in that because there's real world financial consequences to it.

So I think this also brings us over then to this idea of marriage and the roles, women, what you could do and all of that. And we do tend to have this idea, I think, that in medieval society, the main task, if you were a woman, the main thing you did was to get married and have babies and be a mother. Is that true? Was that the sort of main expectation of you if you were born in the Middle Ages? Yeah, this one is true. Yeah, the thing about women is that they are potential wives and mothers, and that is the thing. And you can see all of the devotion to the Virgin Mary is like coming through this where there's a real, reification of this role for women and it is just seen as incredibly important and powerful.

And just the assumption is if you're born a woman, someday you're going to be somebody's wife and mother and that's going to be the thing about you. Sure, there's nuns, great, but there's a lot less of a push for women entering the religious professions than men, although it does exist. So the assumption is that you're going to be a mother, you're going to have children, you're going to raise the children. And if you think that women in the medieval period were really responsible on their own for the raising of children, you're absolutely bang on. This is one of these things where, yeah, you're right.

Like pretty much everything that you think is happening. And we can tell from descriptions of like women's work and women's lives that there's all kinds of things that women are doing for a job. But it's always on top of the job of mothering, which is seen as being completely separate to a fathering. And now fathers are there. Fathers are present. Having a father who raises you is certainly a thing. He is not feeding the baby when it cried. There are all kinds of important roles for men, but this is just not what's going on.

It's grim when you read a lot about it because having children is so dangerous, basically, before the 19th century, even into the 20th century is when it gets a bit safer. And even now, it's quite dangerous. So people die having children all the time. But medieval people are very aware of this. They're aware of the fact that it is a danger to have children because women, Women just die in childbirth all the time. Babies die all the time. So you're taking your life into your own hands as a result of this expectation. And I think that really has to be highlighted because when medieval people talk about having children, you understand why we say labor to describe the process of giving birth. Because medieval people were like, oh, it's horrible and it's work and it's dangerous. And there are all these awful things about it. And this is a form of work that women do. And I think that's actually really valuable because I think now we have this really sanitized idea of birth where it's like, oh, it's all beautiful.

And you just go and you have a quasi-religious experience and then, oh, there's your beautiful baby when, you know, the truth is actually pretty horrific. Absolutely. I think that's a very good point having had two children on my own. I can completely agree with a medieval view on that one. But in terms of other things then, so obviously women are doing other jobs. This isn't the only thing, as you've just pointed out. I'm interested to hear, are there any specific jobs? jobs and roles that were typically women, so any professions or any certain things, apart of a mother that women would be expected to do? Yeah, there's pretty much no profession or anything that happens in the medieval period that women don't do, even to the point that women are soldiers or guardsmen and do martial things. It's not common, but it happens. So we find women

basically doing every form of work that there is. Now, granted, the majority of women are peasants. 80 to 85% of the European population are just farming. When you're out there on a farm, women are doing basically everything that men are doing down to the plowing. Now, it's more likely if you've got a large family or you've got a lot of people on the farm that women aren't going to be involved in plowing, but there's plenty of women with farms of their own and they get the plow out. That's fine. But there are jobs in terms of farming that are seen as being more feminine. So, for example, animal husbandry, looking after cows. So dairy work is usually women's work. Planting is more likely to be women's work. And then there are all like the household chores, which we say,

oh, chores, of course that's women's work. But you have to understand how difficult they were in the medieval period. Like doing laundry, oh my lord, it sounds awful because the schlep all of their cloth down to a river. Before that, you have to soak it all in eggshells and lie. And then you're taking it out to the river and beating it. And then you've got to put it on a bush. These things take hours. It's awful. Then on top of that, let's consider the fact that, oh, you want clothing? Women make the clothing. Like down to the, if you're making things out of linen, they grow the flax, spin the flax into thread, weave the flax into cloth, then cut the cloth out. I'm talking absolutely like roots to dress. They've done everything, including dying. So there's these things

that we just don't think of. In terms of professions that are going on in cities, women are also doing everything. So it's a really interesting one because we tend to think of guilds. There's somewhere between a union and a protection racket, they make sure that people get paid well for their work, but also they mean that not everyone can become, I don't know, a grocer. And so women do the trade that are involved in guilds all the time, especially as wives. They know the ins and outs of being a grocer. But there's also this expectation in professional context that women do the books. Bookkeeping and mathematics is like very specifically a job for wives. And so women are always expected to look at the money in addition to doing the craft. Then on top of that, there are a few

guilds that are expressly for women. For example, silk making is feminine. And that is really interesting because it's an incredibly lucrative trade. You can make absolutely scads of money by making silk, and it is just for women, which is interesting. No one ever really goes into it. It's just always accepted that women are the ones who make silk, which I find quite interesting. But women can also share in varying professions. So, for example, in Paris, the Guild of Bathkeepers is pretty much 50-50. If you own a bathhouse, you may be a woman. But then there are these glass ceilings. It's not just a regular ceiling. It's not glass. Because you can own a bathhouse and you can be in the guild and that's fine. But the upper echelons of the guild are all men and

women can never sit on like the board of directors is the idea. Then at the very top of society, I think it's really important to keep in mind that being a noble person, being a queen, that's a job. And they're involved in really high level diplomacy, moving messages back and forth between countries and all these really interesting kinds of soft power that queens and noble women possess a lot of times negotiating with the church, for example, or rubbing along between peasants and the nobility. So for example, women are often in charge of the household, the noble houses. And that's like being a manager. It's like running a hotel. You've got tons of staff working under you. And women are often the ones who check in on the serfs and are like, how's the harvest coming?

because you owe a tax of whatever on it because that's bookkeeping, right? So there are all these things that women are involved in. So one of the reasons why you get married is because women are workers and then you've got another person in the house who's helping you with your trade and also doing a lot of the things that you don't want to think about. You get them just as much as a bookkeeper as you do as a mother. I think you bring out so many important points there and actually in your book as well you go through quite a lot more and I would love to talk to you about all of them. but I know we're going to run out of time. So I'm just going to have to refer people to read your book themselves.

Neatly there, little plug. But I wanted to just circle back to where we started, actually, when I asked you about why you wrote this. And a little bit more about, you know, our attitudes and these ideas that we have and, you know, why they've passed on. So from all of that, which I think, you know, you made such a good point. There's so many things that I think people aren't really aware of.

But how have those myths and ideas or, you know, knowledge or lack of knowledge of this medieval world and women in the medieval world, how they've sort of come down to us? And where are we, where we are today, do you think? Now, I find this to be really meditation because I think that, sure, there's some things that have stayed the same. Like, largely, we think that women

are going to be wives and mothers still. That is the expectation of women when they are born. But we think that, for example, women in the workplace is this new phenomenon when actually they've been there the whole time, thanks very much. And looking, for example, at beauty standards

where there's this completely different, beauty standard, but it's incredibly rigid. But looking at sexual expectations, this is an interesting one, right, because it's so completely different to what we think now. The point of the book and talking about where these ideas come from and how they shook down for medieval women is that you'll notice that we still treat women as second-class citizens. Men are still seen as the default. Men still have a kind of reign on the imagination of what a human should be. But the things we think about women and the justifications that we have for why women are not as good as men, why women need to be protected, why women need X, Y, Z are totally different from what the medieval

period thought. For beauty standards, I also think it's really important to talk about because when you see people talk about beauty standards now, there are all these people who are like, oh, yes, it's evolution. It's evolutionary psychology that I think that this fashion model is hot. and people have always thought that a woman like this are attractive. And it's like, no, they didn't. No, they didn't. This is not science. The fact that you think this woman is hot is cultural. And it's a cultural thing. You've been told from an early age, this is a beautiful woman and you've responded to that. If I show you a picture of a sexy woman in the middle ages, you are not going to think she's sexy. And this has nothing to do with evolution. It has to do with a social construct that we ask women to live up to. And the minute you look at sexual expectations, that's how you know these things are true. because we now are like, oh, women hate sex. That's the thing about women. You have to trick women into having sex with you by having a relationship with them. Although we still have the same disgust for women that we find to be sexual. So my point is that if we are looking at how ideas about women are constructed, if we go into the medieval period and we say, okay, here's all these ways that they make these ideas and how they say this is what women socially should be, then we understand that they are a social construct. And if we understand that ideas about are social constructs, we could just stop doing that. We could, at any point in time,

choose to just think that women are people and that there isn't something biologically different about them that means that you need to treat them as second class and protect them from the world and manage their sexuality or anything of this nature. So there's a real value into going to the past and looking at gender roles because it helps us to understand that ours

are just as equally a construct as they were when medieval people were doing it. Fantastic. Well, I think that's a brilliant place to end this, actually, because it really justifies exactly why you've written the book. So, Eleanor, thank you so much for coming back to the podcast and talking to me today. An absolute pleasure, Kat. Thank you so much for having me. So don't forget, the book is out now. So the author is Eleanor Janaga, and the book is called The Once and Future Sex, Going Medieval on Women's Role in Society.

So that brings us to the very end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. Don't forget that if you do need a little bit of extra medieval information in your life, sign up to our newsletter Medieval Mondays. Just find out how to subscribe to it in the notes below. And please do leave us a review or rate or rank us or comment wherever you listen and follow us, including on Spotify, because that really helps other people find us.

My co-host Matt Lewis will be here with the next episode. You've just listened to Gone Medieval from History Hit, And have a great week until you meet again.