#Women in medieval europe tv#

The history of gender relations might be more accurately painted as a tug of war between the sexes But when it comes to the history of gender relations, the opposite is true: storytellers insist on portraying women as more oppressed than they actually were. Most of our historical biases tend to run in the other direction: we assume the past was like the present. “I wanted my books to be strongly grounded in history and to show what medieval society was like.” Oddly enough, this didn’t apply to female body hair (or the dragons).

#Women in medieval europe tv#

The Game of Thrones author George RR Martin once defended the TV series’ burlesque maltreatment of women on the grounds of realism. This applies particularly to the fantasy genre, which aside from the odd preternaturally “feisty” female character, tends to portray the period as, well, a misogynistic fantasy. It is often those who push back against them who get accused of “historical revisionism”. (In fact the average 13th-century woman got married somewhere between the ages of 22 and 25.)īut we cling tight to these ideas. In her 2022 cinematic romp, Catherine called Birdy, for example, Lena Dunham puts Sylvia Pankhurst-esque speeches into the mouth of her 13th-century protagonist, while portraying her impending marriage – at 14 – as normal for the period. Even writers who seem desperate for a “feminist take” on the period tend to ignore the angle staring them right in the face. Where poorer women are mentioned, glancingly, they are pitied as prostitutes or rape victims.

We endlessly retread the lives of oppressed noblewomen, and ignore their secretly empowered lower-order sisters. (Victorian women were in many respects more socially repressed than their 12th-century forebears.)īut modern storytellers are also guilty of sexist revisionism. Why does this feel like new information? Much of what we think we know about medieval times was invented by the Victorians, who had an artistic obsession with the period, and through poetry and endless retellings of the myth of King Arthur managed somehow to permanently infuse their own sexual politics into it. When it comes to the history of gender relations, storytellers portray women as more oppressed than they actually were In the 13th century seeing visions and hearing voices might get a woman sainted a hundred years later she’d more likely be burned at the stake. They confined their women to the home, putting them at the financial mercy of men. As economic power shifted, the emerging middle classes began aping their betters. It was the Renaissance that vastly rolled back the rights of women. While it is true that aristocratic women were considered drastically inferior to their male equivalents – traded as property and kept as ornaments – women of the lower orders lived, relatively, in a sort of rough and ready empowerment. The vellum letter-books of the City of London, in which the doings of the capital from 1275 to 1509 were scribbled, detail female barbers, apothecaries, armourers, shipwrights and tailors as a matter of course. Chaucer depicted many such cheerfully domineering women.