Women and the Social Imagination in Medieval Europe (Book Review)

Social control is a preoccupation of [Barbara Hanawalt]'s Of Good and Ill Repute, but Hanawalt examines life on the other end of the social spectrum, in a period (the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) when the richer documentary record, and especially the thicker legal evidence, makes possible a more reliable reconstruction of everyday life for ordinary women in rural and urban space. While women appear throughout this volume (which, like [Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg]'s book, is comprised of separate essays, many published previously), feminist scholars are likely to be most directly engaged by chapters five through eight. These sections deftly comb sources as disparate as coroners' rolls and poetic narrative to expose the contours of daily existence. Records of accidents suggest that in the village, women's space was typically confined to the home and the village itself, where men's activities normally included the fields and forest (p.77). A comparison of the real and fictive anxieties of separation that faced urban artisans and their wives shows that women's real narratives revolved around the problems of managing the family business in the absence of a spouse and the uncertainty surrounding their distant husbands' fates, while `folktale' or popular narratives evinced both male concerns over the chastity of an unsupervised wife and, in an extraordinary version, women's delight in outwitting male challenges to female chastity and business acumen (pp.88-103). Stunningly, in this most stereotypically class-bound and socially static society, Hanawalt finds evidence that gender tramped class in the fictive space created by the poem (p.99). In one redaction, a carpenter's wife dupes three suitors, one of them a lord, who had propositioned her in her husband's absence; she takes their money but gives them nothing in return and forces them to do the women's work of preparing flax. When the lord's wife arrives, the two women mock the men for having assumed female roles and the lady even tells the carpenter's wife to keep the money (p. 100). It is a fantasy narrative set in the very real world of cloth production and housewifery. The research in this collection takes the reader directly to the texture of the ordinary person's ordinary day, no small achievement for a society half a millennium away from our own.