Women and the Medieval Church

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Thomas Feeny

Professor Pumphrey

History 208

13 April 2011

Women and the Medieval Church

Religion played a critical role in peoples lives during the middle ages. Unlike modern

times, ones religion was neither a private, nor personal choice. Both men and women of all

statuses were expected to hold religious beliefs. Christianity was the most practiced faith in

Western Europe during this period. The majority of women were Christian, yet they did not

wield significant influence within medieval society. Women were banned from seats in the

Christian hierarchy. Although the heads of nunneries possessed considerable power in early

medieval society, their authority was drastically reduced in later centuries.1 Not only did women

have a diminished role within the Church, but religious figures focused on Biblical teachings that

held women subordinate to men. Nunneries were extremely constricted and did not enjoy the

same privileges as monasteries. By the high middle ages, the Church had become an institution

that routinely restricted the opportunities of women in society.

The early Christian church offered women expanded opportunities after the death of

Jesus. In Christianitys early years, the informal leaders of small congregations were sometimes

women. However, their chances became restricted as the religion became more popular. As the

religion spread, churches were constructed to accommodate the larger congregations. The

professionals of the church who led the congregation became known as priests. All priests,

bishops, and archbishops were male. Women were prohibited from these positions, as well as

from becoming the Pope, or Bishop of Rome. The Patriarch of Constantinople was also

1Sandy Bardsley, Womens Roles in the Middle Ages (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 27.


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exclusively male. Consequently, women were left out of the hierarchy of the Christian church.

This had important ramifications because the Christian church held significant political power in

addition to its religious clout. Women lost out on additional opportunities within the political

realm of medieval society. This exclusion from very important seats within the Roman Catholic

Church exists to this day.2

Several important Christian figures expressed doubt towards the role of women within

the church. Odo, a tenth century abbot of Cluny, compared women to a sack of dung and

proclaimed that the highest virtue in a woman is not to wish to be seen. He believed that the

ideal woman was one who was securely locked out of sight and away from male temptation. The

Christian Church supported Biblical passages that oppressed women and viewed them as inferior

to men. Church reformers recalled Pauls teachings, which stated that women were not to have

authority over men. According to First Corinthians 14:34-45, Paul believed that women should

keep silence in the churches.3

He also stated that women have no right to preach and should

remain subordinate to their husbands. This led to the disbanding of double monasteries, which

housed both monks and nuns.4

Saint Jerome had little confidence in womens ability to act as good Christians. He

accused them as being spiritually weaker than men. However, he believed that one way that

women could overcome their weak and sinful nature was through chastity. Saint Paul also agreed

that virginity was preferable to marriage.5 The intense interest in maintaining womens virginity

was due in some part as a reaction to romantic literature of the time. There was also the

perception of social dangers from female recklessness.6

2Bardsley, 28.

3Bardsley, 28.

4Bardsley, 37.

5Bardsley, 30.

6Southern, 311.


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Women who did not maintain their physical virginity were not considered saints. There

are stories of women who went to such great lengths to preserve their virginity that they hoped

for and received physical deformities that would make themselves less attractive to men. The

requirement to be considered a true virgin became stricter in later centuries. Women not only had

to refrain from sex their entire lives, but they also had to be pure in mind and modest in behavior.

The meaning of virginity expanded beyond chastity and made it difficult for women to truly be

considered virgins.7 Women were often held to a higher standard than men. This was in part due

to the perception that women had an inherently lustful nature.

Nunneries were severely constrained by both laws and financial limitations. Although

women in nunneries exerted great authority in the early middle ages, this power was curtailed in

later centuries. As society became more organized and patriarchal, males asserted themselves to

the high positions in the church.8 Abbesses, or the heads of nunneries, lost much of their

influence due to increasing regulation from church officials.9

Bishops insisted that abbesses

confine their rule to only their institution and not the local government.10The rules of nunneries

became more standardized. St. Augustine decreed that nuns be more obedient and subordinate to

the entire community. The Bishop of Arles imposed a rule that called for women to be strictly

enclosed within nunneries. Nuns were confined on these grounds for fear that they either made

others desire them, or saw things which they themselves desired.11

Once they entered the gates

of a community, they were not allowed to leave. Caesariuss Rule declared that the enclosure

proclamation shall be more strictly enforced. During the reign of Emperor Charlemagne, church

councils passed laws that enacted this doctrine. Women were forbidden from leaving the nunnery

7Bardsley, 31.

8Southern, 310.

9Bardsley, 32.

10Bardsley, 38.

11Southern, 311.


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and their interaction with the outside world became deeply limited.12

The Bishop of Arles also

insisted that women give up all of their individual property upon entering the nunnery. 13 Most

nunneries throughout Western Europe adopted a variation of the Benedictine Rule. Just as the

monks had, the nuns took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. From the year 1213 and

onwards, nuns and abbesses lost more of their privileges, including visitation rights and

permission to build new settlements.14

Throughout Western Europe, nunneries were always poorer than monasteries. In

Normandy during the mid-thirteenth century, the average net worth of a nunnery was fifteen

percent of that of a monastery. The disparity was even more obvious when one considers that

nunneries were slightly larger institutions. English nunneries generally received half of the

resources of the average monastery. The prayers of nuns were less attractive to donors than those

of monks. Women drew much less financial support than their counterparts. This was due in

large part because monks were sometimes ordained as priests, a position that nuns were excluded

from. This attitude towards women was a consistent theme of the middle ages. Families usually

invested less money in their daughters and more in their sons.15

Families who could not afford to pay the dowries for their daughters wedding sometimes

forced them to enter nunneries. The entrance fee was usually much lower than the cost of a

dowry.16

Unmarried women were uncommon in the early middle ages. Girls were usually

married by age fourteen and widows remarried with little delay. Family connections were made

and land was distributed through the institution of marriage. Families usually felt obligated to

12Bardsley, 34.

13Bardsley, 33.

14Southern, 316.

15Bardsley, 39.

16Bardsley, 34.


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make provisions for girls who refused to marry. Nunneries provided a dignified religious retreat

for unmarried women and widows in medieval society.17

In Medieval churches, the congregation was divided by sex. Women were grouped on the

north end of the church and men on the south end.18 Men repeatedly used the opportunity to warn

the women not to gossip with their friends. Paintings inside the churches showed gossiping

women being overshadowed by a demon who recorded their conversation on a scroll.19

Lay

women were also supposed to ask permission from their husband before they embarked on

pilgrimages. On these journeys, they sometimes discovered that Christian shrines or relics were

in areas that women were prohibited from visiting. Lay women had many restrictions on their

life and often needed permission from their husband to enjoy even the most basic freedoms.20

The freedoms enjoyed by women in the early stages of the Christian church had mostly

disappeared by the high middle ages. Although women had been allowed to lead congregations

in the decades after Jesuss crucifixion, they were completely excluded from the church

hierarchy once the religion reached most of Western Europe. This segregation by gender would

result in serious negative effects that were clearly evident in later centuries. The first universities

were founded in the twelfth century and required students to be ordained. This stipulation

effectively barred all women from attending early universities because only priests could be

ordained.21

Women and nuns were further stigmatized by influential religious leaders who

viewed women as inferior to men. They supported these beliefs with passages from the Christian

Bible. Women in nunneries suffered terribly from poor donations and restrictive laws. Nuns were

further oppressed after it was decreed that the enclosure rule would be more strictly enforced and

17Southern, 309.

18Bardsley, 44.

19Bardsley, 45.

20Bardsley, 44.

21Bardsley, 38.


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their interaction with the rest of the world was greatly limited. Men treated lay women as

children and gave them condescending orders to follow in church. The Christian Church severely

hampered women in medieval society by excluding them from critical positions and treating

them as subordinates of men. These negative attitudes towards women persisted throughout

medieval society in political, social, and religious life.


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Bibliography

Bardsley, Sandy. Womens Roles in the Middle Ages. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 2007.

Boer, Harry R.A Short History of the Early Church. Grand Rapids, MI.: Wm. B. Eerdmans

Publishing Co., 1976.

Bredero, Adriaan H. Christendom and Christianity in the Middle Ages. Grand Rapids, MI.: Wm.

B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994.

Erler, Mary C. Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England. Cambridge, United

Kingdon.: Cambridge University Press., 2002.

Southern, Richard William. Western Society and Church in the Middle Ages. New York: Penguin

Books, 1970.

Documents

Women and the Medieval Church