Abstract
As the thirteenth-century Old French Le Roman de Silence opens, two favorite counts of Evan, king of England, have killed each other.1 Married to twin sisters, they fought over which sister was the elder and hence the inheritor of the family land. As a result, the king proclaims that no woman will ever again inherit property. When a noble couple gives birth to a daughter, they decide to bring her up as a boy so that their line will not lose its property rights. The girl is named “Silence” and in the text, Nature and Nurture argue over which one has the upper hand in her upbringing. She dresses and fights like a man and has all the rights that accrue to her assumed gender. When, later, she is discovered and marries the king, he announces that he will restore property rights to women. Although this is a triumph for her gender, it is actually a loss for Silence, since for her to empower other women, she must lose the many freedoms, social as well as economic, that she has experienced as a male.
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Notes
The Old French text of Le Roman de Silence, along with an English translation, can be found in Heldris de Cornuälle, Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance, ed. and trans. Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999).
It has been suggested that the author of Le Roman de Silence, Heldris de Cornuälle, was actually female, writing pseudonymously as a man. This opinion has been expounded by Lorraine Kochanske Stock, “The Importance of Being Gender ‘Stable’: Masculinity and Feminine Empowerment in Le Roman de Silence,” Arthuriana 7.2 (1997), 7–34.
Kathleen J. Brahney, “When Silence was Golden: Female Personae in the Roman de Silence,” in The Spirit of the Court: Selected Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, ed. Glyn S. Burgess and Robert A. Taylor (Dover, NH: D.S. Brewer, 1985), pp. 52–61.
Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
Erin F. Labbie, “The Specular Image of the Gender-Neutral Name: Naming Silence in Le Roman de Silence,” Arthuriana 7.2 (1997), 63–77.
Even the word “wedlock” implies restriction. As Evelyn J. Hinz has remarked, “wed” suggests optimism, whereas “lock” means suffering and entrapment. See her article, “Hierogamy versus Wedlock: Types of Marriage Plots and Their Relationship to Genres of Prose Fiction,” PMLA 91.5 (1976), 902–903. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Entymology, ed. T. F. Hoad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 537, however, shows its origin in the Old English wedlāc, “wed pledge.”
I am not alone in seeing a connection between the loss of property rights in the Middle Ages and the strict roles for women of the nineteenth century. See Linda Mitchell, Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 135–136.
JoAnn McNamara, “Women and Power Through the Family Revisited,” in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 25–30.
Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), pp. 64–67.
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 173–174.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 310.
Caroline Walker Bynum, “Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 32.
For a discussion of the economic role of women, see Nancy Folbre and Heidi Hartmann, “The Rhetoric of Self-Interest: Ideology and Gender in Economic Theory,” in The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric, ed. Arjo Klamer, Donald N. McCloskey, and Robert M. Solow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 184–203.
Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), p. 10.
Paula R. Backscheider has also commented on the function of the marginalized voice: “Every text has a space within it for the Other, for opposition, for obstacle, for whatever occupies the position that is not expressive of the dominant.” See “The Novel’s Gendered Space,” in Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century “Women’s Fiction” and Social Engagement, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 6.
Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 192–193. It is fitting that the remembrance of the past is delegated to women in these romances. As Elizabeth van Houts has noted in Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 67, medieval memory is kin-centered, and women were the transmitters of family knowledge.
Patrick Geary has described how suppressed elements of the past “continued to live in the discordances, inconsistencies, and lacunae of the created past as well as in the dreams, visions, and anxieties of those who suppressed it.” See his Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 7–8.
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© 2012 Sally A. Livingston
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Livingston, S.A. (2012). Introduction: Silence and Women’s Authority. In: Marriage, Property, and Women’s Narratives. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010865_1
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