Abstract
If literature both foretells change and then instills it in memory, how can we determine if it portrays an actual historical condition? How does the loss of women’s property rights in Le Roman de Silence reflect thirteenth-century social concerns, if at all?1
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Notes
Certainly, the loss of property due to primogeniture was not specifically a gendered problem. Younger sons also bore the consequences of a solution meant to resolve the land situation. Judith Kellogg has demonstrated that medieval romance lays bare the anxieties of the time, a belief echoed by Geraldine Heng, who calls it “the will of a collective culture.” Gabrielle M. Spiegel has observed that thirteenth-century prose has a social function, responding to cultural needs. Helen Cooper has noted that there were two social changes that contributed to the emergence of romance: primogeniture and consent as the determining factor of the validity of marriage. It is not surprising, she believes, that “history and romance can sometimes chime very closely.” See Judith Kellogg, Medieval Artistry and Exchange: Economic Institutions, Society, and Literary Form in Old French Narrative (New York: Peter Lang, 1989).
Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 8.
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 2.
Helen Cooper, “When Romance Comes True,” in Boundaries in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 16–17.
Steven Weinburger, “Women, Property and Poetry in Eleventh Century Provence,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 8 (1980), 25.
Suzanne Fonay Wemple has traced the fusion of Roman and Germanic law in Merovingian and Carolingian society in her Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister 500 to 900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
On the right of daughters to inherit equally with sons, see Antii Arjava, Women and Law in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 70–73 and 154–156.
Although women could pass on their property, they needed support to ensure that their wishes were carried out. See Janet L. Nelson, “The Wary Widow,” in Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Wendy Davies and Paul Fouracre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 94.
Susan Stuard, “The Dominion of Gender: Women’s Fortunes in the High Middle Ages,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), pp. 155–156.
David Herlihy, “The Making of the Medieval Family: Symmetry, Structure, and Sentiment,” Journal of Family History 8.2 (1983), 122.
David Herlihy, “Land, Family, and Women in Continental Europe,” Traditio XVIII (1962), 92–100.
Georges Duby, La Société aux XIe et XIIe Siècles Dans La Région Mâconnaise (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1953), pp. 53–54.
Janet Martindale traces notions of primogeniture back to the Old Testament (Genesis, 27, Exodus, 12); Christ can also been viewed as primogenitus (Luke, 2 vii, Colossians, 1xv). Janet Martindale, “Succession Politics in the Romance-Speaking World, c. 1000–1140,” in England and Her Neighbours, 10 66–1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais, ed. Michael C. E. Jones and Malcolm Vale (London: The Hambledon Press, 1989), p. 26.
Jo Ann McNamara, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 4.
Among many other analyses of the societal implications of primogeniture, two in particular stand out: Mary Frances Wack’s Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), in which she argues that younger sons, torn from their mothers, sought to replace them by romantic alliances with the lords’ wives; and Kellogg, Medieval Artistry and Exchange, in which she shows how anxiety over changing economic models influenced romance literature.
Diane Owen Hughes, “From Bridepiece to Dowry in Mediterranean Europe,” Journal of Family History 3 (1978), 266.
David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 50–51.
Mark Angelos, “Urban Women, Investment, and the Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages,” in Women in Medieval Western European Culture, ed. Linda A. Mitchell (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), p. 259.
Jack Goody, “Inheritance, Property and Women: Some Comparative Considerations,” in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800, ed. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 10–36.
Penny Shine Gold, The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 121–132.
Birgit Sawyer, “Women as Landholders and Alienators of Property in Early Medieval Scandinavia,” in Female Power in the Middle Ages: Proceedings from the 2. St. Gertrud Symposium, ed. Karen Glente and Lise Winther-Jensen (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1989), pp. 165–166.
Claire de Trafford, “Share and Share Alike? The Marriage Portion, Inheritance, and Family Politics,” in Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Women: Pawns of Players? ed. Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), pp. 37–41. By the fifteenth century in England, the power of rich widows to even keep their property was severely challenged.
See Rhoda Lange Friedrichs, “Rich Old Ladies Made Poor: The Vulnerability of Women’s Property in Late Medieval England,” Medieval Prosopography: History and Collective Biography 21 (2000), 211–219.
Jo Ann 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. 21–22.
Theodore Evergates, ed., Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 1–2.
Amy Livingstone, “Noblewomen’s Control of Property in Early Twelfth-Century Blois-Chartres,” Medieval Prosopography: History and Collective Biography 18 (1997), 55–71.
Rebecca Lynn Winer, in Women, Wealth, and Community in Peripignan, c. 1250–1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), analyses women’s property rights in the context of three different religious communities. The variations within these settings argue for significant variations in the actual practice of Roman dowry in Western Europe.
Amy Livingstone, Out of Love For My Kin: Aristocratic Family Life in the Lands of the Loire, 1000–1200 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 112. Michelle Armstrong-Partida contends that not only could women inherit in the Blois-Chartres region, they could also assume all of the responsibilities associated with ownership. “Mothers and Daughters as Lords: The Countesses of Blois and Chartres,” Medieval Prosopography 26 (2005), 77–107.
Martha C. Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in the Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 3. In an earlier work, Howell shows how women were restricted from membership in craft and guild positions that carried prestige and power during the same time period, mainly because the patriarchal order required it. See her Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Shennan Hutton, Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 2.
An interesting example of women gaining patrimonies is given by Joëlle Rollo-Koster. In late medieval Avignon the plague caused a scarcity of patrilineal heirs allowing dowered daughters to inherit. Joëlle Rollo-Koster, “The Boundaries of Affection: Women and Property in Late Medieval Avignon,” in Across the Religious Divide: Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300–1800), ed. Jutta Gisela Sperling and Shona Kelly Wray (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 39.
Linda Mitchell, Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 6–7.
Craig Berry believes this is the case, calling Le Roman de Silence “a romance of property rights.” Craig R. Berry, “What Silence Desires: Female Inheritance and the Romance of Property in the Roman de Silence,” in Translating Desire in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Craig R. Berry and Heather Richardson Hayton (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), p. 193.
For example, see the following representative articles: (1) Le Roman de Silence, Lorraine Kochanske Stock, “The Importance of Being Gender ‘Stable’: Masculinity and Feminine Empowerment in Le Roman de Silence,” Arthuriana 7.2 (1994), 7–34.
Peggy McCracken, “The Boy Who Was a Girl,: Reading Gender in the Roman de Silence,” Romanic Review 85 (1995), 517–536.
Kate Mason Cooper, “Elle and L: Sexualized Textuality in Le Roman de Silence,” Romance Notes XXV.3 (1985), 341–360. (2) La Manekine, the work of Carol Harvey, in particular, “Incest, Identity and Uncourtly Conduct in La Manekine,” in The Court Reconvenes: Courtly Literatures Across the Disciplines, ed. Barbara K. Altmann and Carleton W. Carroll (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 161–168. (3) Havelok, Michael Faletra, “The Ends of Romance: Dreaming the Nation in the Middle English Havelok,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17.2 (2005), 347–380.
Judith Weiss, “Structure and Characterization in Havelok the Dane,” Speculum 44.2 (1969), 247–257.
In addition to Craig A. Berry, three other scholars have raised the inheritance issue in Le Roman de Silence: Christopher Callahan, “Canon Law, Primogeniture, and the Marriage of Ebain and Silence, “Romance Quarterly 49.1 (2002), 12–20.
Sharon Kinoshita, “Mail-Order Brides: Marriage, Patriarchy, and Monarchy in the Roman de Silence,” Arthuriana 12.1 (2002), 64–75.
Erika E. Hess, “Inheritance Law and Gender Identity in the Roman de Silence,” in Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages, ed. Robert S. Sturges (Brepols, 2011), Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, volume 28, pp. 215–235.
Text and translation from Sarah Roche-Mahdi, Silence: A Thirteenth Century French Romance (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999).
Loren Ringer has analyzed the name “Malduit” and contends that it has multiple meanings, the most interesting of which is “mal conduit” in modern French: “One cannot help but notice that the difference between ‘Malduit’ and ‘ma conduit’ (i.e. “con” or the female sex) is exactly what Silence is being forced to hide.” Loren Ringer, “Exchange, Identity, and Transvestism in Le roman de Silence,” Dalhousie French Studies 28 (1994), 8.
Barbara N. Sargent-Baur, “Dating the Romances of Phillipe de Remi: Between an Improbable Source and a Dubious Adaptation,” in Essays on the Poetic and Legal Writings of Philippe de Remy and His Son Philippe de Beaumanoir of Thirteenth-Century France, ed. Sarah-Grace Heller and Michelle Reichert (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), p. 22. I use the text and translation of Irene Gnarra, Philippe de Remi’ “La Manekine”: Text, Translation, Commentary (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1988).
Nancy B. Black, Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003), p. 36.
Margaret Schlauch, Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens (New York: New York University Press, 1927), p. 45.
Richard J. Moll, “’Nest pas autentik, mais apocrophum’: Haveloks and Their Reception in Medieval England,” Studies in Philology 105.2 (2008), 179.
G. Smithers, ed., Havelok (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. lvii. I use Smithers’s edition as the text for Havelok.
Judith Weiss, “The Power and Weakness of Women in Anglo-Norman Romance,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. Carol M. Neale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 7–8.
K. S. Whetter, “Gest and Vita, Folktale and Romance in Havelok,” Parergon 20.2 (2003), 25.
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© 2012 Sally A. Livingston
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Livingston, S.A. (2012). Property’s History, Property’s Literature. In: Marriage, Property, and Women’s Narratives. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010865_2
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