The Middle Ages often appear to be a dark period for women: cloistered in obscure monasteries or subject to their husbands, they would have been kept away from power and from any form of written culture. This cliché, like many others, about the so-called dark times, appeared during the Renaissance and developed in the spirit of the Enlightenment. However, during the six centuries following the end of the Roman Empire (in 476), the condition of women was very far from this collective imagination. In the spheres of power or knowledge, certain women then hold an eminent place, which is not quite the same as what we will see between the XIIe and XVe centuries.
The Middle Ages are a long period and numerous political, economic or religious reconfigurations change and affect the condition of women. Those from the end of this period are better known, because we have more sources, but those from the beginning sometimes have access to unexpected economic or cultural resources.
Women also took part in the culture of their time. This is what the research highlighted in the book shows The Life of Women in the Middle Ages – Another Story, VIe-XIIe century (Perrin, February 2026). At a time when literacy was low, it was sometimes through women that mastery of reading and writing was passed on.
Learn to write
To write, you must of course have learned the technical gesture which consists of tracing letters on parchment. Today, reading and writing are learned together but, in the Middle Ages, many people knew how to read without being able to write, except for their name.
Medieval literacy is also thought of as a spectrum: there is a world of practices between knowing how to read and being able to compose a complex text in Latin. As a result, complete mastery of writing is reserved for a small elite, secular or ecclesiastical, and increasingly for written professionals such as notaries who gain importance from the 12th century onwards.e century.
In the secular aristocracy of the first half of the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for women to receive advanced education.
Furthermore, the lay people most likely to have learned to read and write also have secretaries. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, for example, aristocrats did not write their own letters but dictated them to secretaries, or even gave them only a few instructions.
Women are not excluded from these logics, quite the contrary. In the secular aristocracy of the first half of the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for them to receive an advanced education. The reason is simple: they are often themselves responsible for the education of their children. Queen Mathilde, wife of King Henry Ier of Germania (919-936), for example, knew how to read and write, which was not the case for her royal husband and, in the Ottonian family (named after their son, the king and then emperor Otto Ierfounder of the Holy Roman Empire), it is often women who are the most literate.
Copyists and authors
However, it is not among the laity, but within female monasteries that we find the most women who know how to write. The most common act is the copying of manuscripts: before the invention of printing, it is this tireless work which allows the dissemination of works.
It is estimated that around 1% of medieval manuscripts were copied by women. This may seem small, but we must keep in mind that the vast majority of manuscripts are not signed by their copyists and that in reality we can therefore only rarely know the gender of the copyist.
It was only in the 1980s that specialists of the Middle Ages really began to take an interest in the writings of medieval women before Christine de Pizan (14th-15th centuries).
The work of the nuns is in any case far from being discredited. At the end of the VIIIe century, the nuns of the abbey of Chelles (Seine-et-Marne) are the main suppliers of copies of Augustine of Hippo (Saint Augustine), one of the most widely read fathers of the Church in the Middle Ages. They notably received orders from the bishops of Cologne and Würzburg.
It is therefore logical that it is also in monasteries that we find the most female authors, that is to say women who do not just copy works and compose new ones. No literary genre is forbidden to them: they write hagiography – the lives of saints, men and women –, annalistic texts, treatises, poetry and even theater. The playwright and poet Hrotsvita, who lived at the abbey of Gandersheim (in Saxony) around 960, is thus considered the “first German poet”, even if she wrote in Latin, like most of her contemporaries.
A “feminine” writing?
These women’s texts have been studied in various ways by historians, initially with a touch of suspicion. When Hrotsvita’s works were rediscovered in the 19th centurye century, eminent scholars doubted their attribution and sought, in vain, to affirm that the nun had never existed, or never written…
And it was only in the 1980s that specialists of the Middle Ages really began to take an interest in the writings of medieval women before Christine de Pizan (XIVe-XVe centuries). These works are marked by the idea that the writing of men would be different from that of women. It is not a question of handwritten, paleographic writing, since gender differentiation only appears in the 18th century.e century, but style.
Women, even in the Middle Ages, would talk more easily about their emotions and their family. This is undoubtedly true in some texts but, in reality, texts written by women show more similarities than differences with those of men. This is due, in part, to the weight of ancient models in medieval writing. When the nun Baudonivie wrote the life of the holy queen Radegonde around 600, she had in mind the model par excellence which is the Life of Saint Martinjust like his contemporary VIe century, Venantius Fortunatus, who also devotes a text to the saint.
However, in particular from the XIIe and XIIIe centuries, it seems that women’s writing is increasingly constrained and that this sometimes limits them to certain types of writing. The great reform of the Church known as the Gregorian reform seeks to better regulate the practices of the faithful and to redefine the link of women to the sacred. The development of universities – reserved for clerics and therefore men – also excludes women from a whole section of knowledge.
It is in this context that women mystics flourish, whose writings boast of a particular proximity to divinity. But here again, the historical reality is complex: the visions of these women are often written down by their confessor or a man who can rework the material transmitted by the mystic. Even Hildegard of Bingen, great scholar and abbess of the 12the century, uses a secretary. In the Middle Ages, the idea of a single author rarely worked. And the writing of women, like that of men, often calls upon a multitude of speakers.
