History books, museum exhibitions and viral podcasts overflow with tales of female influence, resistance and agency, while economists triumphantly uncover evidence of women's wealth and wages. Together, these narratives paint medieval Europe as surprisingly progressive.
Except this rosy picture conceals a darker truth. In reality, men monopolised ruling prestigious institutions and backed up their bros. Dissidents were shunned, ostracised, or burned alive.
Only by confronting medieval Europe’s patriarchal oppression can we diagnose what it took to achieve contemporary equality.
An Economist’s Christmas wish-list probably comprises ‘newly digitised data on some form of economic activity’. A scroll from a large manorial farm in Essex details that 27 men and 16 women were hired to bring the harvest. Female workers typically worked fewer days and earned less. In London, between 1309 and 1468, 44% of daughters (and 60% of sons) mentioned in male Londoners’ wills received some form of estate.
But even if we had complete data on everyone's earnings, could we truly understand how men and women were perceived and treated? As I saw first-hand in Uzbekistan, salaried wives may still feel obliged to obey. Ideology matters!
Overturning centuries of male bias, feminist historians have tended to highlight women’s agency, subversion and importance. The British Library’s current exhibition proudly declares that “medieval women’s voices evoke a world in which they lived active and varied lives. Their testimonies reveal.. female impact and influence across private, public and spiritual realms”.
Browse the exhibition's bookshop and behold dozens of books celebrating subversive women. Wow. What a wonderful matriarchy! But was this representative?
If women were so 'influential', how come they were systematically excluded from every institution of power? The Church, universities, law courts, and medical profession remained exclusively male. 90% of ‘self-made’ elites were men. In Medieval France, 98.5% of known medical practitioners were men. Exceptional figures like the preacher Margery Kempe faced violent opposition – angry mobs in York demanded her execution, forcing her to flee.
Once we recognise this empirical reality, we are forced to set a new set of questions: why, despite women’s economic activity, was Europe so patriarchal, and what brought about gender equality? So, if you can forgive my heresy, let me suggest an alternative way of studying the past.
Don’t like your husband? Where exactly would you go - with sickly kids, piece-rate precarity, and rampant murders? Oxford was rife with homicidal maniacs.
The Catholic Church was Europe’s richest institution and largest landowner. Rulers and nobles donated generously, in return for eternal salvation, which concentrated institutional, financial and religious authority in the hands of the Church.
Through sermons, texts, and teachings, the Church built a powerful narrative: men were intellectually superior by divine design, while virtuous women wed, work, and bear children. Monopolising respected wisdom, clerics portrayed gender hierarchies as divinely ordained, fixed by nature. Monasteries controlled book production and libraries.
Leveraging their righteous legitimacy, authorities propagated a cultural fiction: men were intellectually superior. ‘Good women’ wed, worked the land, and bore children. Monks, priests, and scholars worked together to convince everyone - including women - that female inferiority was God’s plan.
Religious doctrine permeated every aspect of medieval life, shaping both sacred and secular spheres. Under the Crown of Aragon, aspiring lawyers learned both Roman and Church law at religious schools, perpetuating assumptions about women’s weakness and inferiority.
By the 1300s, these beliefs were deeply embedded in legal practice. Barred from becoming lawyers or judges, even wealthy women had to frame their claims using the language of female weakness. According to law courts (run by men), wife-beating was perfectly permissible.
In 15th century Dijon, young men led ritualised ‘chasses joyeuses’ (‘joyous hunts’), annually gang-raping 20 servants and prostitutes. If her reputation was shady, law courts judged deemed it perfectly permissible.
Don’t like the Gospel? Want to learn from alternatives? Odds were you were illiterate. Even if you could read, illustrated manuscripts were outrageously expensive and most scholarly work was in Latin.
The Church blamed mankind’s exile from paradise on Eve’s sin. Moreover, because of Eve’s sin, childbirth would be painful, as a punishment on all women. Tertullian, a prominent theologian, declared women to be the devil’s gateway:
The hugely popular “De secretis mulierum” (“Women’s Secrets”, with 80 surviving copies) asserted that women were “failed men” with “defective natures”. Following Aristotle, it explained that adverse reproductive conditions sometimes yielded a sub-optimal outcome: girls.
The Church promoted texts denigrating women, while popular sermons warned of women’s dangerous gossip. Idung of Prüfening (Cistercian monk) railed,
“It is not expedient for that sex to enjoy the freedom of having its own governance because of its natural fickleness and also because of outside temptations which womanly weakness is not strong enough to resist”.
The 12th century bishop of Limerick championed female servitude:
Over in Baden-Württemberg, 12th century Abbot Conrad of Marchtal explained that they suspended the recruitment of nuns because of their wickedness, anger and poison:
“We and our whole community of canons, recognising that the wickedness of women is greater than all the other wickedness of the world, and that there is no anger like that of women, and that the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women, have unanimously decreed for the safety of our souls, no less than for that of our bodies and goods, that we will on no account receive any more sisters to the increase of our perdition, but will avoid them like poisonous animals”.
In 1189 at Durham Cathedral, a stone line was installed to prohibit female distactions. This prohibition is still enforced by other religious institutions today.
Clearly, the above examples are just anecdotal. I will hold my horses until all medieval manuscripts are digitised and someone clever quantifies relative misogyny!
While women were inferior, they still had their own souls and their own rights. Absences are equally telling - I am yet to find evidence or calls for female seclusion. Medieval misogyny had its limits.
The Fable of the Mouth of Truth, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1534. ‘The painting depicts the frequently employed late medieval theme of the "Wiles of Women". A woman charged with infidelity lays her hand in the jaws of the lion. She confesses only to have lain in the arms of her husband and the fool behind her. Because she is speaking the truth, the lion does not bite off her hand. The fool is, in fact, her disguised lover, but he is not taken seriously by any of the witnesses’.
What about Nuns?
The British Library's exhibition celebrates medieval nuns but omits crucial context: monasticism was overwhelmingly male. In 13th century England, monks outnumbered nuns nearly five to one - 14,000 to 3,000.
The Church’s view of female inferiority condemned nunneries to penury. Barred from celebrating mass or hearing confessions, nuns had to employ priests for these basic functions. Unlike their male counterparts, nunneries rarely engaged in lucrative activities like teaching or nursing.
Yet despite their subordinate status, nunneries at least offered women a rare escape - unavailable in other world regions.
What if you don’t like sexist orthodoxy? In southern France, Catharism emerged as a tempting alternative. This heretical movement from Bulgaria denied Church doctrine, condemned marriage, and - crucially - welcomed women as ministers. Noble women gave their homes and fortunes. Esclarmonde, sister of the Count of Foix, donated her fortress to create a Cathar sanctuary.
Guilds dominated medieval commerce - these associations of craftsmen controlled who could practice trades, train apprentices, and sell goods in cities. Male members sought to monopolise trade through restrictions.
In England, barriers were quite severe. While widows could remain in guilds and train apprentices, the London Girdlers ruled in 1344 that members could only employ their wives and daughters. Guild records reveal persistent wage discrimination, especially in the countryside.
French cities offered more possibilities. Paris's 1292 tax list shows five exclusively female guilds and about 80 (of 120+) guilds with women members. When the bakers of Pontoise attempted to ban women by claiming they were not strong enough to knead dough, women appealed and were supported by the Parlement of Paris.
Yet even where women could trade, they were still excluded from valuable fraternities. In Arras, female masters were barred from guild assemblies. The glovemakers of Poitiers went further - explicitly banning wives, daughters, and female servants from their feasts, where brotherly bonds flourished. Despite technical rights, women might still be kicked out of the informal networks that made a business thrive.
Formal education was exclusively male. Even wealthy women often remained illiterate. The Pastons - a family of social climbers in 15th century Norfolk - reveal this starkly. While their men attended Eton and Oxbridge, Margaret Paston, despite managing estates and dispatching over 100 letters, was entirely reliant on scribes.
“A Book of Hours” in French, circa 1400-1425. This was the standard book of popular Christian devotion, detailing the prayers to be said 8 times a day. The opening shows a woman praying with her book, opposite the Virgin and Child. British Library
The Sister Haggadah, Eastern Spain, 14th century. The Haggadah is read at the Seder (Passover ceremonial meal) and was often given as a wedding gift by Medieval Spanish Jews. On the left you see a men reading and reciting the Haggadah in the synagogue. On the right, a family sits at the seder table. The British Library
Universities were Reserved for Men
Medieval European universities were monopolised by men. Between 1000 and 1800, these centers of learning hosted nearly 59,000 male scholars - but only 108 women. The female share was vanishingly small, less than 0.2%.
Before 1600, fewer than 10 women held any academic affiliation across the whole of Medieval Europe. Female participation increased significantly from the 17th century, primarily through the spread of academies of arts and sciences.
Southern institutions like Bologna and Salamanca, while still male-dominated, were often located far from centres of power, and thus operated with greater autonomy. This independence, combined with their focus on practical subjects like law and medicine created narrow openings.
But Italian women still faced severe constraints. At Bologna, Novellà Calderini repeatedly replaced her father, but was veiled so that the students would not be distracted by her beauty. Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia wanted to study theology, with full support from her professors, but the bishop of Padua resisted for fear of public criticism. Not only did she have to change her doctorate to ‘philosophy’ but the college of physicians and philosophers refused her participation in their activities.
The few women who penetrated these bastions relied heavily on devoted fathers or husbands to champion their cause. Yet even with such advocates, they faced relentless opposition. Most women were simply barred from these centers of knowledge altogether, then dismissed as insufficiently scholarly.
By barring women from communities of learning, secular universities actually reinforced ecclesiastical claims of female inferiority. Scientific advancement and intellectual authority continued to be seen as male.
Male friendship was exalted - praised by 12th century scholars like Boncompagno da Signa as “a heavenly power which chooses to dwell only among the virtuous”. Following Cicero, he insisted true friendship only existed between men. Rallying together, men praised each other’s misogyny, celebrating their “high understanding”, and rallying to attack wicked women.
This male dominance extended to medicine, where women comprised just 1.5% of known practitioners in Medieval France. Female medical practitioners faced such hostility that Joan du Lee had to petition for royal protection.
Male dominance affected treatment too – medical diagrams almost exclusively showed male bodies, with only one known exception (below) showing a female body.
At the Scottish court, William Dunbar's "Two Married Women" captured male anxieties through a narrative where an aristocratic wife boasts of manipulating her merchant husband by reminding him of his social inferiority, mockingly calling him her ‘wife’. Religious authorities like John Mirk condemned women for whispering during church services, claiming they transformed sacred spaces into “labyrinths full of vain speech and filth”. In his guidebook for enclosed women, Aelred of Rievaulx painted vivid scenes of an anchoress poisoning another woman’s ear with slanderous gossip.
Why were women perennially cast as appendages, nags and whores?
The answer is simple:
men dominated the production of literature, backed up their bros and bullied dissidents.
Dissidents were Attacked
Heretics were brutally suppressed. When Margery Kempe dared to preach, the archbishop labeled her a ‘wicked woman’. Mobs called for her execution and forced her to flee the city. When Marguerite Porete developed independent religious ideas, she was burned at the stake and her treatise ordered destroyed. The Church condemned hundreds as heretics in Toulouse alone.
When Christine de Pizan challenged “Roman de la Rose” in 1402, Pierre Col’s response captured this patriarchal solidarity: “Oh, foolish presumption... from the mouth of a woman who dares condemn a man of such high understanding”.
Joan of Arc was certainly defiant, yet she was killed for heresy, wearing men’s clothing transgressed divine law, and one subsequent illustration tried to restore her credibility by portraying her as appropriately feminine. My friends, that is erasure.
An anonymised copy of Marguerity Porete’s religious treatise! 1450s. British Library
Book of Sentences of the Inquisition of Toulouse (France, 1307-23. British Library
Subversive or Seeking Commitment?
Even when Medievalists emphasise patriarchy, the focus is usually on resistance. “The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval England”, for example, is superbly researched, nuanced and fascinating. Sara Butler provides detailed case studies of the few women who fought against the grain - litigating for separation and autonomy. But what about the overwhelming majority?
Crudely, I have outlined 3 ways of studying historical cultures:
Studying economic activity - e.g. whether plague raised female earnings.
Celebrating exceptional subversives.
Systematically analysing both political economy and ideological persuasion
The first two approaches offer valuable insights but remain partial. Even in periods when women earned wages or individuals mounted resistance, the dominant discourse remained intensely sexist.
The British Library’s celebration of female ‘influence’ is delightfully heart-warming, their collection of artefacts is truly impressive, but closer examination reveals a fundamental contradiction: how could women exercise meaningful influence if subversives were systematically silenced, suppressed, and or even butchered?
In truth, Europe was hugely bigoted. Zealous patriarchs dominated institutional power and ideological persuasion. Getting the facts straight helps us fine-tune our analysis of what actually turbo-charged contemporary equality: the revolutionary forces of industrialisation and secularism enabled women writers to rewrite the script.
Stay tuned for my festive special: “Smashing the Manosphere”.
Would love to know what you make of Annete Kehnel's The Green Ages, which makes much of the communal prosperity of convents and beguinages. I think she is arguing that there were competing ideologies in medieval Europe, some of which were neither "modern" (ie capitalist) nor orthodox patriarchy. Ie not a book that says "let's celebrate this one person of 100,000 who beat the system" but rather "there were alternate systems that lasted centuries and weren't obliterated."
Would love to know what you make of Annete Kehnel's The Green Ages, which makes much of the communal prosperity of convents and beguinages. I think she is arguing that there were competing ideologies in medieval Europe, some of which were neither "modern" (ie capitalist) nor orthodox patriarchy. Ie not a book that says "let's celebrate this one person of 100,000 who beat the system" but rather "there were alternate systems that lasted centuries and weren't obliterated."
I take it Festivus has started?
Yours, Brad DeLong