Medieval Women, flowers, sex, motherhood

Medieval woman was constantly reminded of God's will and his divine justice. In fact everyone was, men, women and children. The notion of heaven and hell was very real, so real that, throughout the Middle Ages, churches contained wall paintings reminding the people, rich and poor, of Heaven's blessings and Hell's terrors. Women during this period were classified according to their sexual status. They were virgins, wives or widows and they were, of course, also mothers.

Church Wall Paintings informed men and women of sin

Sexual intercourse was part of God's original plan. If Adam and Eve had not eaten the apple- a sin of pride- they would have had intercourse. Otherwise how would they have obeyed God's order to increase and multiply (Genesis 1: 27-8) ? By this rationale, if women chose to be virgins in paradise they would have been thwarting God's intentions. It was, therefore, after the 'fall' that the concept of lust crept in and, thereafter,became the problem for the medieval Church; not sex. If lust was not controlled it could lead to eternal damnation. The only legitimate outlet for sex was marriage. 'Marriage was ordained by God. Monasticism,' writes historian Henrietta Leyser, 'was instituted by man.'

This gave rise to the idea of mutual conjugal debt. St Paul wrote, 'Let the husband render to his wife what is her due, and likewise the wife to her husband.' It does not take much imagination for us as we glance backwards from the perspective of a more liberated 21st century to see the problems this presented for women.

The Medieval Woman

Two main medical theories about sexual differences existed during the medieval period. Galen said that female anatomy corresponded to that of a man. This theory also suggested that women must ejaculate her seed for there to be conception but could not conceive without enjoying intercourse. It seems on a first reading, egalitarian. Yet, what does this theory suggest for the medieval woman who conceives a child after a rape? However, just as unfair, Aristotle saw women as defective males with the male anatomy turned inside out. Women were perceived as the 'weaker vessel.'

The Weaker Vessel

Male seed was precious. It could not be wasted. Female seed was dangerous so women must purge themselves of bodily excesses. Menstruation was a part of this. Intercourse was also part of the purging process. Obviously not when a woman had her menses.

It was thought that women's seed and menstrual blood were dangerous to everyone and everything. It could turn wine sour, destroy crops. It could kill off bees and dogs tasting it could get rabbies. Even gazing at a menstruating woman might have dire consequences. Another theory comes into play here.

Health during the medieval period was all about balancing humors. This theory had been taught by Hippocrates and was inherited from Ancient Greece. The medieval believed that there were in existence four humors that must be in a state of balance. These were four elements: fire, air, earth and water. Three categories corresponded to these: heat, cold, dryness and moisture. Then the bodily humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm; third the temperaments: sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic. Men and women were different. Men were hotter than women. They had physiological and moral superiority. Women had a lack of heat which made for physical weakness and untrustworthy nature. Women were more sexually greedy than men because their cold uteruses were in need of having hot semen to warm the uterus.

Wikipedia, The Four Humors

In the Trotula, a Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine written in Salerno in the 12th C we find that this defect was considered a sign of a less perfect life form. 'Women were unable to concoct ( cook) their ingredients as thoroughly as men.' ( Introduction). Men were able to exude residues through sweat and the growth of facial hair. Women, however, would accumulate excess materials from their bodies and this could lead to disease, an humoral imbalance. This imbalance was menstruation.

Menses became called a woman's flowers because trees without their flowers will not bear fruit. Women without their flowers will be deprived of offspring. Menstrual blood works like a tree. Before bearing fruit a tree must bear its first flowers. Nature had in effect established a purgation to temper woman's poverty of heat. Thus the 'flowers'. It was a vernacular term for menstruation used by rich and poor.

Childbirth was risky. It was believed that saints dispensed their favours equally between men and women. Mothers in the course of difficult labours would offer prayers to the Virgin and to Saints. St Margaret, a saint who was swallowed and spat out by a dragon, had unrivalled powers of empathy with the process of labour. During their ordeal women, surrounded by midwives, might seek comfort by listening to readings from her life.

Childbirth came to rich and poor, the village and the castle alike.

Girdles, known as birth girdles, were popular aids to birthing. As early as the 11th C Bald's Leechbook suggests that in a case of difficult labour a woman would put prayers upon her girdle to help ease the birth. At Westminster Abbey the monks guarded the Virgin's own girdle which had been given to them by Edward the Confessor. It was loaned out for aristocratic and royal births.

Image of St Margaret

So, Heaven, Hell, Saints, God's Will, were all notions that permeated the medieval mind. These were ideas that also existed in a misogynist society. As regards sex and motherhood, women were the 'weaker vessel.'

To read more I suggest:

Medieval Women, Henrietta Leyser, 1995, Phoenix Press.
The Trotula, edited and translated by Monica H.Green, 2002, University of Pennsylvania Press.

There is much on this subject in my new novel The Swan-Daughter to be published by Accent Press on 18th September 2014 as an e book and in December 2014 as a paperback.   

Sarah Bower on The Art of Writing

A big thank you to Carol McGrath for inviting me to join this blog hop and for hosting my post. So, relay baton in hand, here I go…

What are you working on at the moment? 

I’m lucky enough to be writer in residence in the English Department of Lingnan University in Hong Kong until June. While I do have a teaching commitment, the university has been incredibly generous in giving me a lot of time to write. 
I’m currently working on a novel entitled Love Can Kill People, Can’t It? (and thank you to the totally cool Magnetic Fields for the title) which has three story lines covering life in England and Palestine from 1948 to 2008. Its principals are an Englishwoman with a mysterious past which is revealed to her when she inherits a house on the North Yorkshire coast, and a Palestinian terrorist. The woman’s mother and an artisan baker also play key roles. The chronology is complicated and none of the relationships works out quite the way you think it will. I am trying, with this book, to walk the tightrope of reproducing a sense of the randomness of life’s connections and coincidences while still constructing a coherent narrative.
There are many challenges for me in writing this book. Perhaps, to date, I’ve had the most fun overcoming my ignorance about commercial bread-baking, when the Pump Street Bakery in Orford  www.pumpstreetbakery.com kindly allowed me to work a shift alongside their bakers. (And fresh-baked doughnuts for breakfast at 4am after a long night kneading dough is possibly the closest to heaven I shall ever get!) My next challenge will be a visit to Palestine in October when I shall be working on the olive harvest as part of the Zaytoun Project www.zaytoun.org Of course, the history of modern Palestine is so well documented one hardly knows where to begin - and in the news again as we speak, with the Hamas-Fatah agreement - but a chance to visit the country, to stay with local villagers and share their lives, if only for a couple of weeks, will be invaluable to me as a writer in helping me to grasp what is pretty much ineffable about the atmosphere of a place - its smells and tastes, sounds and colours.
As part of my role at Lingnan, I’m also working on a contemporary adaptation of Beauty and the Beast for a class of eight to eleven year olds to perform and a paper on fashion in vampire novels for a forthcoming conference on fiction and fashion, and I’m preparing a review of Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel for the e-zine Asian Cha.
My third novel, Erosion, was published on April 28th.
My short story, Restoration, will be published in Unthology 5 in June.

Sarah wrote Erosion under a pseudo-name

How does your work differ from others of its genre? 

Well, I don’t write in any single genre. My two historical novels, The Needle in the Blood and The Book of Love (published in the US as Sins of the House of Borgia), have been variously described as literary fiction and historical romance! My latest book, Erosion is a contemporary literary thriller. I’ve described Love Can Kill People, Can’t It? in answer to the previous question, so I’ll leave it to readers of this blog to define it for themselves.
To be honest, and I think most writers would agree with me here, genre seems to me to be a marketing concept rather than any useful way of defining or describing a work of fiction. When, for example, my US publisher wanted to re-title The Book of Love, I was
uncomfortable because Sins of the House of Borgia gives, to my mind, a misleading impression of what that book is actually about, but they were insistent because they believed it would make the book more marketable. Well, they were right, so I bow to their superior selling skills and take the royalties cheques.

Why do I write what I do?

Simple. My head would explode if I didn’t. I don’t choose what I write, it chooses me.
How does my writing process work?
If I knew that, it might take me less than three years to write a novel!
I am an intuitive writer. The only novel for which I have made a detailed plan was Erosion because it is, on one level, a crime novel and therefore involves elements of puzzle solving, for which you must first construct your puzzle. I undertook the novel as something of an academic exercise, to see if I could do it. It will be for readers to judge if I succeeded, of course! I never usually know where a novel will end, I just have to follow my nose until I get there.
It’s much the same for my short fiction. Some ideas come to me as short stories, some as novels, and I have no real idea why this happens except, I suppose, that the short story form is more fitted to examining a moment, a mood, a single, intense crisis or realisation in a life, and the novel is more a series of actions and consequences.

As for the actual, physical process, let me give you a little glimpse of how I’m writing now. I’m sitting at my table in my apartment on Hong Kong’s Gold Coast. It’s a relatively cool day today, so I have the balcony door open rather than the air conditioner blaring. Birds are singing - black and white robins, spotted doves and something that sounds like a football referee blowing his whistle which I haven’t yet been able to identify. Mimosa is just coming into flower, as is hibiscus and bauhinia. The sea is a still, metallic blue and the mountains on the other side of the bay have that misty, Bali Hai look I shall forever associate with the South China Sea (while not reminding myself it probably derives from the factories in Shenzen rather than any mysteries of the Oriental climate). At this precise moment, I’m probably one of the luckiest writers on the planet…so let’s leave it there, shall we?

As the next writer to be featured in the blog hop, I’d like to introduce Karen Ma, author of Excess Baggage, a wonderful ‘true novel’ about the consequences for one family of living through the Maoist era in China.
http://www.karenmaauthor.com/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Excess-Baggage-A-Novel/455424431209258

Karen Ma is a Chinese-American author and journalist based in Beijing.  Originally born in China, Ma spent her formative years in Hong Kong and Japan, before earning an M.A. degree in Chinese language and literature from the University of Washington.  During her 20 plus years living in Japan and China, Ma worked as a journalist for the Daily Yomiuri, Kyodo News and NHK Radio Japan.  She also wrote for many international publications,
New York Newsday, International Herald Tribune, More Magazine, the Japan Times, South China Morning Post and the New Delhi-based Mint.
Ma’s most recent book is Excess Baggage, a semi-autobiographical novel based loosely on her family’s experience as Chinese immigrants living in Tokyo during the post bubble years of 1990s, published by San Francisco-based China Books in 2013.

Ma is the author of the non-fiction book, Modern Madam Butterfly: Fantasy and Reality of Japanese Cross-cultural Relationships, published in 1996 by Charles E. Tuttle.

The Swan-Daughter and the Art of Writing

Justin Hill has invited me to take part in a WIP (work in progress) Blog Tour. Justin is an award winning travel writer and early medieval expert. His book Shield Wall, set in the years  before 1066, is a must read if you like this era. Shield Wall was highly praised by The Times and was included in a Sunday Times best of 2012 selection. You can find Justin's writing process story here:

  http://justinhillauthor.blogspot.hk/2014/04/blog-tour-how-how-what-and-why.html.

What are you Working On?

I am frequently asked this question. Well, the answer is several projects. The most important of these is the final copy edit for The Swan-Daughter. That is in the hands of my editor now, but I shall be checking the proofs this May.

The Swan-Daughter is the second novel in the Daughters of Hastings trilogy which unusually presents the year 1066 and its aftermath from the point of view of the noble Godwin women. The Handfasted Wife was shortlisted for the Romantic Novel of the Year- Historical Fiction, and has been consistently high on amazon UK and USA ratings since publication last year.

A story it like a coffer filled with treasures

The Handfasted Wife tells Edith Swan-Neck's story. She was Harold's common-law wife.  Although her marriage to him was legal he sat her aside in 1066 for a political alliance. She  was mother to  six of Harold's surviving children who all have interesting stories. I continue with The Swan-Daughter. Although connected to The Handfasted Wife and, even though, familiar characters do reappear in it, The Swan-Daughter is a stand alone novel. The novel tells the story of Gunnhild, the younger daughter. It tells of an extraordinary true romance which begins in 1075 after Queen Edith, the dowager queen and wife to Edward the Confessor, dies and Gunnhild elopes from Wilton Abbey with Count Alan of Richmond. Not only did Gunnhild elope with Count Alan, but, interestingly, she became involved with his brother. The Swan-Daughter presents a tapestry of women's lives during the post Conquest decades, a nod to emergent Anglo-Norman romance literature, and the effects of Domesday on the North during its conception in1086. The Swan-Daughter will be published this summer just as The Handfasted Wife is placed on wide distribution in UK and US bookshops. I am now working on the first draft of The Betrothed Sister, the story of King Harold's daughter Gita's (Thea in the book) exile in Denmark following The Siege of Exeter in 1068, her betrothal and her marriage to Vladimir, Prince of Kiev.

Part of The Swan-Daughter takes place in Normandy and Brittany

  Whilst it is unusual to write about 1066 and its aftermath from the point of view of the noble women, it is equally unusual to write about them in the wider context of Europe especially contemporary Denmark, Russia and Brittany. Sweyn Estridson, King of Denmark was the last Danish viking king and the first Danish medieval ruler. I have enjoyed researching them all but particularly The Betrothed Sister since Russian Studies was my first degree along with Medieval History. For me, writing historical fiction is primarily about story writing. Even though the story comes out of my research creating an exciting narrative is the most important element of my writing process. I diligently research and I stick to facts where I find these but this is the world of fiction, so I am compelled to 'invent' to bring characters to life with a good story as well as a replicated historical world.

The Angst and Joys of Writing a Novel

Here is my usual method for novel writing. I plan an outline before I begin a novel. The novels are character driven so I first write sketches of my main characters using a mix of what I can discover in annals and chronicles and my own imagination. As Hilary Mantel says a story is a series of scenes held together by a plot. Characters do tend to take on their own life in scenes and I have rein their behavior in. However, I might change things to suit these personalities as I write. Even if a plan is flexible and even organic it is all important for me to know where the story ends before I write it.


My research library is extensive, yet I can often be found amongst the shelves of Oxford's Bodleian Library. Writing an historical novel set so far back in The Middle Ages during a period of great change involves a subtle balancing act of fact and fiction. I aim to recapture the 'atmosphere' of the 11thC in a particular place and time. This means excavation and a later burial as information is concealed within a character or scene. At the moment I am getting a picture of Danish and Rus palaces during 11thC. I tend to keep detailed, clearly labelled notebooks with information. Before I write the words Chapter One I set out three parts to my plan and divide it roughly into chapters. This approach is just a variation on three acts. There is much to learn from film scripting techniques.


 I sit at my computer most days and aim for 1k words but often write less and sometimes  resort to pen and paper. Each session I revisit my previous session and correct things, aiming to get as good a first draft as possible. I also stop to check the historical background such as eating habits, sleeping habits, clothing, towns, fortresses, palaces, countryside, transportation and so on. Mine is a deceptively simple process but it works.

The first draft is set aside for a while and then it is worked on further, many times before my editor sees it. Angst and joy as I complete a book. And, as ever, I am interested in how other writers work.

May I Introduce:

I would like to introduce three writers whose books I admire:

Sarah Bower

'Sarah Bower is a novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, THE NEEDLE IN THE BLOOD, was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her second, SINS OF THE HOUSE OF BORGIA, has been translated into nine languages and was an international bestseller. Her third, EROSION, will be published later this year. Her short fiction has been read on Radio 4 and has appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies. Sarah is currently writer in residence at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.’ Actually Erosion is published today 28th April. Congratulations, Sarah.

Sarah will write about her working practice, guesting here on Monday 5th May. Do look then.

 Rebecca Hazell

Rebecca Hazell holds an honours BA from the University of California at Santa Cruz in Russian history. She has written educational filmstrips, designed award-winning needlepoint canvases, designed science craft kits for children, and published award-winning nonfiction books for children. She has just completed a historical trilogy set in the thirteenth century.
She lives with her husband on beautiful Vancouver Island near their two adult children. She is a senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition.

Rebecca Hazell

Rebecca's first novel in The Grip of God is titled The Tiger and the Dove.

Rebecca will tell us about her writing and research for The Grip of God and especially her second novel now published Solomon's Bride on her blog on 5th May. Do look here.  http://www.rebeccahazell.com/my-blog/ 

Geoffrey Gudgion

 

Geoffrey Gudgion left school at 17 to join the Royal Navy, and was later sponsored by the RN to read Geography at Cambridge. His sense of place began there. A subsequent, business career proved incompatible with writing, and after one row with his boss he stepped off the corporate ladder. His debut novel, Saxon’s Bane, is a thriller with a supernatural twist and was released in 2013 to widespread critical acclaim. He is now finishing his second book. You will find Geoffrey's write up on Monday 5th May on his website.
http://geoffreygudgion.com/

I hope my readers have enjoyed this article about writing and that you will look next week for the writers I have introduced. They will discuss their writing practice on their blogs and Sarah Bower here: www.scribbling-inthemargins.blogspot.

Find out more about me on my website : www.carolcmcgrath.co.uk