Medieval Women

After offering a brief overview of the status of women during the Middle Ages, Power's book is formatted into four additional chapters. These chapters focus on the lady, the working woman in town and country, the education of women and nunneries. If an age is to be judged by how it treats its women then the Middle Ages is to be seen in terms of the many contradictions which it generated. During the Medieval era, women were both revered and denigrated. Fascinatingly, Power

indicates that the religious cult of the virgin spawned its secular parallelism, the cult of the lady.

Another of Power's fascinating insights is that it is a "small but vocal minority" who repressed the "expressed opini

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ies. If dowry money was to be limited, it could be advantageous to have a daughter elect to enter the convent. Women of the lower classes were not to be found in convents since their families were more likely to need their income as wage-earners. In attempting to understand how women were educated in the Middle Ages, Power indicates that it is easier to ascertain how women were taught the fine arts and manners rather than actual intellectual instruction. During the Middle Ages, education for women was to be conceived within its widest sense as a preparation for life. Didactic treatises dating from the thirteenth century focused on what exactly a woman should know. First, many of these works attempted to help shape "ladies who would shine in society." Curiously, many of these manual-type books are modelled upon Ovid's The Art of Love. Unfortunately, the tone of these didactic treatises usually errs on the side of frivolity. What women were encouraged to perfect were the arts of hawking, playing chess, telling stories, responding with witty repartee, singing and playing on various musical instruments. In contrast, the more serious didactic works adopted a much more serious tone. Courtly manuals attempted to instruc
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Approximate Word count = 1338
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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