Chapter 45 - Women's Life

Summary

This is an enormous field, of which I can here touch only the fringe, in anticipation of the exhaustive study with which Professor Eileen Power has long been engaged. Meanwhile, however, those who wish to pursue the subject further should consult her article in The Legacy of the Middle Ages and her Medieval English Nunneries, together with Miss A. Abram's English Life and Manners in the later Middle Ages, and Thomas Wright's Womankind in Western Europe. For Renaissance women see P. S. Allen's Age of Erasmus, pp. 197–8.

There is, perhaps, no subject in which it would be more dangerous to judge from legislation alone. In law, medieval woman had certainly great disadvantages, of which the most startling was her crude subjection to physical violence. We find here a significant contrast between the much older Jewish civilization and that of these comparatively recent feudal lords whose Germanic fathers, not so many generations earlier, had broken in upon the Roman Empire. We must here recall that decision of Rabbi Perez, who died shortly before 1300. It is not an authoritative conciliar decision; but it represents fairly what an influential Rabbi attempted to enforce in his congregation.