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“Composed for the Honor and Glory of the Ladies”

Folklore and Medieval Women’s Sexuality in The Distaff Gospels

THERESA A. VAUGHAN

The Distaff Gospels (Les evangiles des quenouilles), a fifteenth-century French manuscript, presents a series of about 230 items of folklore—beliefs, sayings, and remedies—within a frame narrative.¹ It shares this structure, linking loosely related stories in the context of a sequence of tellings, with more famous works from the Middle Ages, including Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron. In the most commonly read version of The Distaff Gospels, the so-called Paris Manuscript,² a clerk agrees to spend six successive nights recording the “gospels” of older women and the responses of those who gather to hear and discuss the important knowledge being taught. Each night, one woman is appointed a “doctoresse,” or teacher, in a setting deliberately imitating a male-centered classroom. The doctoresse proclaims a statement from an authoritative source, in this case popular belief. These ideas gain respectability by being referred to as “gospels,” but the ironic tone mocks both the women and the ecclesiastical tradition. The students—the other women present—comment upon and affirm the statement in the “gloss”³ through their own experience or that of others. The clerk assigns each proclamation a chapter, as if it were a selection of a biblical text.

The distaff, used to spin thread, refers both to a tool that the women employ during their gatherings and to women’s domains in general.⁴ Until the industrial age, spinning was a common daily occupation for women of most social classes in their spare time, a task that could be undertaken when sitting, standing, or even walking. Thus, the name of the collection, The Distaff Gospels, refers to the world of women in general on the basis of their common occupation, the spinning of wool or flax into thread that would be eventually woven into cloth.⁵

Although respectful to the women in their presence, the often-bemused clerk frequently mocks them and distances himself from their “gospels” when he records them. While the text itself, and the frame narrative in particular, can be placed within the antifeminist tradition of medieval writing (or at least the querelle des femmes),⁶ it nevertheless records women’s popular beliefs, sayings, and remedies. Though ostensibly written by a man, the clerk, who often finds humor in mocking silly, domineering, and oversexed old women, the folklore itself, found in the gospels as opposed to the glosses, is neither misogynistic nor male dominated. Instead it likely represents folklore about women and possibly even by women, embodied in women who are fully strong-willed, intelligent, and sexual beings, commenting upon and influencing their lives. For example, the women discuss a typical sexual remedy:

Or, in the case of a condemnation of men who beat women:

Most scholars consider the traditions in the Gospels to more or less accurately reflect fifteenth-century folklore. The Distaff Gospels’contents concern women, whose actual daily issues may be discerned in them. It is thus likely that they reflect women’s folklore, and they may in some instances actually come from women. In contrast, Gretchen Angelo (2003) and Madeleine Jeay (1982) presume that the quotations attributed to the gathered women in the glosses were inserted by the male author or authors for misogynistic comic effect. Literature of the time period was nearly always male authored, and the glosses’ comments mirror the language of other contemporary fictional works by men. In particular, they resemble the comic literature that often plays upon stock characters like the oversexed old woman and the weak and cuckolded man—figures medieval people apparently found amusing. Nevertheless, Laura Doyle Gates (1997), among others, argues that even in the glosses, with their obvious female caricatures, irrepressible old women with strong opinions and identities emerge. In that sense, though the glosses may have been intended for comic effect, misogyny is not the only trope that is present.

There are multiple editions of The Distaff Gospels. Originally written and published in French as Euvangiles des queneules (Les évangiles des quenouilles in modern French), it has also appeared in English, Dutch, and German versions as well as an Occitan adaptation. No modern English translation existed until recently when Jeay and Kathleen Garay published a critical edition and English translation in 2006. There are two complete early manuscripts in French: the shorter, anonymous Chantilly version, likely written sometime before 1474,⁸ and the longer but more widely read Paris version, probably written sometime in the late 1480s. The latter, commonly attributed to Fouquart de Cambray, Anthoine du Val, and Jean d’Arras, is the most frequently published and translated. Although the gospels and folklore in the Chantilly and Paris texts are similar, the latter has the best-developed frame narrative, glosses, and added examples. However, most scholars see it as the more overtly misogynist (e.g., Angelo 2001, 25; Jeay and Garay 2006, 26–27; Small 2009, 232).

Between 1482 and 1490, no fewer than five different printings from two publishing houses in France came out, indicating the text’s popularity. The first English translation, circa 1510, by Wynkyn de Worde in London, also went through several editions and sold well (Jeay and Garay 2006, 27). The original intended audience for the manuscripts is not entirely clear, but evidence suggests that they were written for the Burgundian court rather than for scholarly or ecclesiastical consumption (Angelo 2003, 86). Given their target readership of aristocratic courtiers, it is not surprising that these manuscripts were written in vernacular French rather than in Latin. The incunabula⁹ and later print works, illustrated with standard woodcuts, were for the less well-to-do.

Most folklore in the manuscripts comes from the regions of Flanders and Picardy (Krueger 1988, 943). In Savoir faire: Une analyze des croyances des “Evangiles des quenouilles” (1982), Jeay makes a convincing case that the folklore collected and contained within The Distaff Gospels is not merely the creation of the manuscript authors. Quite a number of the beliefs in The Distaff Gospels also appear in Le Folk-lore de France by Paul Sébillot, (2006) a four-volume collection of nineteenth-century traditions published from 1904 to 1907, with emphasis on material from northern France. Jeay argues that the presence of similar or even identical beliefs nearly four centuries later indicates the authenticity of those found in The Distaff Gospels. She contends that beliefs, sayings, and remedies from the fifteenth century could survive in recognizable form into the nineteenth century, given the rather conservative nature of folklore. This assertion has been accepted in subsequent works (see L. D. Gates 1997; Morris 1988).¹⁰ Feminist academics who have examined and analyzed The Distaff Gospels over the past twenty years (e.g., Angelo 2001; L .D. Gates 1997; Jeay 1982; Phillips 2007), concentrate largely on antifeminist literature and the querelle des femmes; on the contrast between orality and literacy (the women representing orality, the male scribe representing literacy); and on scholarly versus popular literature. While the conclusions they have reached vary, some argue that the voices of the women are negated by the mocking gaze and words of the scribe (Angelo 2003), while others contend that both male and female voices can be heard in this text. The latter suggest that women’s voices cannot be completely silenced by the clerk or the misogynistic tone set by the male authors (L. D. Gates 1997). The comic characters themselves, while humorous and likely the invention of the male author or authors, display an admirable irrepressibility that cannot be termed wholly misogynistic in character. In addition, such critics point out that the work’s comic nature allows the women’s voices, even those within the narrative frame, to take on a joyful and laughing essence (Perfetti 2003, 114–115).

While modern scholars link this type of text to misogynistic traditions or to related genres such as the fabliaux,¹¹ and portions of the work unquestionably criticize women and femininity, The Distaff Gospel’s authors most likely imitated the typical literature produced by male clerks for comic effect. University clerks compiled collections of misogynist, often humorous stories for use by priests in their sermons and other preaching. Such works formed part of their intellectual training. “When we look closely at these male-authored texts, however, we find that clichés about women’s talkativeness, excessive libido, and deceitfulness are played with, reversed to charge men with the same faults, or reconfigured in ways that make trouble with easy antifeminist essentialism” (Perfetti 2003, 2–3).

To analyze the text as a whole, including the Chantilly manuscript and most especially the Paris manuscript, we must consider it on a number of levels. Folklore in the form of beliefs, sayings, and remedies from oral tradition lies at its core. Circumscribing that material, the narrative frame must be understood within the emerging vernacular literary tradition of the time, drawing from the both the ecclesiastical and scholastic perspectives. The use of the ecclesiastical seats the format within the realm of aristocratic, rather than more popular works, as upper-class audiences would have received training in the ecclesiastical tradition, while the middle class would not. The manuscript authors play with these different traditions from the church and the academy to comic effect, as I demonstrate below.

Little work on The Distaff Gospels published to date has taken ethnological or folkloristic approaches to it beyond noting evidence of its folklore’s authenticity. Instead, most scholars explore the text within the literary tradition. Jeay’s work offers one notable exception, particularly Savoir faire (1982). In it, Jeay (also the translator of a modern French version of the Evangiles [1985]) first demonstrates the authenticity of the folklore by working backward, primarily from the work of Sébillot, mentioned above.¹² She then proceeds to a structuralist analysis of the Gospels’ traditions, using, among others, the article “Brown County Superstitions: The Structure of Superstition” by Alan Dundes (1961). Jeay is, without a doubt, the foremost modern authority on the Evangiles. However her attempt to fit these folk beliefs into a structuralist framework produces an analysis that some American scholars find less successful than it might be (Morris 1988). American folklorists have not found beliefs and superstitions¹³ particularly amenable to structuralist methodology. Even Dundes’s abovementioned work does little more than discuss the definition of superstition and broadly classify the beliefs he collected into the categories of signs, magic, and conversion superstitions.

Another quasi-structuralist, or at least classificatory, attempt to analyze the lore in the Evangiles was undertaken by Anne Paupert in Les fileuses et le clerc: Une étude des “Evangiles de quenouilles” (1990). In it, she supports Jeay’s assertion that the Gospels’ folklore is authentic by comparing it with similar beliefs from later periods and extrapolating backward through time. It seems clear, then, that the text represents the rural popular culture of Flanders and Picardy, particularly as it pertained to women’s experiences of marriage, childbirth, and child care, and to their folk remedies. It also demonstrates that the aristocratic or elite culture of the day was sufficiently removed from rural life by this point that a collection of such rural lore would be interesting and amusing for its intended aristocratic audience. The bulk of Paupert’s book classifies beliefs (Jeay 1993, 1107). Neither Jeay nor Paupert incorporates much English-language folklore scholarship in their analyses, and the reader familiar with the latter literature may experience a disconnect between it and what the two scholars set out to accomplish. Thus, analysis in French of the Distaff Gospels can be fruitfully supplemented from the perspectives of English-language folklore studies.

While being mindful of the difficulty of pinpointing the exact cultural context for these beliefs, feminist scholarship on women’s folklore offers a useful mode of analysis. As much groundbreaking work (see Farrer 1986; Greenhill and Tye 1997; Hollis, Pershing, and Young 1993; Jordan and Kalčik 1985; Radner 1993) has demonstrated, women’s folklore can be subversive, enhance female-centered relationships, and express a worldview and concerns that are and were unique but interdependent with the traditions of the culture as a whole. For example, in studying a body of nineteenth-century local legends recorded by Mary Katzman Lawson, a writer and newspaper editor from Preston, Nova Scotia, folklorist Diane Tye (2002) compares stories Lawson composed based on legends told to her by her mother and published as a series in her newspaper, the Provincial, with later revisions that were shaped by a male editor and published as an official community history. The early narratives that draw directly on oral tradition express a female-centered worldview; they reflect multiple viewpoints and take up difficult subjects, including domestic violence. In contrast, the later versions concentrate more heavily on the “facts,” draw on public documents such as court records rather than oral testimony, and create a linear narrative of progress and respectability. Tye’s work represents just one approach to the examination of historic traditions.

It can sometimes be difficult to sort out the relationship between folklore and text in the Middles Ages (Peck 2007, 100). A considerable body of scholarship addresses the interplay among folktale, myth, and legend in medieval literature, but less has been said about the place of folk belief in the literary tradition. With respect to the Gospels, the distinction manifests between the ideas of the elite, relatively urbanized, educated audience at whom the book is aimed and the beliefs of the rural peasant women who proclaim their “gospels” on each successive night. We should keep in mind, however, that while an aristocratic audience may have found peasants, and especially old peasant women, amusing in part due to class differences, at this point in history there was no romantic glorification of peasant life. Such a view, associated with the nineteenth-century social evolutionary theories of British and British-influenced folklore and anthropology, dates to centuries after the Gospels were published. Medieval aristocratic people would likely have thought of peasants as simple and unsophisticated, but would not have seen them as representing some earlier phase of sociocultural development. As anthropologist Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah (1990) has argued, the scientific orientation that radically altered Western worldviews was absent in medieval Europe. We cannot assign scientific meaning, or lack thereof, in the modern sense to medieval belief. Analyzing magic, the supernatural, and folk belief presented in The Distaff Gospels, we must allow for a different way of thinking about the world.

Medieval ideas about the beliefs of rural women would have been influenced by the twin strands of authority that privileged the writings of antiquity, on the one hand, and the traditions of the church on the other. Although fifteenth-century Italy was going through significant intellectual evolution, the development of humanism, and the reexamination of religious ideas, the world of Flanders—that of the Gospels— would have been less influenced by these trends.¹⁴ The text’s humor comes not from the “bad science” of the women speaking but from the much older tradition of misogyny inspired partly, but certainly not entirely, by ecclesiastical literature. It made women into men’s intellectual inferiors, ruled by their sexual appetites,¹⁵ and it contrasted elite and peasant cultures or, perhaps, literate and oral cultures (Angelo 2001; Loyson 2004).

By the end of the fifteenth century, women like Hildegard of Bingen, Christine de Pizan, and Heloise, to name some of the best known, sought to become part of the intellectual and ecclesiastical writing traditions (Blamires 1992; Dinshaw and Wallace 2003). And others, like the aristocratic Marie de France, influenced the vernacular tradition of literature and poetry (Dinshaw and Wallace 2003). However, the female characters in The Distaff Gospels express their beliefs and customs within a framework that knowingly acknowledges and mocks scholasticism and theological debate, juxtaposing the male, educated tradition with the oral tradition of the uneducated women. The male clerk who records their pronouncements in both the Chantilly and Paris manuscripts, and comments on the women’s beliefs in the Paris manuscript, makes it clear that he distances himself from them. For example, on the fourth night, after a lively session that would be followed by the women throwing themselves a party, the clerk writes: “I was sorry not to have another man’s company so that I might have laughed with him because, truly, their ways were very strange and, as far as I could tell, they seemed to think that, from now on, the world should be ruled and governed by their constitutions and chapters” (Jeay and Garay 2006, 155). Or, following the fifth night, “After my farewell, I took my leave and went to rest since my head was empty because of their senseless talk that my mind had quite failed to grasp” (173). Finally, at the conclusion of the Gospels, the author writes, “You, my lords and ladies, who will read or have read this short treatise, consider it as a pastime for idle moments; don’t give any consideration to anything which has been written, if you please, and don’t look for any benefit, essential truth or good lesson. Instead, consider that it has been written to demonstrate the frailty of those who gossip in this way when they are together” (189).

The literate male writer seeks to detach himself both from the actual knowledge contained within the “gospels” and from the women themselves. Possibly he fears that his association with them might weaken his reputation by showing that he identifies overmuch with the culture of women, thus calling into question his masculinity. Dismissing women’s conversation as “gossip” is a long-held strategy for disempowering women’s words (Kousaleos 1999; Weigle 1982). Thus the clerk mocks the women both for the sake of humor and to show that what they say doesn’t actually carry the weight of truth (L. D. Gates 1997, 17). It has also been suggested that perhaps these beliefs, because they were not church sanctioned and thus possibly were associated with heresy or witchcraft, needed to be soundly repudiated in the text so that the author(s) would not come under suspicion by the authorities (Shaus 2006, 266).

From this point forward, I will refer to the Paris manuscript only. The doctoresses who preside over each of the six nights of instruction and proclamation of their gospels deserve some mention, as they help to set the stage for what will follow. On the first night, Monday, we meet Dame Ysengrine du Glay (Ysengrine the Joyous). Ysengrine, sixty-five, has been married five times and has taken several lovers. A midwife, she fears that her younger husband will be unfaithful. Midwives had a poor reputation, especially since the delivery of children had become the purview of the medical establishment after the founding of the university system in the 1100s. Midwives were increasingly viewed as merely superstitious old women rather than legitimate medical practitioners (Jeay and Garay 2006, 79). Medieval people found the character of the oversexed old woman or widow amusing, and they are common in French fabliaux and comic literature (Karras 2005, 81). From the point of view of the church, widows who could not remain chaste were encouraged to remarry. “The church followed the lead of male scholars (and poets) who suggested that women’s sexual appetites were voracious and, once unleashed, difficult to manage” (Hanawalt 2003, 60). The church viewed women, generally associated with sexual appetite and lack of control, as temptations to men until the age at which they had lost their beauty and attractiveness and were found to be merely comical. That did not mean, however that women didn’t actually enjoy sex into their later years—the Gospels suggests that many of them did.

The subsequent nights feature Transeline du Croq (Transeline the Hooker), age sixty, skilled at divination and the concubine of a priest; Abonde du Four (Abonde of the Oven), a corpulent retired prostitute; Sebile des Mares (Sibyl of the Swamps) from Vaud, aged fifty-seven and associated with heresy and witchcraft; Gomberde la Faee (Gomberde the Sorceress), still with a strong sex drive but married to a man who doesn’t want sex as much as she; and Berthe de Corne (Berthe the Horny), about eighty and secretly trained by her father, a doctor, implying that she practiced medicine, which was generally illegal for women to do at this point in the medieval period (Jeay and Garay 2006).

These women, fitting the literary comic stereotype of oversexed old women who may also be dabbling in witchcraft, are presented for the amusement of members of the elite audience, who saw themselves in radically different terms. Elite women were expected to marry in order to preserve family titles and property rights but were not normally portrayed as wantonly sexual. Aristocratic women, according to tradition, had greater control of their desires and behavior than did peasants. Their only alternative to the socially acceptable role of chaste wife was to participate in the courtly love of Marie de France, whereby they were objects of adoration but out of reach to knights. They were expected to have more self-control than peasant women had (Shahar 2003, 126).

Within the Gospels, however, we see a more nuanced picture of women and their knowledge. For example, the lore of the first night, led by Ysengrine du Glay, highlights gender conflict between men and women, particularly within marriage. For example:

This chapter refers to the customs of marriage dowry, which vary over the medieval period and from place to place. Generally speaking, by the later Middle Ages, women would bring a dowry into the marriage and would also receive a dower, a gift of land or property, from the husband’s family. Ostensibly, women were supposed to retain some control over both the dower and dowry, and would retain rights to both if widowed (see Amt 2010, 44–45). In some places, women legally operated businesses independently of their husbands or male relatives. Widows who had retained sizable assets from one or more previous marriages became attractive candidates for remarriage (Shahar 2003, 237–239). According to law, husbands were supposed to secure permission from their wives to use these assets—although in practice this did not always happen.¹⁶ In most locations, her resources could not be used to pay her husband’s debts, for example, without her permission. The gospel pronounced by Ysengrine du Glay, and confirmed by Griele, assigns a harsh quasi-spiritual punishment (burning in molten rock) to men who go against their wives’ wishes regarding use of their property.

Other examples from the first evening address this and other problems that wives encounter in marriages. Night 1, chapter 2 decries men who do not follow the advice of their wives. Chapter 3 asserts that men who beat their wives will never obtain the mercy of the Virgin Mary. Chapter 4 indicates that men who take actions without informing their wives are worse than thieves (Jeay and Garay 2006, 83). Chapter 5 echoes chapter 1, expanding condemnation to men who squander household resources, even if not from the wives’ assets (83, 85). In chapter 18, we find that husbands are to blame when they, or their wives, stray sexually (95).

Among the other examples from the first night, we find divinatory and instructional advice pertaining to marriage, although typically the women’s response in the gloss reflects social commentary:

The gospel here states a fairly typical divination technique for determining a future husband’s name. Many such methods exist in cultures worldwide, including dropping an apple peeling, the shape of which forms the letter that will begin the name of one’s husband, or leaving the written letters of the alphabet facedown in a basin of water overnight; the one facing up in the morning similarly signifies (Opie and Tatem 1989, 276). The gloss, in this case, reflects the common medieval literary trope of the husband who cannot perform sexually, although it is not unrealistic to imagine a woman being dissatisfied with her husband’s loss of attractiveness and sex drive. The medieval reader would have found amusing the juxtaposition of the tired old man, no longer virile, with the sexually potent old woman.

Other examples from the first night that involve methods of divination or supernatural consequences include the following: the tenth gospel states that a young woman who drinks milk boiled in a frying pan or earthen pot will find that it will rain on her wedding day, and that her husband will be ill tempered. In the twelfth gospel, we find that if a young virgin woman marries an equally inexperienced young man, their first child will be “simple” (Jeay and Garay 2006, 89). In chapter 16, the woman who eats the last cherry while with her suitor will be the last to marry—although the wording implies that eating the last cherry is some sort of game (93). As the epigraph shows, the twenty-first chapter advises that a woman who suspects her husband of cheating on her should see if he goes at least one lunar month without approaching her sexually—if this happens, then her suspicions are grounded (97). Another method of detecting a straying husband is found in chapter 25: if a woman loses her garter in the middle of a street, it is a sure sign that her husband (or lover) is cheating (95).

The subsequent evenings also feature folklore that pertains to women. I have chosen only those examples that relate directly to sexuality and/or gender roles. Sayings suggest that a man who offers his mistress a knife as a New Year’s gift will cool the love between them (night 2, chapter 20, Jeay and Garay 2006, 117); that a man who is mounting a horse should not accept any sword or piece of equipment from his wife or he will be unable to use it when necessary (night 3, chapter 20, 135); that a married man who has an affair with a married woman will never enter heaven (night 4, chapter 7, 143); and that a man who has kissed the altar after Mass must not kiss any woman other than his wife for the following week (night 4, chapter 8, 143, 145). All constrain men but implicate women, as they have consequences for a man’s wife or lover. I note particularly that night 4, chapter 7 is in keeping with many of the sayings of the first night, in that a man who betrays his wife will find spiritual consequences for his misbehavior.

Spells, remedies, and divination are also included. A woman should feed her husband or lover catnip in order to increase his sexual desire for her (night 2, chapter 1, Jeay and Garay 2006, 101, 103). A woman who fears she is being ridden by an incubus¹⁷ at night should place an oak stool in front of the fire so the incubus will sit down on it and be unable to get up (night 2, chapter 10, 109). If a woman places a walnut leaf picked just before nones¹⁸ on midsummer’s night in her husband’s or lover’s left shoe, he will love her passionately (night 4, chapter 23, 153). If a woman makes a soup from herbs picked just before dawn on midsummer’s night and feeds it to her beloved, he will love her and will never leave her (night 5, chapter 1, 159). If a woman wishes to avoid being beaten by her husband, she should put his shirts under the altar on a Friday celebration of the Passion,¹⁹ then have him wear one on Sunday. He will be sweet and loving (night 5, chapter 2, 161). If a woman has an itchy head, it is a sign that she may be beaten by her husband (night 5, chapter 14, 167). White fever (lovesickness) can be worse than other fevers but can be cured with a soup made in St. George’s vessel (night 6, chapter 6, 177, 179).²⁰

Most of these beliefs have to do with love and sexuality. One specifically addresses the issue of domestic violence. In each case, women attempt to exert control over uncertainties that affect their well-being. The sexuality and behavior of others concern women in their own lives, but desires for one’s own gratification or safety can be difficult to impose on others. Divination, spells, and remedies help women control uncertainty and make men (and incubi!) conform to their wills.

Several sayings and proverbs concern incest taboos, including that a man who initiates sex with his commother²¹ will not go to heaven unless his godson does penance for both of his godparents (night 4, chapter 3, Jeay and Garay 2006, 141). Incest taboos relate to the forbidden or darker side of sexuality. In this case, the church’s rules prohibiting sex between even non–blood kin godparents of the same child could be troublesome. If the community were small, the practice of naming multiple godparents could limit the number of licit sexual partners. Note here, however, that there is no open disagreement with church law but rather an implicit assertion that it would be the man, rather than the woman, who would initiate illicit sex.

The Gospels also include sayings and proverbs regarding the sexual lives of men and women of the church. Clergy who have intercourse with nuns or other women religious will die in pain and with an erect penis (night 4, chapter 4, Jeay and Garay 2006, 141, 143). A woman who remains the mistress of a priest until her death is the “devil’s mount,” and will not achieve salvation (night 4, chapter 5, 143). If a priest or friar has sex with a married woman, he cannot be granted forgiveness unless the husband grants it first (night 4, chapter 6, 143). Two levels of discourse work here. The clerical or ecclesiastical tradition condemns sexual activity on the part of clergy. The popular tradition, however, acknowledges their frequent engagement in illicit sex. Perhaps straddling both traditions, women as well as men are condemned for the practice. We are faced by a contradiction, however, when we learn that Transeline du Croq, the leader of the second night, “retired and became the concubine of the priest in town who heard her confession night and day, which is why all her neighbors treated her with great reverence” (103). Oversexed clergy are present in fabliaux, and in The Distaff Gospels women both enjoy their ministrations and condemn them for their sins.

The above reflect women’s belief and knowledge. But within the glosses, the author of the Paris manuscript increases his manuscript’s comedic impact. For example:

The prescription of garlic to improve the health and performance of a rooster is traditional. However, the gloss adds a humorous twist by depicting one of the women, Marotte Ridee, as old but still quite eager for sex.

Folklorists are at a disadvantage in interpreting the folklore presented in The Distaff Gospels. We cannot see it performed in its original context, and an artificial framing narrative intervenes from a male point of view. Even the examples of folklore, though probably authentic to the time period, may or may not have been collected from women to begin with; we simply have no evidence either way. Virtually all folklore from the Middle Ages and later periods encounters the same problems, rendering it somewhat difficult to ascribe modern feminist interpretations. The bulk of work in feminist folkloristics dates to the 1970s and later and has concentrated primarily, although certainly not exclusively, on contemporary cultures (Greenhill, Tye, and Cantú 2009, xxiv–xxv). Despite work on medieval folklore by medievalists and folklorists, the overlap between medieval studies and contemporary folkloristics is still less than it might be, particularly in the area of feminist scholarship (Lindahl, McNamara, and Lindow 2002, xix–xxii; Sautman, Conchado, and Di Scipio 1998, 1–17).

Nevertheless, presuming at least some of its material as women’s own traditions, the beliefs and customs found in The Distaff Gospels demonstrate that women had many of the same domestic concerns as they do today. They wanted their voices to be heard in the marital relationship and beyond. They wanted control over their own resources, or at least consultation in their use. They faced the challenges of domestic violence and its avoidance. They wanted satisfying sex lives and attentive partners. They were sometimes concerned about the fidelity of their husbands and lovers. They were curious about whom they would marry, and wanted some control over their future health and welfare and that of their husbands and children. Traditional forms of expression held great importance for women, who had no access to channels of formal decision making (Greenhill and Tye 1997; Radner 1993). All of these concerns are expressed through the religious beliefs and cultural norms of their time, and all remain common to women today.

The complications of interpreting this lore in its specific cultural context should not prevent us from appreciating that the women it quotes and comments on were not silent, asexual creatures. Our ability to see medieval women as sexual beings has been hindered by the incorrect modern assumption that medieval Europe, largely under the sway of a church that had since the time of its fathers propounded a negative view of sexuality and of sexual intercourse, rendered women silent on the subject of sex (Karras 2005, 18). Instead, while medieval life had very strict gender definitions and restrictions on acceptable behavior, medieval people talked about sex in a way we might today find rather straightforward and surprising (19). According to Ruth Mazo Karras, the medieval era was also a world in which, it can be safely assumed, a large number of men and women ignored the writings of ecclesiastical and scholarly men about the problems of sexual intercourse and the virtues of chastity (21). Or, if there were not a total disregard for church teachings, it was a world in which people chose to have illicit sex regardless of the spiritual consequences of their acts. Thus, according to Judith M. Bennett, rural medieval people were by no means abstaining from sex outside marriage: “Although medieval records seldom illuminate the sexual experience of rural dwellers, no contemporary sources lend any credence to the view that preindustrial sexual relations were either uncreative or particularly unpleasurable for women . . . Manorial fines for illicit sexual intercourse and illegitimate births also testify to both the extent of sexual activity and the pleasure of women; with so many births in the countryside attributed to unmarried women, it is hard to suppose that most women viewed sexual intercourse as an unpleasant marital obligation” (1987, 102–103). The women of The Distaff Gospels certainly show no shame about their sexual nature. We should also keep in mind that the modern Euro–North American conception that women are naturally shy and reticent about sex is actually a product of nineteenth-century Victorian England, not of the Middle Ages.

The setting of The Distaff Gospels imagined by its male authors imitates the scholarly setting for humorous effect. It is not unreasonable to assume, however, that women—particularly among themselves—talked freely about sex and their dissatisfaction with men in general or with specific male husbands and lovers—just as many do today. Even if the Gospels’ authors played up the bawdiness of the women’s conversation for comic value, as is entirely likely, the fact remains that most of these folkloric texts were probably collected from women or reflect women’s speech and beliefs.

In The Distaff Gospels, women attempt to exercise some control over domestic violence, which was apparently common in the Middle Ages. Even though French fabliaux parody the violent and/or aggressive wife (Shahar 2003, 78), just as current apologists for misogynist violence solemnly intone that “women can be abusive too,” the Gospels show women’s concern about their husbands beating them. Women were considered their husbands’ property in many locations. Thus, it was lawful for a man to beat his wife, short of severe injury, in order to correct her behavior. A woman could ask for a separation from her husband, but given women’s limited ability to support themselves financially in much of Europe, economic realities forced many to return home (Ward 2002, 49). While the idea of domestic violence could be the subject of comic relief, it was normally the husband as victim that medieval people found amusing, because he had been displaced from his usual role as spiritual and physical head of the household.

We also see women, stereotypically consigned to the realm of the physical, applying their knowledge of church teachings and of the consequences of sin to the men who betray them—whether sexually, materially, or relationally. The women of The Distaff Gospels want to have control over their lives, their property, and their decisions. Those glosses written by men may parody and exaggerate women’s dissatisfactions for comic relief or to distance the authors from heretical ideas, but the actual gospels themselves show a reasonable human expectation for respect and fidelity. And although the joke of the oversexed elderly woman is an old one, going back to the ancient world, the Gospels show that women expected sexual satisfaction. They fully inhabited their bodies while also being engaged in the spiritual world. They tried to control their milieu in the way that humans deprived of socially sanctioned power always have, through beliefs, divination, and folk remedies.

Endeavoring to understand medieval women’s lives through folklore alone is fraught with pitfalls, just as trying to understand medieval women’s lives exclusively through the writing of men leaves an incomplete picture, to say the least. Legal documents, such as court records, give a glimpse of women as they both used and were subject to the legal system. The relatively small volume of written material, largely from aristocratic women of the time, gives some picture of the daily lives and concerns of upper-class, literate women. But few texts offer the intimate view of the lives of peasant women that the Gospels delivers. I have argued, concurring with Lisa Perfetti (2003) and L. D. Gates (1997), that their narrative framing does not wholly stifle women’s voices and experiences. I have further contended that we actually can tell something about medieval women’s lives and desires from the folklore in The Distaff Gospels, especially the relatively unadulterated gospels spoken by the doctoresses. Despite a great separation of time and culture, medieval women are recognizable to their counterparts today in that they also desired happiness and some measure of control over their lives. The author of the Paris manuscript of The Distaff Gospels may have been speaking tongue-in-cheek when he dedicated the work to the “honor and glory of the Ladies,” but perhaps there is more truth to that dedication than he intended.