Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC) has a long list of people,
ideas, works, and historical eras whom they assume are deplorable
because they don't reflect their politically correct multiculturalist
values. “The Middle Ages” is one of them (often amped up for good
measure by substituting “Middle” with “Dark”).
One way out of this brainwashing straitjacket is to educate oneself by good teachers (and the ability to even find a good teacher often takes some doing).
Régine Pernoud is one such good teacher. Among many other books she has written, the first I will read with pleasure is Pour en finir avec le Moyen Age
("Done with the Middle Ages"), since I have heard much about it over
the years, and have read extracts from fan websites, as well as big
chunks of the English translation, available for partial preview on Google Books.
Pernoud's overarching thesis is that the so-called “Middle Ages”, in
contrast to their denigration by later Moderns (where modernity began
with the 14th century Renaissance), were actually quite progressive and
arguably, in many ways, superior to the eras that succeeded them. In
addition, this bias against the “Middle Ages” not only is largely false,
according to Pernoud, and not only was created in early modernity: it
also has survived as a prejudice into our own post-modern world (the
20th century for Pernoud, as she passed in 1998).
Just to take one example -- the treatment of women -- Pernoud writes:
If one wants to get an exact idea of the place held by women in the
Church in feudal times, one must wonder what, in our twentieth century,
would be said about of convents of men placed under the authority of a
woman. Would a project of this kind have the least chance of succeeding
in our time? This was, however, achieved with great success, and not
without providing the least in the Church, by Robert d'Arbrissel at
Fontevrault, in the early part of the twelfth century. Having resolved
to situate the extraordinary crowd of men and women who were in his
footsteps -- for he was one of the great converters of his time --
Robert d'Arbrissel decided to found two convents, one for men and one
for women; between them rose the church. which was the only place where
the monks and nuns could meet. Now this double monastery was placed
under the authority, not of an abbot, but of an abbess. The latter,
through the will of the founder, was to be a widow, having had the
experience of marriage. Let us add, to complete the picture, that the
first abbess, Petronilla Chemillé, who presided over the fortunes of
this order of Fontevrault, was twenty-two years old.
About this abbey at Fontevrault, by the way, the Catholic Enyclopedia tells us:
At the death of Robert d'Arbrissel [its founder], in 1117, there are said to have been at Fontevrault alone 3000 nuns, and in 1150 even 5000.
And Pernoud goes further:
If one examines the facts, the conclusion is inescapable: during the
whole feudal period, the place of women in the Church was certainly
different from that of men... but it was an eminent place. which,
moreover, symbolized perfectly the cult, which was likewise eminent,
rendered to the Virgin among all the saints.
She adds that it was only at the very end of the 13th century when Pope
Boniface VIII ruled for the strict cloister of nuns. “In consequence,”
Pernoud adds,
...women religious would no longer be allowed to mix in the world.
Consecrated laywomen, such as the béguines, who, in the thirteenth
century, led a life like everyone else's but were consecrated by vows,
would no longer be tolerated. In the seventeenth century in particular,
the Visitation sisters, meant by their foundress to mix in everyday
life, were obliged to adapt themselves to the same cloister as the
Carmelites, so that Saint Vincent de Paul [1581-1660], in order
to permit the Daughters of Charity to render service to the poor, to go
care for the sick and to help families in need, was very careful not to
treat them as religious and make them take the veil; if he had, their
fate would have been that of the Visitandines. It was by then [centuries after the “backward Middle Ages”] inconceivable
for a woman, having decided to consecrate her life to God, not to be
cloistered; although in the newer orders created for men, such as the
Jesuits, the latter remained in the world.
It suffices to say that the status of women in the Church is exactly
the same as their status in civil society and that gradually, after the
Middle Ages, everything that conferred on them any autonomy, any
independence, any instruction, was taken away from them. Now, at the
very time when the University -- which admitted only men -- was trying
to concentrate knowledge and teaching, convents gradually ceased to be
those centers of study that they had been previously... women thus found
themselves excluded from ecclesial life just as from intellectual life.
Pernoud notes that this situation only got progressively worse, until
the solidly modern period, the end of the 18th century, where in a
backhanded way, by virtue of the fact that many (if not most) orders of
women religious became more and more corrupted by various influential
sorts indulging the insouciance that is one hallmark of the modern
secularism:
[These female orders] also ceased, and rather rapidly, being centers
of prayer... The best example remains the order of Fontevrault, which
became [in the sixteenth century] a sanctuary for old mistresses of the
king... If some orders, like those of Carmel or the Poor Clares, kept
their purity thanks to the reforms, most of the monasteries of women, at
the end of the Ancién Régime [the close of the 1700s], were
accessible houses where the younger daughters of large families received
a large number of visits and where cards were played, as well as other
“forbidden games”, very far into the night.
Pernoud then embarks on a discussion of ordinary women in the Middle
Ages: “...women who were neither great ladies nor abbesses nor even
nuns: peasants and townswomen, mothers of families and women practicing a
trade.” The source material, Pernoud explains, is both less distinct
in terms of pinpointing data, yet far more copious, where the historian
finds:
...thousands of small details, gleaned by chance and without any
preconceived order, which shows us men and women through the small facts
of existence: here the complaint of a woman hairdresser, there of a
woman salt merchant (trading in salt), of a woman miller, of the widow
of a farmer, of a chatelaine [a castle owner], of a woman Crusader, and so on.
Pursuing this thread, Pernoud expatiates:
It is through documents of this kind that one can, piece by piece,
reconstruct, as in a mosaic, the real story. There is no point in
saying that this story is in appearance very different from that
provided by the chansons de geste, the chivalric novels, and the
literary sources that have so often been taken as historical sources!
The picture that comes into focus from the whole of these documents
presents for us more than one surprising trait, since one sees, for
example, women voting like men in urban assemblies or in those of rural
parishes...
In notarial acts, it is very common to see a married woman act by
herself, in opening, for example, a shop or a trade, and she did so
without being obliged to produce her husband's authorization... tax
rolls... show a host of women plying trades: schoolmistress, doctor,
apothecary, plasterer, dyer, copyist, miniaturist, binder, and so on.
[taken from pages 107-111]
Aerial view of the Fontevrault Abbey:
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