Introduction

Here, we’ll consider another element of Western European societies in the mid- to late Middle Ages (c. 1000 – c. 1350): women. As societies developed, they used traditions and other means to maintain order. We’ve seen mostly male rulers use religion to support their claims to political power. Now we’ll look at how religious and secular (non-religious) laws shaped women’s lives.

Social structures

In medieval Europe, women were generally considered to be the property of their nearest male relative. In society, their social status depended on that of their father or husband. Elite women, such as nobles and aristocrats, lived on big rural estates. They had some access to education, provided by private tutors. Their principal jobs were to manage a household of servants and family members. They were also expected to have many children, preferably sons.

Daughters of shop owners or small businessmen were considered middle class. Most such families lived in towns or cities. Young women may have received some education if they worked in the family business. Like noblewomen, these middle-class women were also responsible for running the household and producing and raising children. In the countryside, a woman was considered middle class if her family owned a successful farm. In rural areas, there was little need or opportunity for formal education.

However, the vast majority of women in medieval Western Europe were peasants or members of the working classes. They still had all the household and child-raising responsibilities, but also had to produce or provide food in some way. Often, they worked outside the home to help support their families. In the cities, they might find work as servants or employees of some sort. In the countryside, many were paid as farmworkers. In the early Middle Ages, most rural women and their families were serfs: farmworkers whose only pay was a place to live.

Religious traditions about women

The main religion of medieval Western European kingdoms was Roman Catholic Christianity. Judaism was also practiced, mostly in cities. Islam had established itself on the Iberian peninsula (modern-day Portugal and Spain). These three religions had a lot in common when it came to teachings about women. They all referred to the story of Adam and Eve. Religious leaders often blamed Eve for getting humans thrown out of Paradise. They promoted the idea that all women were, at some level, disobedient and had to be controlled by men.¹  At the same time, all three religions also highlighted some powerful women in their religious traditions.

Christian women and religion

Women had different ways to interact with Christianity, depending on their social status. An elite woman could join one of the region’s many convents. These church properties could be vast estates that employed hundreds of people. Some women would even become an abbess.²  But the Catholic Church grew more powerful, wealthy, and centralized with the pope’s authority in Rome. That’s when women’s authority in convents came to an end. By the 1300s, a series of popes ordered that men (priests) should run the convents. Women (nuns) in the convents were now cloistered. In short, they were forbidden to leave the convent grounds. In spite of having limited authority in their own spaces, many women still found value and purpose in convents. These institutions often ran schools for girls and provided health care. Nuns were honored members of the community, and this occupation was one of the few ways a woman could get an education.

To join a convent, a fee had to be paid to cover a nun’s living expenses for the rest of her life. For this reason, these women tended to come from very wealthy families. Some women who could not afford to join a convent came together in communal, women-only houses known as beguines. There, women studied and lived religious lives while they worked in the community.

Christian women attended church on Sundays and holy days. However, they were little more than audience members. The Church reflected the social and gender distinctions of general society. That meant the elite women sat in the front, the middle-class women in the middle range of seats, and the lower classes sat in the back or stood. Women were not allowed to participate in religious ceremonies and were seated separately from men. However, the idea that women’s souls were equal to men’s souls was generally accepted. 

Jewish women in medieval Europe

Christian kingdoms passed laws forbidding Jews to own land because this gave families significant social status. Such laws were passed to prevent that. As a result, in Western medieval Europe, most Jews lived in urban areas. Some lived in their own Jewish neighborhoods. There, they could be near the synagogue, speak Hebrew, and shop for kosher foods. And frankly, some lived in these neighborhoods to escape the threat of antisemitism.³  Other Jews lived alongside Christian neighbors in mixed neighborhoods.

Like Christian women, Jewish women were generally excluded from public religious life. They rarely learned Hebrew. Nor did they receive training in Jewish law. There was no tradition similar to the Christian convent where Jewish women could leave their families and study their religion. Within the Jewish religious traditional texts, women were also seen as morally inferior to men. However, men were directed to love and praise their faithful and obedient wives.

Some Jews prospered in trade and money lending in medieval Western Europe. These wealthy families saved up large dowries for their daughters. Such transfers of wealth helped the new wife hold status in her new family.⁴  For Jewish men, it was considered virtuous to spend time studying holy texts such as the Torah. So Jewish women, unlike most Christian women, often helped run businesses. As they worked, these middle-class women developed business experience. There were other improvements in Jewish women’s social positions. One example is when Jewish religious leaders revised Jewish law around the year 1000. It banned polygyny (men having more than one wife). It also forbade men from divorcing their wives against their wills.

In kingdoms of Poland and Russia, Jewish families could own land, but not a lot of it. The lives of rural Christian and Jewish women were similar. They were tasked with farm work as well as taking care of the family and household.

Note: Because of the region being discussed, this article did not cover Muslim women. Most Muslim women in western Europe at this time lived in the Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula. It was closely connected to Islamic North African states. Today, this peninsula is occupied by Spain and Portugal.

1 The Greek philosopher Aristotle also considered women to be intellectually, morally, physically and emotionally inferior copies of men. His writings from the fourth century BCE were some of the only Greek writings known in medieval Europe.
2 A convent is a community of women (nuns). They devote their lives to religious study. They work under the supervision of an abbess. The abbess is a member of the Christian church hierarchy.
3 Antisemitism: the hatred of Jews. When there were unexplained disasters in medieval society, sometimes Jews were used as scapegoats or easily-blamed villains.
4 A dowry could be money, land, goods given from the bride’s family to the groom’s family at her wedding.