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The construction of women's social identity in medieval Douai: Evidence from identifying epithets
PII: S0304-4181( 98 )00032-3
Journal of Medieval History, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 215–227, 1999 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in The Netherlands. 0304-4181 / 99 $ – see front matter 1 0.00
The construction of women’s social identity in medieval Douai: Evidence from identifying epithets Ellen E. Kittell* Department of History, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844 -3175, USA
Abstract In documents throughout medieval Europe, references to persons were frequently augmented by concise phrases that provided identifying information beyond personal names. Most of these appositive references described the subject with reference to familial association; ‘daughter of’, ‘wife of’, and ‘son of’ were among the most frequent. Such phrases were more commonly appended to women’s names than to men’s. In some regions, familial associations were virtually the only type of epithet appended to women’s names, and it has become common to assume that women who were identified without any such appositives must have been single or widowed. An examination of the documentary record for Douai, a commercial city located near the border between the French kingdom and the county of Flanders, however, demonstrates that appositives attached to women’s names were by no means limited to detailing familial connections, and that identification with reference to marital or family relationships does not in any case imply incapacity to transact public business on one’s own behalf. A lack of appositives should not, therefore, be assumed to signify single or widowed status. The fluidity of the formulas used in identifying women, including the frequent failure in particular instances to note familial associations that can be inferred from elsewhere in the documentary record, may well attest to the breadth of opportunities the city offered to women. 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Historians have frequently developed ‘rules of thumb’ to help make sense out of their material. One such is the assumption that women who are identified in records by name only, that is, without articulated familial association, were probably single or widowed. In a number of regions throughout Europe, women’s names rarely appear in medieval
ELLEN E. KITTELL is Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho. Author of a number of works on the administrative history of Flanders, she became interested in Flemish women when she discovered female names on a roster of administrative officials in the employ of the count of Flanders. *E-mail: [email protected]
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records without accompanying phrases that detail their familial relationship with men.1 In those regions where this was not the practice, however, collapsing ‘widow’ and ‘never-married’ into the single category ‘unmarried’ can be problematic. It ignores, for example, the fact that custom in certain regions made significant distinctions between the two.2 Moreover, there were other regions in Europe where the phrases which accompanied women’s names could detail more than family relationships, and where the number of women who lacked any such identifying phrases was also intriguingly large. Women identified themselves in the city of Douai, for example, not only as wives and daughters, but also by their citizenship status, by place of provenance or residence, and by occupation.3 In the majority of documents in which a woman is clearly the primary agent, moreover, she is referenced with no further identifying phrases at all.4 Where identification of women with reference to male relatives is the norm, as in Genoa, there is probably some validity in the assumption that an absence of specification implies a lack of male family connections. The application of this principle to a socially heterogeneous society such as Douai, however, raises certain questions. Numerous women in Douai were clearly identified by connections other than to a family; given this range of social identities, is it not possible that women not identified by family relationships enjoyed other statuses? Were there valid domestic affiliations that were not associated with the family? And finally, was family association the most important basis 1
Stephen Epstein notes, for example, that a full 80% of female testators in Genoa identified themselves as either the daughter or the wife of some man (Wills and Wealth in Medieval Genoa, 1150 – 1250 (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 63. 2 ` In Liege, for example, the never-married woman routinely acted without a guardian whereas the widow did ´ ` (Brussels, 1987), not (Philippe Godding, Le droit prive´ dans les Pays-Bas meridionaux du 12 e au 18 e siecle 78, item 61). 3 ˆ (Paris, 1913), vol. 4, Roeussele Catel, bourgeoise (Georges Espinas, La vie urbaine de Douai au moyen age 461 [1288; Maroie a´ la Pance de Bethune (Douai. Archives Communales (hereafter DAC) FF 862; Zandre li Gossars, olieresse (DAC FF 862). 4 The first mention is the crucial one, in that it usually includes what is considered to be the most important information about the persons involved in the transaction. Once a person’s identity has been established, subsequent references usually need only to repeat the first name or to use a pronoun. Although the data upon which this study is based consist of the appositives appended to the names of participants, the names themselves are only of incidental significance. This is not, therefore, an onomastic study. Numerous onomastic studies focus on medieval French and Flemish names (e.g., Wilfried Beele, Studie van de Ieperse persoonsnamen uit de stads – en baljuwsrekeningen (1250 – 1400) (Handzame, 1975); ´ A. Carnoy, Origines des noms de famille en Belgique (Leuven, 1953); P. Deprez, ‘Noms et prenoms en ´ ´ Flandres’, in: Noms et prenoms . Aperc¸u historique sur la denomination des personnes en divers pays, published under the direction of Louis Henry (Dolhain, 1974), 33–36; Philippe Godding, ‘Le Nom’, in: Le ´ 86–87, items 75–77; E. Helin, ‘La denomination ´ ´ droit prive, des personnes dans quelques regions de la ´ Belgique francophone’, in: Noms et prenoms, 21–32; O. Leys, De oudste vrouwennamen in Zuid-Nederland. (Leuven-Brussels, 1959); Leys, ‘Onze doopnamen omstreeks 1300’, Biekorf, 53 (1952), 13–21, 34–40, 60–66, 88–90, 220–5, 258–63; Leys, ‘Romaanse leenwoorden in de Westvlaamse naamgeving tot 1225’, Med. Ver. Naamkunde, 30 (1954), 149–169; J. Lindemans, Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis en de betekenis ´ van de Vlaamsche persoonsnamen (Turnhout, 1944); M.T. Morlet, Etude d’ anthroponymie picarde. Les ` noms de personne en Haute Picardie aux XIIIe, XIV et XVe siecles (Amiens, 1967); J.L. Pauwels, ‘Persoonsnamen in de volkstaal’, Med. Ver. Naamkunde, 44 (1968), 1–37; A. Vincent, Les noms de famille de la Belgique (Brussels, 1952); E. Vroonen, Les noms de famille en Belgique (Brussels, no date)). Most such studies, however, focus on the development of personal names and not on the social significance of the identifying phrases which surround them. The study of private law by Philippe Godding is one of the few examinations of social history, for its part, to include a short two-page section on names (Godding, Le droit prive´ (Brussels, 1987), 86–87).
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for the construction of female identity or were there others, such as social class, which were equally or even more significant? 5 The corpus of documents for medieval Douai is large and coherent enough, particularly from the thirteenth century onward, to allow us to answer these questions and thus to test the applicability of the above-mentioned rule of thumb. For the period between 1200 and 1384, there are 612 entries involving transactions in which women are clearly active. This number does not include the seventy-two entries which simply identify a woman as holder of a particular property. Three typical instances of the latter are: Sor tout le tenement ke il ont en le rue Williame de Saint-Aubin,...entre le tenement Mikiel Bofelin et le tennement Ysabiel Le Franc¸oise,..; 6 Encore li a-il vendu et werpi se maison ki siet el-Pont, entre le maison Renier de Goy et le maison ki fu Erenberghien Pikete; 7 totes les rentes k’ il on a Doai, . . . c’ est asavoir . . . Sor le maison Marien Lokin.8 The female holders described in the majority (47 or 64%) of such entries bear only their names; two are described as citizens, one as a parent, six as widows; fifteen are identified by title, and four by sobriquet (dite . . . ).9 As for records detailing transactions in which women were actively engaged, a good 60% describe them without familial affiliation.10 An investigation of the documentary record for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in fact, shows that, for at least that period of Douaisian history, a lack of appositive reference does not indicate that the woman in question is necessarily either single or widowed. The great variety of phrases used to identify women (including the bare name alone) suggests instead that the social construction of female identity was at this time in a state of flux.
2. Social identity in Douai By 1400, Douai’s population had reached around 15,000 inhabitants.11 All of the documents referred to here detail transactions which were local in nature, and most such business was carried out under the eyes of the populace. What this means is that participants, both the authorities and the petitioners, were likely to be acquainted with each other, and while it was possible to remain anonymous, it was probably rather difficult. Moreover, distinctions between public and domestic identity were, in all likelihood, rather blurred. The construction of social identity probably involved a 5
´ , le seigneur et la cite´ . Coutume et For analyses of marriage practices in Douai see both R. Jacob, Les epoux ˆ (Brussels, 1990), pratiques matrimoniales des bourgeois et paysans de France du Nord au moyen age 77–240 and Martha Howell, The Marriage Exchange. Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300 – 1550 (Chicago, 1998). 6 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 441 [587. 7 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 323 [422. 8 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 35 [48. 9 Citizen (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 250 [301; vol. 4, 392 [1221); parent (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 496 [669); title (e.g., vol. 3, 78 [114; vol. 3, 425 [562; vol. 4, 265 [1120; vol. 4, 552 [1358); dite (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 404 [537; vol. 3, 634 [849 (two times); vol. 4, 34 [901). 10 These may bear descriptive appositives, such as title, occupation, or sobriquet (dite...), but they do not bear familial appositives, such as ‘wife of’, ‘daughter of’, ‘niece of’, or even ‘widow of’. 11 Martha Howell, ‘Fixing Movables: Gifts by Testament in Late Medieval Douai’, Past and Present, 150 (1996), 3.
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continuous mix of both, to which factors of occupation, residency and citizenship could be added. The use of familial surnames to identify members of a particular family group was correspondingly not consistent, nor had ways of identification become routine, let alone invariable, in official forms.12 Another element contributing to this instability was the variety of situational factors which might determine how a person would be identified. Three of these involved participants in the public event being documented: the attending official, the petitioner herself, and the scribe who jotted down the notes which would establish the petitioner’s identity in the written record. The action itself constituted a fourth factor. A transaction involving the transfer of property within a clan would tend to favour specification of the familial relationships among the participants, whereas a listing of drapers in one of Douai’s halls did not call for that sort of detail.13 Only when more distant authorities (such as bailiffs and other comital and eventually royal French officials)14 began to intervene on a more consistent basis to impose standards that in part owed their form to demands for efficiency in the production of records did more uniform templates and standards emerge for the establishment of personal identity. In common with the region’s comital and particularly royal officials, the historian shares a distinct remoteness from the webs of social relationships in terms of which medieval townspeople habitually identified one another. As the most distant of all authorities, the modern-day scholar is perhaps the most inclined of all to impose a grid of standard assumptions for the interpretation of personal reference in the documents of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Douai. But given the density and multiplicity of the social networks that informed mutual acquaintance among townspeople, it behooves the historian to approach any such assumptions with considerable critical caution.
3. The problem of names The documentary evidence from Douai is extensive and varied. It includes wills, marriage contracts, financial records, deeds attesting to and ratifying property exchanges, and records of conflicts resolved by the aldermen. A broad variety of Douaisians participated in the actions that precipitated the drawing up of these records. An examination of the corpus of Douai material yields fourteen categories of appositives which could be applied to women: citizen, daughter, companion, popular epithet (dite...), 12
It is possible that the instability in choice of personal reference owed something to the historical conditions that characterized this period (the economic boom of the thirteenth century and the war, famine, and plague of the fourteenth); similarly, the trend which ultimately resulted in the widespread substitution of last names for appositives may have owed much to the attempts of authorities to establish order (and thus their own authority) within Flemish towns such as Douai. On the latter dynamic, see E. Kittell, From Ad Hoc to Routine. A Case Study in Medieval Bureaucracy (Philadelphia, 1991). 13 See, respectively, Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 322–323 [1172 and Georges Espinas and Henri Pirenne, ` en Flandre (Brussels, 1909), vol. 2, Recueil de documents relatifs a` l’ histoire de l’ industrie drapiere 219–221 [338. (Hereafter EP). 14 Douai remained part of the county of Flanders until the invasion of Philip the Fair of France in 1297. He and his successors retained control of Douai and the surrounding region until it was given to Louis of Male, the Flemish count, as part of the marriage negotiations between the Flemish count’s daughter, Margaret, and the French king’s son, Philip, duke of Burgundy.
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kin, location, spouse, mother, occupation, religious affiliation, sibling, social class (signified by the use of a title), and no description at all. These can in turn be loosely grouped into a larger classification which distinguishes between family and non-family association. The data present, however, a number of obstacles. First, and most importantly, personal names do not always constitute a reliable indicator of gender. While it is perfectly clear that names such as Emme, Marie, Margaret, and Matilda denote women, ones like Addain, Thassart, Bourge, Pieronne, and Ermbours are at first sight more opaque; further investigation reveals that these names are usually feminine. And even though certain names like Jaque and Jakemes can usually be assumed to be male, a closer look reveals that, for example, Jaque de Lens and Jakemes de France are in fact female.15 Finally, there are names such as Nicaise and Aelidis which could equally well be either male or female. The problem with names has occasionally led to serious underrepresentation of female participation in scholarly works. Martha Howell, for example, calculated that there were only sixteen women among the sixty-three retailers in Douai’s lower hall.16 In order to come up with that number, she must have been counting only those names which were obviously female, such as Maroie, Agnes, and Ysabel. But evidence from other records, such as wills, makes it very clear that Bierge Li Leus and Pieronne de Leuwe, for example, were, in fact female.17 If one includes names such as Mehaus, Sebile, Jehane, Pieronne, and Paske, all of which customarily denote women (while omitting questionable names such as Alixandre), the ratio becomes twenty-nine women to thirty-three men.18 Since a good 60% of the records where women appear list them without any familial appellations (such as sister, wife, mother, daughter, or niece) which would immediately identify them as female, it is imperative not to assume that names which are not clearly female must be male, even if they usually are. Very occasionally a record will include no evidence regarding a particular person’s sex. These individuals may not, moreover, appear in any other records or, if they do, the necessary information may be lacking there as well. In such indeterminate cases, the best methodological procedure is not to use the record at all. Fortunately such instances are quite rare.
4. Other, non-familial domestic affiliations When one or more petitioners appeared before a town official to transact public business, the substance of which was being noted down by a scribe, the appositive reference served to emphasise an identifying characteristic which at least one of these parties thought pertinent. The majority of appositive references indicated association with a larger group, be it a clan, a religious body, or the citizenry. By virtue of the fact 15
The will of Jaque de Lens (DAC FF 862); ‘Jehans de France’ (EP, vol. 2, 221 [338). Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago, 1986), 250 note 12. 17 DAC FF 862. 18 EP, vol. 2, 220–221 [338. 16
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that they determined domestic arrangements for their members, the two institutions that functioned as the primary points of reference were family and religious institutions. There are two categories of adult groupings which did not involve either of these. Both could, in fact, be described as companionate associations of unrelated and unmarried adults, usually female. The first is represented in the documentary record by two couples, Jake de France and Liegars de Ghesnaing on the one hand, and Jeanne de Bacleret and Chateline de Tilloy on the other. Both sets left wills which make it clear that their relationship was such as to warrant acceptance as a social unit.19 Only Jake and Liegars, however, employed the appositive ‘compaingnesses’ to describe themselves.20 The will of Jeanne and Chateline is silent on the nature of their relationship.21 These may well have been lesbian couples, and it is possible that since Jake de France appears to have been a person of substance – she is listed among the drapers of the lower hall in the city and she was made guardian of Ysabel d’Arras – she felt safe enough to make that relationship public.22 Particularly significant is the fact that she is identified elsewhere as the sister of Jean de France.23 It could be argued, in traditional fashion, that it was Jake’s association with him that determined her identity, and thus made her participation possible. However, both the specific fact that Jake is elsewhere identified with no such appositive and the finding that assumptions of female legal incompetence are in general very weakly attested for medieval Flanders 24 recommend a simpler (and more accidental) explanation: that in a document which for other reasons required the listing of both Jake and her brother, the scribe simply found it convenient to list him first and her second, and to append the appositive ‘his sister’ to her first name. If we assume that her will is as close as we are going to get to discerning how she viewed herself, we can conclude that her familial relationships were not as important to her as the one she shared with Liegars. Moreover, it was obviously important to both of them to identify themselves publicly as ‘companions’, something Jeanne de Bacleret and Chateline de Tilloy could not bring themselves to do, even though it is quite possible that they too were a couple. Because they, unlike Liegars and Jake, append no appositives to their names, they would, according to our ‘rule of thumb’, each be considered single. The second type of domestic arrangement that was neither familial nor ‘religious’ in the conventional sense was that associated with beghines. Records describe Agnes le Cuveliere and Bietris as both companions and beghines.25 Beghines were pious women 19
Will of Jake de France and Liegars de Ghesnaing (DAC FF 862); will of Jeanne de Bacleret and Chateline de Tilloy (DAC FF 862). Sachent tout cil qui sont et ki avenir sont que Jake de France et Liegars de Ghesnaing se compaignesse font leur devise ensanle (DAC FF 862). 21 Sachent tout chil ki sont et qui avenir sunt ke Jehane de Bacleret et Chateline de Tilloy font leur ordenance et leur devise (DAC FF 862). 22 Among the drapers listed with her were Baude Ghibe, an alderman, and various members of prestigious Douaisian families such as the Painsmouillis and Vregelays (EP, vol. 2, 220 [338). For Jake de France as guardian, see Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 133 [985. Wills in Douai were drawn up in the public glare of the aldermanic session (E. Kittell, ‘Testaments of Two Cities: A Comparative Analysis of the Wills of Medieval Genoa and Douai’, European Review of History, 5 (1998), 52–53). 23 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 133 [985; EP, vol. 2, 220, 221 [338. 24 E. Kittell, ‘Guardianship over Women in Medieval Flanders: A Reappraisal’, Journal of Social History, 31 (1998), 897–930. 25 Sacent tout cil ki sunt et ki avenir sunt que Foucars Li Carpentiers a werpi et donne a rente a Agnies Le Cuveliere et a Bietris, se compaingnesse, beghines, au jor de hui, ses maisons et tout sen tennement (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 396–7 [528. 20
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who, however, took no vows. They frequently lived together in groups of two or three or ´ in large residences known in francophone Douai as beguinages. Although they were not formally recognized as a religious order, the relatively common attestation of appositive ‘beghine’ would suggest that these arrangements enjoyed social recognition.26 The question is, of course, whether these women are to be considered single. Only two of the six, Jeanne de Bacleret and Chateline de Tilloy, were silent on this issue. The other four were not; they clearly perceived themselves to be domestically associated.27 The rule of thumb, however, suggests that they should be reckoned as single and unassociated.
5. Single or widowed? More central to the argument against the applicability of the rule of thumb is the issue of whether a woman who lacked a designation might be someone other than a single woman or a widow. The question itself would seem to be predicated on the assumption that single women and widows appear in public records because they had no alternatives – that is, no male to whom they can delegate their responsibility.28 Circumstances, according to this theory, invested them with the capacity to carry out public business themselves. Such an assumption is in turn predicated on the notion that women whose male relatives were alive and well did not have that capacity. We must therefore ask two further, preliminary questions. First, do familially and religiously affiliated women have the capacity to carry out public business on their own, and second, do they want to? We cannot, of course, know the answer to the second, but asking it does raise the possibility that women carried out business not by dint of adverse circumstances, but simply because they enjoyed performing the actual task, or found it convenient to do so. Some may even have been good enough at it that they became the ones delegated by the family or other social grouping to carry it out. The first question can in fact be answered with a certain degree of confidence. We know that heads of female religious institutions routinely carried out major and minor public functions. Some of them even held local courts and settled disputes.29 Nuns certainly had the capacity to carry out their responsibilities within convent walls, but only those invested with particular offices transacted business outside those walls. This 26
The fact that both Countess Jeanne and Countess Margaret founded such houses no doubt went a long way toward legitimating beghine status. For beghines and their male counterparts, the beghards, in Douai, see Walter Simons, ‘Begijnen en begarden in het middeleeuwse Dowaai’, De Franse Nederlanden, 17 (1992), 181–197. 27 Both Jake and Liegars and Agnes and Bietris called themselves companions. In addition, Jake and Liegars made a will together in which each left the other all her own goods and the goods that they had accumulated while living together (DAC FF 862). 28 For widows and widowhood in a similar town, see Marianne Danneel, Weduwen en wezen in het laat-middeleeuwse Gent (Leuven, Apeldoorn, 1995). 29 For the extent of the activities of the abbesses of three of the more prominent convents see, for Flines, Cartulaire de l’ abbaye de Flines, ed. E. Hautcoeur (Lille, 1873). For Marquette, see Cartulaire de l’ abbaye de Marquette, ed. Th. Leuridan (Lille, 1937), and for Messines, see Inventaire analytique et chronologique des chartes et documents appartenant aux archives de l’ ancienne abbaye de Messines, ed. I. L. A. Diegerick (Bruges, 1876).
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was particularly true for members of the more urban orders, such as the Dominicans and Franciscans. The crucial exception is, of course, the beghines. Their quasi-religious status enabled them to remain unassociated with familial and religious institutions yet be treated as religious folk. Their quasi-secular status, meanwhile, demanded that they function in the secular world. As we have seen in the case of Bietris and Agnes, the appositive ‘beghine’ suggested exactly that capacity. Beghines were usually unmarried women who found themselves in domestic relationships with other women. What of women whose status, as suggested by the familial appositives appended to their names, might have been secondary to and dependent on that of male members of their family and kin? Did sisters, mothers, daughters and wives have the capacity to conduct public affairs without the legitimating presence of their male kinfolk? Were they dependent to such an extent that the absence of such appositives should be taken to mean, not that they were independent, but that they were socially crippled? The answer to this question cannot be found in law codes. Until the fifteenth century, with the penetration of Roman law, these say little, if anything, about female capacity.30 In the absence of other compelling evidence, one must therefore assume that prior to the fifteenth century, the fact of an action stands as proof of its actor’s capacity. If a woman bearing the appellation sister, daughter, mother, or wife performs it, the evidence of her capacity to do so resides in the record of its completion. By no means does the appending of any particular familial appositive in the absence of any accompanying male necessarily suggest that her actions were necessarily due to exceptional circumstances, viz. a lack of male representation. It would in fact be unwarranted to suppose that the point of the appositive reference was to articulate her theoretical social subsumption or even subordination within a larger unit headed by a male. In fact, it probably tells us nothing more than how she or the official to whom she presented her case chose to represent her identity. If meaningful inferences are to be drawn from the use of identifying appositives, these will in all likelihood concern what were or were not considered to be the most important associations with respect to a given activity in the given society. The records of Douai reveal, in fact, that women who bore familial appositives did routinely act by and for themselves (and, ipso facto, that they had the capacity to do so). Out of eighty-nine actions in which an adult woman is described as someone’s daughter, sixty-two or 70% were accomplished by an unaccompanied woman. These numbers result from the following formula: the number of occasions on which a woman was clearly accompanied by a man is subtracted from the total number of entries detailing the actions of women bearing a particular appositive. (In this case, the figures are respectively twenty-seven and eighty-nine.) The figure that results (in this case, sixtytwo) represents the number of women who bear a particular familial appositive (’daughter of’, in this case) and who can nevertheless be assumed to have been functioning as their own agents for the transactions in question. The percentage results 30
` ` siecle chez des juristes de formation universitaire’ ‘On retrouve la terminologie du droit romain au 15 eme (Godding, 143).
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from dividing this number (sixty-two) by the original number of entries (eighty-nine, in this case). The resulting percentage (70% in the case of the appositive ‘daughter of’) represents a very conservative estimate. While on the one hand it does not include those occasions where the woman, although accompanied by a male, is clearly the active agent, it does, on the other, include those instances where the family member to whom a woman is related is female (e.g., Fresseis de Roie nieche demisele Gillotain de Bapaumes).31 Comparable figures for women identified as spouses (50%), mothers (85%), and other kin such as nieces and cousins (90%) tell the same tale. If one starts from the opposite direction, meanwhile, looking at all instances of business clearly transacted by women as sole agents, one finds that 40% were handled by women who were identified primarily by their familial associations. There were a total of 612 transactions involving women as sole agents, of which 249 (or 44%) were performed by women identified as nieces, cousins, wives, sisters, mothers, or daughters, while the remaining 363 (or 56%) were performed by those who were identified with reference to their citizenship, nicknames (dite...), occupations, places of residence or provenance, titles, or who were identified solely by their first name or (much more frequently) their first and last names. The actions in question, moreover, range broadly from property transfers to financial transactions and to testimony offered in the course of conflict resolution. Their competence to act was thus clearly not determined by the nature of the transaction undertaken. The one significant exception appears to concern transactions involving feudal tenure.32 A plethora of examples of transactions which did not involve feudal tenure demonstrate, however, that the nature of the issue at hand could and did dictate the form a reference took. When Marie, wife of Renier Painsmouillis, for example, transferred property to Jakemon Prociel and Gillon Mulet, the document does not initially identify her as his wife.33 It details the property under consideration, but does not specify her marital status, probably because the latter was not considered germane. Jeanne, wife of Jakemon de Grants, testified in the conflict which erupted during execution of the will of Jean Boinebroke; 34 the document only accidentally mentions the name of her spouse. In 1327, Caterine de Deuwioel, daughter of Willaume Le Vaukier, quit Jean Fierins of a sum he owed her; the document spends some time detailing these arrangements, but identifies her only by first and last name.35 Note that Catherine does not bear the same surname as her father. It was becoming increasingly common during the fourteenth century for children to take their father’s name, so the fact that Caterine bears a name different from that of her father is intriguing. The two possibilities which suggest themselves are that she was married and took her spouse’s name or that she was illegitimate and had taken the name of her mother. Does this evidence warrant the inference that women unidentified by appositives were not necessarily single or widowed? A search of the documentary record reveals 31
DAC FF 862. See Kittell, ‘Guardianship,’ 902–904. Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 280 [352. 34 EP, vol. 2, 199 [328. 35 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 184–185 [1035. 32 33
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numerous occasions where a woman who lacked the familial appositive in one instance bore it in another. In other words, she is not always identified by the familial appositive even when it is in principle applicable. The best evidence for this can be found in the record of the prolonged debate which attended the execution of the will of Jean Boinebroke between 1300 and 1310. This was a very public event and included official testimony from ninety-eight people, of whom more than half were women. We know that many of these women were married, but the information does not come from any attendant appositives. It must be found elsewhere, which suggests that it simply was not considered to be especially relevant. Margot Bielos was married to Jean (whose last name is unclear) when she testified, but the information is not evident from any direct reference to her in the document; it is buried in the rest of the testimony.36 Mention of Rumeus Fille Diu lacks any identifying appositives; when the name of her spouse finally appears, it is he and not she who bears the marital appositive.37 Applying the rule of thumb to Isabeaus de Brebiere, Maroie de Heuvin, and Margot le Tuiliere would similarly have yielded the false conclusion that they were all single or widowed, though each of them was in fact married.38 These are not isolated cases. Similar situations can be found where documents are labelled one way on the outside and contain other, usually additional information, inside.39 Typically omitted on the outside is the familial appositive. Most of these records were written on pieces of parchment which were rolled up before they were conserved. It was common practice for scribes to note what the record was about on the outside edge of the parchment that remained visible. Such notations were not always concise. One document dated 16 November 1344 included, for example, the following on its outside: Ch’ est compromis dou debat meut entre l’ abbesse dou Vivier et suer Yzabiel de Buignicort, nonne en celi abbaye, d’ une part, et Jehennain, veve de feu Mikiel Porte Esteulle, d’ autre part (‘This is the resolution of the conflict which arose between the abbess of Vivier and sister Yzabiel de Buignicort, nun in the same convent, on the one hand, and Jehanne, widow of the deceased Mikiel Porte Esteulle, on the other’).40 The absence of familial or other specifications was thus not necessarily due to any sort of customary brevity, but probably represented the whim of the scribe. Margot Baudane’s identification on the outside of a document detailing a 1275 transfer of property she took part in consists merely of her name. Only on the inside is she identified as the mother of Waubiers Mulet.41 The exterior of another document notes only C’ est wers Margot Boine Siecle (‘This is a transfer by Margot Boine Siecle’). The text inside provides the additional information that Margot is the stepdaughter of Jeanne Galipe.42 That Juliane Kavete was Alexander Kavete’s sister is in 36
EP, vol. 2, 190. ...Jehan Le Fournier, baron celui Rumet...(EP, vol. 2, 197 n. 23). 38 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 2, 186 n. 2, vol. 2, 201 n. 30, vol. 2, 204 n. 37. It is interesting to note that Espinas himself assumes that the husbands of both Margot li Tuiliere and Rumeus Fille Diu must have been ¨ Sozialdead (Georges Espinas, ‘Jehan Boine Broke, bourgeois et drapier Douaisien’, Vierteljahrschrift f ur und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 2 (1904), 402, 404, 406), even though the document does routinely mark widowhood, for instance, Maroie, ki fu fem Baude dou Four (EP, vol. 2, 199 n. 26a). 39 E.g., Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 25 [33. 40 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 282 [1138. 41 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 467 [620. 42 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 255 [1109. 37
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no way apparent from the notation on the outside of the document detailing arrangements for her life rent.43 Comparisons of two or more records may also yield familial information that any particular record might leave out. The notation ‘Saintain Behourdet’ on the outside of a parchment dated 1250 and the reference to her on the inside are equally lacking in appositive specifications. A record dated twenty-one years earlier indicates that Saintain was indeed married. It is quite possible, given the passage of time, that her husband Symon was dead in 1250, but even Espinas himself does not describe her as a widow.44 This example demonstrates the difficulties involved in identifying the marital status of a woman for whom the record specifies no appositive. It is clear in any case that married women routinely transacted public business, whether or not they were identified by means of a marital appositive. While the majority of married women were so identified, there exists enough evidence to suggest that the inferences conventionally drawn from the absence of appositive specifications are inappropriate, at least for Douai. The largest number of recorded transactions involving women (208 or 33%) consist of notations which lack any identifying information beyond the woman’s name. As shown, such women often did have familial associations; these were just not invariably noted. It is in fact possible that this circumstance facilitated the growing trend towards the use of last names in place of appositive descriptions. Last names were, after all, much more efficient. Identifying phrases, particularly when either the official or the petitioner mandated more than one, required more ink and more space. They also consumed more of the scribe’s time – not only did he have to write more down, but someone had to decide which appositive was appropriate for each person involved, given the nature of the situation at hand. The use of last names at least potentially obviated this decision and its attendant ambiguities. Increasingly exclusive use of surnames, to be sure, raised another problem: which surname to use? While marital and paternal names came to define most family names by the seventeenth century, this was not yet invariably true even for the late fourteenth. Although women were increasingly using their father’s names, they appear not to have been exchanging them for those of their spouses upon marriage.45 Analyzing this development is, however, beyond the scope of the present essay.
6. Family versus class Variation in the choice of appositives suggests further that familial association was not the sole or even primary factor governing appositive reference. There were two others of 43
Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 561 [767. This is particularly surprising in view of the fact that he held the relatively prestigious position of cure´ of St. Nicholas in the city. Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 25 [33; vol. 3, 78 [115. 45 Examples of this phenomenon include Maroie le Sallehadine, wife of Thiebaut de le Mairie (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 302 [1154); Catelline Baudehaue, wife of Colars Quaillos (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 470 [1296); Angnies Tarine, wife of Jehan Waufflart (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 383–384 [1235); Marie Maillard, wife of Nicaise Villain (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 430–432 [1343); Marie de Barlet, wife of Willaume de Paskendare (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 595 [806); Margherite Cauvete, wife of Pierre Viel (DAC FF 861); Bietris de Courceles, wife of Jehan de le Vail (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 591 [799). This list is by no means exhaustive. 44
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at least equal significance: class status and the nature of the issue at hand. As one example of the latter factor, we have already noted the document that recorded the proving of Jean Boinebroke’s will, in which marital status was not always of importance.46 What a particular witness did or did not do, or what Boinebroke did or did not do to them was of more consequence than familial or even marital status. The fact that Saintain de Behourdet, also mentioned above, gave a house to the hospital of Wes was significant enough to preclude any necessity of providing information either on her marital status or on the identity of her spouse. Her actions were simply more important than her family status. Marital or even familial status was not, as we have seen, invariably specified when actors were first identified in a document. Only one status achieved that distinction: class, in particular, high social rank. A person who bore the distinctive demisielle or dame (neither of which denoted marital status)47 in one document invariably bore it in any other records in which her name appeared. The contrast with the variable appearance of other types of appositive reference suggests that while marital and familial status were significant for the construction of women’s social identity, class may well have been of greater moment.
7. Conclusion The conventional assumption that women’s identity (unlike that of men) is intrinsically defined in terms of marital status, together with the corollary ‘rule of thumb’ that the omission of identifying appositives next to a woman’s name in the documentary record implies single or widowed status, flows logically from the assumption that women are either customarily or legally under the guardianship of men. A woman without a man, on this assumption, was socially crippled; she had no one to whom she could delegate the execution of her affairs, and this deficiency was reflected in the lack of supporting appositives such as ‘wife of’, ‘mother of’, or ‘sister of’ some man. In the case of Douai, however, such conventional wisdom is difficult to square with the evidence that women routinely transacted public business on their own behalf, regardless of whether they were identified by marital appositives or not. It also fails to take into account the existence of other appositives, including those denoting citizenship and occupation. Although detailing non-familial associations, such appositives appear by their very use to have been invested with as much validity as familial ones possessed. To be sure, if the only appositives that a woman can lack are familial, then one might indeed logically conclude that women who lack them are unmarried or have no family. But the variable attestation of other types of appositives upsets this logic. It would be unrealistic to conclude, for example, that a woman who lacks any appositive specifications was not a citizen or did 46 47
See above, page 227. Married women can be found to bear both titles. In one document Bietris de Courceles is called demisielle, though she is simultaneously identified as married (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 6–7 [7). It is likely that the two terms were associated with variations in class status. There has been little or no work done to determine what these different titles meant. It is possible that dame denotes the rural, landed aristocracy, and that demisielle signifies a member of the urban patriciate. This, however, is wholly speculation.
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not work for a living. As just noted, it is only in the case of designations of high social rank that the absence of a relevant epithet invariably signifies that the person in question was indeed not invested with that social status. The great variety of phrases used to identify women in Douai suggests that this particular piece of conventional wisdom should be used very cautiously, if at all. The diversity in phrases which are appended to personal names of women (what we have called ‘appositives’) implies that family status was not a rigid standard in terms of which Douaisian society was customarily organized. The combination of this variety in appositives with the high incidence of women’s names unaccompanied by any identifying information at all not only indicates that formulas for identification were unstable, but also suggests that the nature of women’s identity itself was in flux and not yet fully socially determined.
Journal of Medieval History, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 215–227, 1999 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in The Netherlands. 0304-4181 / 99 $ – see front matter 1 0.00
The construction of women’s social identity in medieval Douai: Evidence from identifying epithets Ellen E. Kittell* Department of History, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844 -3175, USA
Abstract In documents throughout medieval Europe, references to persons were frequently augmented by concise phrases that provided identifying information beyond personal names. Most of these appositive references described the subject with reference to familial association; ‘daughter of’, ‘wife of’, and ‘son of’ were among the most frequent. Such phrases were more commonly appended to women’s names than to men’s. In some regions, familial associations were virtually the only type of epithet appended to women’s names, and it has become common to assume that women who were identified without any such appositives must have been single or widowed. An examination of the documentary record for Douai, a commercial city located near the border between the French kingdom and the county of Flanders, however, demonstrates that appositives attached to women’s names were by no means limited to detailing familial connections, and that identification with reference to marital or family relationships does not in any case imply incapacity to transact public business on one’s own behalf. A lack of appositives should not, therefore, be assumed to signify single or widowed status. The fluidity of the formulas used in identifying women, including the frequent failure in particular instances to note familial associations that can be inferred from elsewhere in the documentary record, may well attest to the breadth of opportunities the city offered to women. 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction Historians have frequently developed ‘rules of thumb’ to help make sense out of their material. One such is the assumption that women who are identified in records by name only, that is, without articulated familial association, were probably single or widowed. In a number of regions throughout Europe, women’s names rarely appear in medieval
ELLEN E. KITTELL is Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho. Author of a number of works on the administrative history of Flanders, she became interested in Flemish women when she discovered female names on a roster of administrative officials in the employ of the count of Flanders. *E-mail: [email protected]
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records without accompanying phrases that detail their familial relationship with men.1 In those regions where this was not the practice, however, collapsing ‘widow’ and ‘never-married’ into the single category ‘unmarried’ can be problematic. It ignores, for example, the fact that custom in certain regions made significant distinctions between the two.2 Moreover, there were other regions in Europe where the phrases which accompanied women’s names could detail more than family relationships, and where the number of women who lacked any such identifying phrases was also intriguingly large. Women identified themselves in the city of Douai, for example, not only as wives and daughters, but also by their citizenship status, by place of provenance or residence, and by occupation.3 In the majority of documents in which a woman is clearly the primary agent, moreover, she is referenced with no further identifying phrases at all.4 Where identification of women with reference to male relatives is the norm, as in Genoa, there is probably some validity in the assumption that an absence of specification implies a lack of male family connections. The application of this principle to a socially heterogeneous society such as Douai, however, raises certain questions. Numerous women in Douai were clearly identified by connections other than to a family; given this range of social identities, is it not possible that women not identified by family relationships enjoyed other statuses? Were there valid domestic affiliations that were not associated with the family? And finally, was family association the most important basis 1
Stephen Epstein notes, for example, that a full 80% of female testators in Genoa identified themselves as either the daughter or the wife of some man (Wills and Wealth in Medieval Genoa, 1150 – 1250 (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 63. 2 ` In Liege, for example, the never-married woman routinely acted without a guardian whereas the widow did ´ ` (Brussels, 1987), not (Philippe Godding, Le droit prive´ dans les Pays-Bas meridionaux du 12 e au 18 e siecle 78, item 61). 3 ˆ (Paris, 1913), vol. 4, Roeussele Catel, bourgeoise (Georges Espinas, La vie urbaine de Douai au moyen age 461 [1288; Maroie a´ la Pance de Bethune (Douai. Archives Communales (hereafter DAC) FF 862; Zandre li Gossars, olieresse (DAC FF 862). 4 The first mention is the crucial one, in that it usually includes what is considered to be the most important information about the persons involved in the transaction. Once a person’s identity has been established, subsequent references usually need only to repeat the first name or to use a pronoun. Although the data upon which this study is based consist of the appositives appended to the names of participants, the names themselves are only of incidental significance. This is not, therefore, an onomastic study. Numerous onomastic studies focus on medieval French and Flemish names (e.g., Wilfried Beele, Studie van de Ieperse persoonsnamen uit de stads – en baljuwsrekeningen (1250 – 1400) (Handzame, 1975); ´ A. Carnoy, Origines des noms de famille en Belgique (Leuven, 1953); P. Deprez, ‘Noms et prenoms en ´ ´ Flandres’, in: Noms et prenoms . Aperc¸u historique sur la denomination des personnes en divers pays, published under the direction of Louis Henry (Dolhain, 1974), 33–36; Philippe Godding, ‘Le Nom’, in: Le ´ 86–87, items 75–77; E. Helin, ‘La denomination ´ ´ droit prive, des personnes dans quelques regions de la ´ Belgique francophone’, in: Noms et prenoms, 21–32; O. Leys, De oudste vrouwennamen in Zuid-Nederland. (Leuven-Brussels, 1959); Leys, ‘Onze doopnamen omstreeks 1300’, Biekorf, 53 (1952), 13–21, 34–40, 60–66, 88–90, 220–5, 258–63; Leys, ‘Romaanse leenwoorden in de Westvlaamse naamgeving tot 1225’, Med. Ver. Naamkunde, 30 (1954), 149–169; J. Lindemans, Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis en de betekenis ´ van de Vlaamsche persoonsnamen (Turnhout, 1944); M.T. Morlet, Etude d’ anthroponymie picarde. Les ` noms de personne en Haute Picardie aux XIIIe, XIV et XVe siecles (Amiens, 1967); J.L. Pauwels, ‘Persoonsnamen in de volkstaal’, Med. Ver. Naamkunde, 44 (1968), 1–37; A. Vincent, Les noms de famille de la Belgique (Brussels, 1952); E. Vroonen, Les noms de famille en Belgique (Brussels, no date)). Most such studies, however, focus on the development of personal names and not on the social significance of the identifying phrases which surround them. The study of private law by Philippe Godding is one of the few examinations of social history, for its part, to include a short two-page section on names (Godding, Le droit prive´ (Brussels, 1987), 86–87).
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for the construction of female identity or were there others, such as social class, which were equally or even more significant? 5 The corpus of documents for medieval Douai is large and coherent enough, particularly from the thirteenth century onward, to allow us to answer these questions and thus to test the applicability of the above-mentioned rule of thumb. For the period between 1200 and 1384, there are 612 entries involving transactions in which women are clearly active. This number does not include the seventy-two entries which simply identify a woman as holder of a particular property. Three typical instances of the latter are: Sor tout le tenement ke il ont en le rue Williame de Saint-Aubin,...entre le tenement Mikiel Bofelin et le tennement Ysabiel Le Franc¸oise,..; 6 Encore li a-il vendu et werpi se maison ki siet el-Pont, entre le maison Renier de Goy et le maison ki fu Erenberghien Pikete; 7 totes les rentes k’ il on a Doai, . . . c’ est asavoir . . . Sor le maison Marien Lokin.8 The female holders described in the majority (47 or 64%) of such entries bear only their names; two are described as citizens, one as a parent, six as widows; fifteen are identified by title, and four by sobriquet (dite . . . ).9 As for records detailing transactions in which women were actively engaged, a good 60% describe them without familial affiliation.10 An investigation of the documentary record for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in fact, shows that, for at least that period of Douaisian history, a lack of appositive reference does not indicate that the woman in question is necessarily either single or widowed. The great variety of phrases used to identify women (including the bare name alone) suggests instead that the social construction of female identity was at this time in a state of flux.
2. Social identity in Douai By 1400, Douai’s population had reached around 15,000 inhabitants.11 All of the documents referred to here detail transactions which were local in nature, and most such business was carried out under the eyes of the populace. What this means is that participants, both the authorities and the petitioners, were likely to be acquainted with each other, and while it was possible to remain anonymous, it was probably rather difficult. Moreover, distinctions between public and domestic identity were, in all likelihood, rather blurred. The construction of social identity probably involved a 5
´ , le seigneur et la cite´ . Coutume et For analyses of marriage practices in Douai see both R. Jacob, Les epoux ˆ (Brussels, 1990), pratiques matrimoniales des bourgeois et paysans de France du Nord au moyen age 77–240 and Martha Howell, The Marriage Exchange. Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300 – 1550 (Chicago, 1998). 6 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 441 [587. 7 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 323 [422. 8 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 35 [48. 9 Citizen (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 250 [301; vol. 4, 392 [1221); parent (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 496 [669); title (e.g., vol. 3, 78 [114; vol. 3, 425 [562; vol. 4, 265 [1120; vol. 4, 552 [1358); dite (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 404 [537; vol. 3, 634 [849 (two times); vol. 4, 34 [901). 10 These may bear descriptive appositives, such as title, occupation, or sobriquet (dite...), but they do not bear familial appositives, such as ‘wife of’, ‘daughter of’, ‘niece of’, or even ‘widow of’. 11 Martha Howell, ‘Fixing Movables: Gifts by Testament in Late Medieval Douai’, Past and Present, 150 (1996), 3.
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continuous mix of both, to which factors of occupation, residency and citizenship could be added. The use of familial surnames to identify members of a particular family group was correspondingly not consistent, nor had ways of identification become routine, let alone invariable, in official forms.12 Another element contributing to this instability was the variety of situational factors which might determine how a person would be identified. Three of these involved participants in the public event being documented: the attending official, the petitioner herself, and the scribe who jotted down the notes which would establish the petitioner’s identity in the written record. The action itself constituted a fourth factor. A transaction involving the transfer of property within a clan would tend to favour specification of the familial relationships among the participants, whereas a listing of drapers in one of Douai’s halls did not call for that sort of detail.13 Only when more distant authorities (such as bailiffs and other comital and eventually royal French officials)14 began to intervene on a more consistent basis to impose standards that in part owed their form to demands for efficiency in the production of records did more uniform templates and standards emerge for the establishment of personal identity. In common with the region’s comital and particularly royal officials, the historian shares a distinct remoteness from the webs of social relationships in terms of which medieval townspeople habitually identified one another. As the most distant of all authorities, the modern-day scholar is perhaps the most inclined of all to impose a grid of standard assumptions for the interpretation of personal reference in the documents of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Douai. But given the density and multiplicity of the social networks that informed mutual acquaintance among townspeople, it behooves the historian to approach any such assumptions with considerable critical caution.
3. The problem of names The documentary evidence from Douai is extensive and varied. It includes wills, marriage contracts, financial records, deeds attesting to and ratifying property exchanges, and records of conflicts resolved by the aldermen. A broad variety of Douaisians participated in the actions that precipitated the drawing up of these records. An examination of the corpus of Douai material yields fourteen categories of appositives which could be applied to women: citizen, daughter, companion, popular epithet (dite...), 12
It is possible that the instability in choice of personal reference owed something to the historical conditions that characterized this period (the economic boom of the thirteenth century and the war, famine, and plague of the fourteenth); similarly, the trend which ultimately resulted in the widespread substitution of last names for appositives may have owed much to the attempts of authorities to establish order (and thus their own authority) within Flemish towns such as Douai. On the latter dynamic, see E. Kittell, From Ad Hoc to Routine. A Case Study in Medieval Bureaucracy (Philadelphia, 1991). 13 See, respectively, Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 322–323 [1172 and Georges Espinas and Henri Pirenne, ` en Flandre (Brussels, 1909), vol. 2, Recueil de documents relatifs a` l’ histoire de l’ industrie drapiere 219–221 [338. (Hereafter EP). 14 Douai remained part of the county of Flanders until the invasion of Philip the Fair of France in 1297. He and his successors retained control of Douai and the surrounding region until it was given to Louis of Male, the Flemish count, as part of the marriage negotiations between the Flemish count’s daughter, Margaret, and the French king’s son, Philip, duke of Burgundy.
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kin, location, spouse, mother, occupation, religious affiliation, sibling, social class (signified by the use of a title), and no description at all. These can in turn be loosely grouped into a larger classification which distinguishes between family and non-family association. The data present, however, a number of obstacles. First, and most importantly, personal names do not always constitute a reliable indicator of gender. While it is perfectly clear that names such as Emme, Marie, Margaret, and Matilda denote women, ones like Addain, Thassart, Bourge, Pieronne, and Ermbours are at first sight more opaque; further investigation reveals that these names are usually feminine. And even though certain names like Jaque and Jakemes can usually be assumed to be male, a closer look reveals that, for example, Jaque de Lens and Jakemes de France are in fact female.15 Finally, there are names such as Nicaise and Aelidis which could equally well be either male or female. The problem with names has occasionally led to serious underrepresentation of female participation in scholarly works. Martha Howell, for example, calculated that there were only sixteen women among the sixty-three retailers in Douai’s lower hall.16 In order to come up with that number, she must have been counting only those names which were obviously female, such as Maroie, Agnes, and Ysabel. But evidence from other records, such as wills, makes it very clear that Bierge Li Leus and Pieronne de Leuwe, for example, were, in fact female.17 If one includes names such as Mehaus, Sebile, Jehane, Pieronne, and Paske, all of which customarily denote women (while omitting questionable names such as Alixandre), the ratio becomes twenty-nine women to thirty-three men.18 Since a good 60% of the records where women appear list them without any familial appellations (such as sister, wife, mother, daughter, or niece) which would immediately identify them as female, it is imperative not to assume that names which are not clearly female must be male, even if they usually are. Very occasionally a record will include no evidence regarding a particular person’s sex. These individuals may not, moreover, appear in any other records or, if they do, the necessary information may be lacking there as well. In such indeterminate cases, the best methodological procedure is not to use the record at all. Fortunately such instances are quite rare.
4. Other, non-familial domestic affiliations When one or more petitioners appeared before a town official to transact public business, the substance of which was being noted down by a scribe, the appositive reference served to emphasise an identifying characteristic which at least one of these parties thought pertinent. The majority of appositive references indicated association with a larger group, be it a clan, a religious body, or the citizenry. By virtue of the fact 15
The will of Jaque de Lens (DAC FF 862); ‘Jehans de France’ (EP, vol. 2, 221 [338). Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago, 1986), 250 note 12. 17 DAC FF 862. 18 EP, vol. 2, 220–221 [338. 16
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that they determined domestic arrangements for their members, the two institutions that functioned as the primary points of reference were family and religious institutions. There are two categories of adult groupings which did not involve either of these. Both could, in fact, be described as companionate associations of unrelated and unmarried adults, usually female. The first is represented in the documentary record by two couples, Jake de France and Liegars de Ghesnaing on the one hand, and Jeanne de Bacleret and Chateline de Tilloy on the other. Both sets left wills which make it clear that their relationship was such as to warrant acceptance as a social unit.19 Only Jake and Liegars, however, employed the appositive ‘compaingnesses’ to describe themselves.20 The will of Jeanne and Chateline is silent on the nature of their relationship.21 These may well have been lesbian couples, and it is possible that since Jake de France appears to have been a person of substance – she is listed among the drapers of the lower hall in the city and she was made guardian of Ysabel d’Arras – she felt safe enough to make that relationship public.22 Particularly significant is the fact that she is identified elsewhere as the sister of Jean de France.23 It could be argued, in traditional fashion, that it was Jake’s association with him that determined her identity, and thus made her participation possible. However, both the specific fact that Jake is elsewhere identified with no such appositive and the finding that assumptions of female legal incompetence are in general very weakly attested for medieval Flanders 24 recommend a simpler (and more accidental) explanation: that in a document which for other reasons required the listing of both Jake and her brother, the scribe simply found it convenient to list him first and her second, and to append the appositive ‘his sister’ to her first name. If we assume that her will is as close as we are going to get to discerning how she viewed herself, we can conclude that her familial relationships were not as important to her as the one she shared with Liegars. Moreover, it was obviously important to both of them to identify themselves publicly as ‘companions’, something Jeanne de Bacleret and Chateline de Tilloy could not bring themselves to do, even though it is quite possible that they too were a couple. Because they, unlike Liegars and Jake, append no appositives to their names, they would, according to our ‘rule of thumb’, each be considered single. The second type of domestic arrangement that was neither familial nor ‘religious’ in the conventional sense was that associated with beghines. Records describe Agnes le Cuveliere and Bietris as both companions and beghines.25 Beghines were pious women 19
Will of Jake de France and Liegars de Ghesnaing (DAC FF 862); will of Jeanne de Bacleret and Chateline de Tilloy (DAC FF 862). Sachent tout cil qui sont et ki avenir sont que Jake de France et Liegars de Ghesnaing se compaignesse font leur devise ensanle (DAC FF 862). 21 Sachent tout chil ki sont et qui avenir sunt ke Jehane de Bacleret et Chateline de Tilloy font leur ordenance et leur devise (DAC FF 862). 22 Among the drapers listed with her were Baude Ghibe, an alderman, and various members of prestigious Douaisian families such as the Painsmouillis and Vregelays (EP, vol. 2, 220 [338). For Jake de France as guardian, see Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 133 [985. Wills in Douai were drawn up in the public glare of the aldermanic session (E. Kittell, ‘Testaments of Two Cities: A Comparative Analysis of the Wills of Medieval Genoa and Douai’, European Review of History, 5 (1998), 52–53). 23 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 133 [985; EP, vol. 2, 220, 221 [338. 24 E. Kittell, ‘Guardianship over Women in Medieval Flanders: A Reappraisal’, Journal of Social History, 31 (1998), 897–930. 25 Sacent tout cil ki sunt et ki avenir sunt que Foucars Li Carpentiers a werpi et donne a rente a Agnies Le Cuveliere et a Bietris, se compaingnesse, beghines, au jor de hui, ses maisons et tout sen tennement (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 396–7 [528. 20
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who, however, took no vows. They frequently lived together in groups of two or three or ´ in large residences known in francophone Douai as beguinages. Although they were not formally recognized as a religious order, the relatively common attestation of appositive ‘beghine’ would suggest that these arrangements enjoyed social recognition.26 The question is, of course, whether these women are to be considered single. Only two of the six, Jeanne de Bacleret and Chateline de Tilloy, were silent on this issue. The other four were not; they clearly perceived themselves to be domestically associated.27 The rule of thumb, however, suggests that they should be reckoned as single and unassociated.
5. Single or widowed? More central to the argument against the applicability of the rule of thumb is the issue of whether a woman who lacked a designation might be someone other than a single woman or a widow. The question itself would seem to be predicated on the assumption that single women and widows appear in public records because they had no alternatives – that is, no male to whom they can delegate their responsibility.28 Circumstances, according to this theory, invested them with the capacity to carry out public business themselves. Such an assumption is in turn predicated on the notion that women whose male relatives were alive and well did not have that capacity. We must therefore ask two further, preliminary questions. First, do familially and religiously affiliated women have the capacity to carry out public business on their own, and second, do they want to? We cannot, of course, know the answer to the second, but asking it does raise the possibility that women carried out business not by dint of adverse circumstances, but simply because they enjoyed performing the actual task, or found it convenient to do so. Some may even have been good enough at it that they became the ones delegated by the family or other social grouping to carry it out. The first question can in fact be answered with a certain degree of confidence. We know that heads of female religious institutions routinely carried out major and minor public functions. Some of them even held local courts and settled disputes.29 Nuns certainly had the capacity to carry out their responsibilities within convent walls, but only those invested with particular offices transacted business outside those walls. This 26
The fact that both Countess Jeanne and Countess Margaret founded such houses no doubt went a long way toward legitimating beghine status. For beghines and their male counterparts, the beghards, in Douai, see Walter Simons, ‘Begijnen en begarden in het middeleeuwse Dowaai’, De Franse Nederlanden, 17 (1992), 181–197. 27 Both Jake and Liegars and Agnes and Bietris called themselves companions. In addition, Jake and Liegars made a will together in which each left the other all her own goods and the goods that they had accumulated while living together (DAC FF 862). 28 For widows and widowhood in a similar town, see Marianne Danneel, Weduwen en wezen in het laat-middeleeuwse Gent (Leuven, Apeldoorn, 1995). 29 For the extent of the activities of the abbesses of three of the more prominent convents see, for Flines, Cartulaire de l’ abbaye de Flines, ed. E. Hautcoeur (Lille, 1873). For Marquette, see Cartulaire de l’ abbaye de Marquette, ed. Th. Leuridan (Lille, 1937), and for Messines, see Inventaire analytique et chronologique des chartes et documents appartenant aux archives de l’ ancienne abbaye de Messines, ed. I. L. A. Diegerick (Bruges, 1876).
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was particularly true for members of the more urban orders, such as the Dominicans and Franciscans. The crucial exception is, of course, the beghines. Their quasi-religious status enabled them to remain unassociated with familial and religious institutions yet be treated as religious folk. Their quasi-secular status, meanwhile, demanded that they function in the secular world. As we have seen in the case of Bietris and Agnes, the appositive ‘beghine’ suggested exactly that capacity. Beghines were usually unmarried women who found themselves in domestic relationships with other women. What of women whose status, as suggested by the familial appositives appended to their names, might have been secondary to and dependent on that of male members of their family and kin? Did sisters, mothers, daughters and wives have the capacity to conduct public affairs without the legitimating presence of their male kinfolk? Were they dependent to such an extent that the absence of such appositives should be taken to mean, not that they were independent, but that they were socially crippled? The answer to this question cannot be found in law codes. Until the fifteenth century, with the penetration of Roman law, these say little, if anything, about female capacity.30 In the absence of other compelling evidence, one must therefore assume that prior to the fifteenth century, the fact of an action stands as proof of its actor’s capacity. If a woman bearing the appellation sister, daughter, mother, or wife performs it, the evidence of her capacity to do so resides in the record of its completion. By no means does the appending of any particular familial appositive in the absence of any accompanying male necessarily suggest that her actions were necessarily due to exceptional circumstances, viz. a lack of male representation. It would in fact be unwarranted to suppose that the point of the appositive reference was to articulate her theoretical social subsumption or even subordination within a larger unit headed by a male. In fact, it probably tells us nothing more than how she or the official to whom she presented her case chose to represent her identity. If meaningful inferences are to be drawn from the use of identifying appositives, these will in all likelihood concern what were or were not considered to be the most important associations with respect to a given activity in the given society. The records of Douai reveal, in fact, that women who bore familial appositives did routinely act by and for themselves (and, ipso facto, that they had the capacity to do so). Out of eighty-nine actions in which an adult woman is described as someone’s daughter, sixty-two or 70% were accomplished by an unaccompanied woman. These numbers result from the following formula: the number of occasions on which a woman was clearly accompanied by a man is subtracted from the total number of entries detailing the actions of women bearing a particular appositive. (In this case, the figures are respectively twenty-seven and eighty-nine.) The figure that results (in this case, sixtytwo) represents the number of women who bear a particular familial appositive (’daughter of’, in this case) and who can nevertheless be assumed to have been functioning as their own agents for the transactions in question. The percentage results 30
` ` siecle chez des juristes de formation universitaire’ ‘On retrouve la terminologie du droit romain au 15 eme (Godding, 143).
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from dividing this number (sixty-two) by the original number of entries (eighty-nine, in this case). The resulting percentage (70% in the case of the appositive ‘daughter of’) represents a very conservative estimate. While on the one hand it does not include those occasions where the woman, although accompanied by a male, is clearly the active agent, it does, on the other, include those instances where the family member to whom a woman is related is female (e.g., Fresseis de Roie nieche demisele Gillotain de Bapaumes).31 Comparable figures for women identified as spouses (50%), mothers (85%), and other kin such as nieces and cousins (90%) tell the same tale. If one starts from the opposite direction, meanwhile, looking at all instances of business clearly transacted by women as sole agents, one finds that 40% were handled by women who were identified primarily by their familial associations. There were a total of 612 transactions involving women as sole agents, of which 249 (or 44%) were performed by women identified as nieces, cousins, wives, sisters, mothers, or daughters, while the remaining 363 (or 56%) were performed by those who were identified with reference to their citizenship, nicknames (dite...), occupations, places of residence or provenance, titles, or who were identified solely by their first name or (much more frequently) their first and last names. The actions in question, moreover, range broadly from property transfers to financial transactions and to testimony offered in the course of conflict resolution. Their competence to act was thus clearly not determined by the nature of the transaction undertaken. The one significant exception appears to concern transactions involving feudal tenure.32 A plethora of examples of transactions which did not involve feudal tenure demonstrate, however, that the nature of the issue at hand could and did dictate the form a reference took. When Marie, wife of Renier Painsmouillis, for example, transferred property to Jakemon Prociel and Gillon Mulet, the document does not initially identify her as his wife.33 It details the property under consideration, but does not specify her marital status, probably because the latter was not considered germane. Jeanne, wife of Jakemon de Grants, testified in the conflict which erupted during execution of the will of Jean Boinebroke; 34 the document only accidentally mentions the name of her spouse. In 1327, Caterine de Deuwioel, daughter of Willaume Le Vaukier, quit Jean Fierins of a sum he owed her; the document spends some time detailing these arrangements, but identifies her only by first and last name.35 Note that Catherine does not bear the same surname as her father. It was becoming increasingly common during the fourteenth century for children to take their father’s name, so the fact that Caterine bears a name different from that of her father is intriguing. The two possibilities which suggest themselves are that she was married and took her spouse’s name or that she was illegitimate and had taken the name of her mother. Does this evidence warrant the inference that women unidentified by appositives were not necessarily single or widowed? A search of the documentary record reveals 31
DAC FF 862. See Kittell, ‘Guardianship,’ 902–904. Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 280 [352. 34 EP, vol. 2, 199 [328. 35 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 184–185 [1035. 32 33
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numerous occasions where a woman who lacked the familial appositive in one instance bore it in another. In other words, she is not always identified by the familial appositive even when it is in principle applicable. The best evidence for this can be found in the record of the prolonged debate which attended the execution of the will of Jean Boinebroke between 1300 and 1310. This was a very public event and included official testimony from ninety-eight people, of whom more than half were women. We know that many of these women were married, but the information does not come from any attendant appositives. It must be found elsewhere, which suggests that it simply was not considered to be especially relevant. Margot Bielos was married to Jean (whose last name is unclear) when she testified, but the information is not evident from any direct reference to her in the document; it is buried in the rest of the testimony.36 Mention of Rumeus Fille Diu lacks any identifying appositives; when the name of her spouse finally appears, it is he and not she who bears the marital appositive.37 Applying the rule of thumb to Isabeaus de Brebiere, Maroie de Heuvin, and Margot le Tuiliere would similarly have yielded the false conclusion that they were all single or widowed, though each of them was in fact married.38 These are not isolated cases. Similar situations can be found where documents are labelled one way on the outside and contain other, usually additional information, inside.39 Typically omitted on the outside is the familial appositive. Most of these records were written on pieces of parchment which were rolled up before they were conserved. It was common practice for scribes to note what the record was about on the outside edge of the parchment that remained visible. Such notations were not always concise. One document dated 16 November 1344 included, for example, the following on its outside: Ch’ est compromis dou debat meut entre l’ abbesse dou Vivier et suer Yzabiel de Buignicort, nonne en celi abbaye, d’ une part, et Jehennain, veve de feu Mikiel Porte Esteulle, d’ autre part (‘This is the resolution of the conflict which arose between the abbess of Vivier and sister Yzabiel de Buignicort, nun in the same convent, on the one hand, and Jehanne, widow of the deceased Mikiel Porte Esteulle, on the other’).40 The absence of familial or other specifications was thus not necessarily due to any sort of customary brevity, but probably represented the whim of the scribe. Margot Baudane’s identification on the outside of a document detailing a 1275 transfer of property she took part in consists merely of her name. Only on the inside is she identified as the mother of Waubiers Mulet.41 The exterior of another document notes only C’ est wers Margot Boine Siecle (‘This is a transfer by Margot Boine Siecle’). The text inside provides the additional information that Margot is the stepdaughter of Jeanne Galipe.42 That Juliane Kavete was Alexander Kavete’s sister is in 36
EP, vol. 2, 190. ...Jehan Le Fournier, baron celui Rumet...(EP, vol. 2, 197 n. 23). 38 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 2, 186 n. 2, vol. 2, 201 n. 30, vol. 2, 204 n. 37. It is interesting to note that Espinas himself assumes that the husbands of both Margot li Tuiliere and Rumeus Fille Diu must have been ¨ Sozialdead (Georges Espinas, ‘Jehan Boine Broke, bourgeois et drapier Douaisien’, Vierteljahrschrift f ur und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 2 (1904), 402, 404, 406), even though the document does routinely mark widowhood, for instance, Maroie, ki fu fem Baude dou Four (EP, vol. 2, 199 n. 26a). 39 E.g., Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 25 [33. 40 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 282 [1138. 41 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 467 [620. 42 Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 255 [1109. 37
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no way apparent from the notation on the outside of the document detailing arrangements for her life rent.43 Comparisons of two or more records may also yield familial information that any particular record might leave out. The notation ‘Saintain Behourdet’ on the outside of a parchment dated 1250 and the reference to her on the inside are equally lacking in appositive specifications. A record dated twenty-one years earlier indicates that Saintain was indeed married. It is quite possible, given the passage of time, that her husband Symon was dead in 1250, but even Espinas himself does not describe her as a widow.44 This example demonstrates the difficulties involved in identifying the marital status of a woman for whom the record specifies no appositive. It is clear in any case that married women routinely transacted public business, whether or not they were identified by means of a marital appositive. While the majority of married women were so identified, there exists enough evidence to suggest that the inferences conventionally drawn from the absence of appositive specifications are inappropriate, at least for Douai. The largest number of recorded transactions involving women (208 or 33%) consist of notations which lack any identifying information beyond the woman’s name. As shown, such women often did have familial associations; these were just not invariably noted. It is in fact possible that this circumstance facilitated the growing trend towards the use of last names in place of appositive descriptions. Last names were, after all, much more efficient. Identifying phrases, particularly when either the official or the petitioner mandated more than one, required more ink and more space. They also consumed more of the scribe’s time – not only did he have to write more down, but someone had to decide which appositive was appropriate for each person involved, given the nature of the situation at hand. The use of last names at least potentially obviated this decision and its attendant ambiguities. Increasingly exclusive use of surnames, to be sure, raised another problem: which surname to use? While marital and paternal names came to define most family names by the seventeenth century, this was not yet invariably true even for the late fourteenth. Although women were increasingly using their father’s names, they appear not to have been exchanging them for those of their spouses upon marriage.45 Analyzing this development is, however, beyond the scope of the present essay.
6. Family versus class Variation in the choice of appositives suggests further that familial association was not the sole or even primary factor governing appositive reference. There were two others of 43
Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 561 [767. This is particularly surprising in view of the fact that he held the relatively prestigious position of cure´ of St. Nicholas in the city. Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 25 [33; vol. 3, 78 [115. 45 Examples of this phenomenon include Maroie le Sallehadine, wife of Thiebaut de le Mairie (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 302 [1154); Catelline Baudehaue, wife of Colars Quaillos (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 470 [1296); Angnies Tarine, wife of Jehan Waufflart (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 383–384 [1235); Marie Maillard, wife of Nicaise Villain (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 4, 430–432 [1343); Marie de Barlet, wife of Willaume de Paskendare (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 595 [806); Margherite Cauvete, wife of Pierre Viel (DAC FF 861); Bietris de Courceles, wife of Jehan de le Vail (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 591 [799). This list is by no means exhaustive. 44
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at least equal significance: class status and the nature of the issue at hand. As one example of the latter factor, we have already noted the document that recorded the proving of Jean Boinebroke’s will, in which marital status was not always of importance.46 What a particular witness did or did not do, or what Boinebroke did or did not do to them was of more consequence than familial or even marital status. The fact that Saintain de Behourdet, also mentioned above, gave a house to the hospital of Wes was significant enough to preclude any necessity of providing information either on her marital status or on the identity of her spouse. Her actions were simply more important than her family status. Marital or even familial status was not, as we have seen, invariably specified when actors were first identified in a document. Only one status achieved that distinction: class, in particular, high social rank. A person who bore the distinctive demisielle or dame (neither of which denoted marital status)47 in one document invariably bore it in any other records in which her name appeared. The contrast with the variable appearance of other types of appositive reference suggests that while marital and familial status were significant for the construction of women’s social identity, class may well have been of greater moment.
7. Conclusion The conventional assumption that women’s identity (unlike that of men) is intrinsically defined in terms of marital status, together with the corollary ‘rule of thumb’ that the omission of identifying appositives next to a woman’s name in the documentary record implies single or widowed status, flows logically from the assumption that women are either customarily or legally under the guardianship of men. A woman without a man, on this assumption, was socially crippled; she had no one to whom she could delegate the execution of her affairs, and this deficiency was reflected in the lack of supporting appositives such as ‘wife of’, ‘mother of’, or ‘sister of’ some man. In the case of Douai, however, such conventional wisdom is difficult to square with the evidence that women routinely transacted public business on their own behalf, regardless of whether they were identified by marital appositives or not. It also fails to take into account the existence of other appositives, including those denoting citizenship and occupation. Although detailing non-familial associations, such appositives appear by their very use to have been invested with as much validity as familial ones possessed. To be sure, if the only appositives that a woman can lack are familial, then one might indeed logically conclude that women who lack them are unmarried or have no family. But the variable attestation of other types of appositives upsets this logic. It would be unrealistic to conclude, for example, that a woman who lacks any appositive specifications was not a citizen or did 46 47
See above, page 227. Married women can be found to bear both titles. In one document Bietris de Courceles is called demisielle, though she is simultaneously identified as married (Espinas, La vie urbaine, vol. 3, 6–7 [7). It is likely that the two terms were associated with variations in class status. There has been little or no work done to determine what these different titles meant. It is possible that dame denotes the rural, landed aristocracy, and that demisielle signifies a member of the urban patriciate. This, however, is wholly speculation.
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not work for a living. As just noted, it is only in the case of designations of high social rank that the absence of a relevant epithet invariably signifies that the person in question was indeed not invested with that social status. The great variety of phrases used to identify women in Douai suggests that this particular piece of conventional wisdom should be used very cautiously, if at all. The diversity in phrases which are appended to personal names of women (what we have called ‘appositives’) implies that family status was not a rigid standard in terms of which Douaisian society was customarily organized. The combination of this variety in appositives with the high incidence of women’s names unaccompanied by any identifying information at all not only indicates that formulas for identification were unstable, but also suggests that the nature of women’s identity itself was in flux and not yet fully socially determined.