Gafney Response to Hanawalt, “At the Margins of Women’s Space in Medieval Europe”

Gafney Response to Hanawalt, “At the Margins of Women’s Space in Medieval Europe”

In this chapter of her 1998 Of Good and Ill Repute: Gender and Social Control in Medieval Europe, Barbara Hanawalt describes the ways in which women are morally and socially judged based on their adherence to patriarchal and church organization of gendered space. As Hanwalt writes, “This exercise finds less significance in separating respectable women and marginals than in studying the spaces that they occupied…By limiting the physical spaces that women could occupy and controlling women both within those spaces and outside of them, medieval men defined spatial locations for women that made those who moved beyond those boundaries more clearly marginal” (73). Women who did move beyond these spatial strictures, such as some prostitutes, beggars, and certain non-conformist religious, were also “subject to harassment” (74). Space restrictions were physical as well as intangible; silence, for example, was imposed as one of the restrictions that Hanawalt identifies as coexisting with and reinforcing spatial boundaries.

I agree with Hanawalt’s general depiction of adherence to physical gendered space norms as directly influencing general opinion of women in the Middle Ages; her scholarship is sound and her arguments are convincing. I am interested in the ways in which medieval literature, particularly that of the fourteenth century, articulate various “escapes” from the spatial strictures imposed on medieval people. (Hanawalt rightly focuses on the restrictions of women, as opposed to the greater physical liberties of men, and I will also limit my discussion to these restrictions. It is worth noting, however, that the gendered spaces described here may have alienated men from the home, “restricting” them in a certain sense as well.) I’ll briefly list these imagined “escapes” below:

(1) Sanctioned travel or movement: Pilgrimages and other forms of sanctioned movement, as in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, provide more acceptable ways for women to move about the world and interact with men (though, as Hanawalt points out, these trips were risky for a woman to undertake alone).

(2) Pagan settings/ Chivalric settings: Stories set in classical times, or in the time of King Arthur are often “Christianized” but are also removed from various structures of the Church. Female characters in these stories generally enjoy much greater liberty of movement.

(3) Cross dressing: Certain female saints that had cult followings in the Middle Ages, such as Saint Eugenia, dressed as men in order to teach, preach, and preserve their virginity.

(4) Tale-telling games: Tale-telling games, such as those found in Chaucer and Boccaccio, often coexist with abnormal but sanctioned movement that includes women. Tale-telling represents and opportunity for overcoming the restrictive silence imposed on women in the domestic sphere.