LITERATURE REVIEW:
TREATMENT OF WOMEN IN PETER OF BLOIS' LETTER COLLECTION
Michael Markowski
Peter of Blois wrote six letters which directly addressed the status of women in his day. All six letters were written, included in his letter collection, and were circulating before readers by 1185. These letters exemplify real situations of the day, and were products of Peter’s early to mid-career time frame. They were not written by an old, successful bureaucrat with an eye toward posterity, but by an active and authoritative intellectual responding to situations -- large and small -- in his life.
Peter of Blois had taught liberal arts in Paris. He moved to England in the 1170s and stepped down from his teaching career in order to serve the Norman court of King Henry II and successive archbishops of Canterbury as a courtier, adviser and writer. But Peter of Blois’ historical significance is not due to his work at court as much as due to his letter collection which was very popular from the twelfth through sixteenth centuries.1 There is no serious biography or in-depth study of Peter of Blois, and little in the way of journal articles concerning him or his corpus.
Peter's letters have been edited and printed in Latin in the source-collection by Migne, Patrologiae Latina, vol. 207. Being a readily‑available but uncritical edition, this paper will cite Migne but check all text with the best manuscripts of each version of Peter's Letter Collection. There is a basic textual problem: Of all his letters, Peter used about 150 to ‘publish’ his Letter Collection. During the course of the next 25 or so years, he added, changed and removed various letters. Some 10 different versions of the collection came out in Peter’s own lifetime!
Richard Southern's article on Peter of Blois sorts out the main versions of Peter’s Letter Collection and notes a few of the better manuscripts to stand as exemplars for each version.2 Ethel Higgonet's Harvard Dissertation built on Southern’s work, essentially agreeing with Southern's divisions.3 Southern and Higgonet identified 3-4 major revisions which Peter had made of his Letter Collection. There are also a number of more minor but identifiable revisions also for a total of 8-10 versions. Southern and Higgonet had done much of the ground-work to differentiate the main lines of Peter's versions, to put them in chronological order, and sort out the manuscripts associated with each version. Following a suggestion from Southern, I've tried to identify the best manuscript for each version, a sort of archtype or exemplar, to rely upon since producing a critical edition of the Letter Collection is out of the question because of the very large number of manuscripts -- around 500 -- involved.
Some of Peter’s letters openly promoted women's authority over their own lives and vocations. To the extent he argued for this position, he moved against the current of medieval tradition, which put severe limits on the range of choices open to women. While past medieval traditions held women back, progress in the 12th century in terms of women’s status was taking leaps forward. The support in Peter’s letters for women's power over their own lives was based primarily on religious arguments. This may seem surprising to some who believe that Christianity essentially stifles women. A closer look at the New Testament shows both sides, clear ambiguities in this area: some biblical texts promote a full-blown gender equality, some argue for an inferiority of women, and some texts can be categorized somewhere between. The real question is: how does each society sort out that ambiguity? Which interpretation becomes the norm?
For the 12th century and afterward, the prominent historian David Herlihy found that Christianity tended "to raise women to a position of prominence."4 What is at the root of Herlihy's argument is the idea that Christ redeemed all humanity -- men and woman equally -- thus creating for the first time in history a widespread theoretical basis for equality on earth. Jean Leclercq has written that St Bernard "considered monks and nuns on an equal footing."5 Leclercq extended this line of thought to argue for the presence of a universal equality of gender in medieval religious thought.6 But this line of thinking, in both the secondary and primary sources, really is theoretical. It was an ideal that some held, but few put into practice. Peter of Blois, by adhering to his spiritual principles, achieved that degree of theoretical equality of the sexes, and in his letters, attempted to put theory into practice. But strangely, not all his letters fit this view. While Peter wrote some letters strongly supporting women against the gender prejudice of his day, in other letters, he fell right into supporting gender biases against women!
Peter’s famous letter to Eleanor of Aquitaine is a case in point. In 1173, Eleanor had left her husband, King Henry II of England. She joined a violent insurrection against her king and husband. In the letter Peter wrote to Eleanor, there is a clear message that women should not mix into politics and that wives should obey their husbands. Where is this coming from? Was Peter literally bi-polar, producing both sides of an issue without distinction?
The historian most influential in opening the modern study of medieval women was Eileen Power. Power has described two opposed archetypes that medieval women often were expected to conform to,7 in terms of the pit and the pedestal, with the inferior temptress Eve as one archetype, and the perfect Virgin Mary as a superior archetype. The superior type was carried over into the fictionalized Dame of courtly literature.8 Perhaps Peter of Blois presented both archetypes, but in different letters.
In another letter, Peter repeated the misogynous anecdote from Roman literature of the hanging wives:
Weeping, Pacuvius said to his neighbor: "Friend, I have a cursed tree in my garden. My first wife hung herself from it. My second wife did too. Now so has the third!"
The friend responded to him: "I am amazed to have found you in tears over such successes. Good gods! That tree has suspended you from such spending! Give me cuttings from your tree so that in the end of my wife, it may begin to live and prosper."
Peter concluded the story by addressing his friend, who was about to be married, that he needed such a tree. If Peter was trying to be humorous, it was a twisted humor.
Misogynous sentiments were common enough in the Middle Ages, and they are still all too common today. Modern grammarians include the anecdote of the hanging wives in two current textbooks for beginners in Latin!9 Should we expect a more enlightened view from a medieval mind than from our own scholars?
Penny Schine Gold and Susan Mosher Stuard have argued that medieval attitudes toward women were ambivalent, and particularly in the twelfth century, were undergoing a great deal of change.10 Perhaps Peter of Blois was no more than an accurate representative of his culture, and so, of much use to us. He preserved for his readers the best that medieval society had to offer in ameliorating and protecting the rights and status of women. He also preserved a picture of some of the worst medieval prejudices and practices concerning women. Considering the problem one historian has termed a "dearth of documentation" concerning women in medieval England,11 these letters need to take their place among the known sources for women's lives in the Middle Ages.
ENDNOTES
1. This literature review is drawn from the work which resulted in the article, "Treatment of Women in the Letter Collection of Peter of Blois," by Markowski, article in: Minorities in the Middle Ages, Ed. Susan Ridyard (University of the South, Sewanee Mediaeval Studies #7, 1996), 63-71.
A large number of manuscripts, over 500, which contain his writings have survived. Cf. Rolf Kohn, " Pierre de Blois," Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, (Paris, 1985), 13:1513; also Cf.: Richard Southern, "Peter of Blois: A Twelfth Century Humanist?" Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (New York: Blackwell, 1970), p. 105; Giles Constable, "The Popularity of Twelfth-Century Spiritual Writers in the Late Middle Ages," Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, Ed. by Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1970), pp. 8 & 28; Ethel Higonnet, "Spiritual Aspects in the Letters of Peter of Blois," Speculum 50 (1975), p. 218, note 3. For recent bibliographies on Peter, Cf. Rolf Kohn, "Pierre de Blois." Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, (Paris, 1985), and Elizabeth Revell, "Peter of Blois." Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Ed. by Joseph R. Strayer (New York: Scribner, 1987), 9:517‑8.
2. "Peter of Blois: A Twelfth Century Humanist?" Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (New York: Blackwell, 1970).
3. The Letters of Peter of Blois (Harvard dissertation, 1973).
4. David Herlihy, "Land, Family, and Women in Continental Europe, 701‑1200" Women in Medieval Society, Ed. by Susan Mosher Stuard (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), p. 34.
5. Jean Leclercq, "Does St Bernard Have a Specific Message for Nuns?" Distant Echoes, Ed. by John A. Nichols and Lilian Thomas Shank (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications Inc., 1984), p. 275.
6. Jean Leclercq, "Does St Bernard Have a Specific Message for Nuns?" p. 276.
7. Eileen Power, "The Position of Women," article in The Legacy of the Middle Ages, Ed. G. C. Crump and E. F. Jacob (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), pp. 401 ff.
8. Eileen Power, Medieval Women, Ed. M. M. Postan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 10.
9. Frederic Wheelock, Latin. An Introductory Course Based on Ancient Authors (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1963), p. 203; Charles H. Beeson, A Primer of Medieval Latin (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1953), p. 55.
10. Penny Schine Gold, The Lady & the Virgin. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. xxi for a summary of this ambivalence. Cf. also on changes and ambiguities generally toward women at this time, Susan Mosher Stuard, "Introduction," Women in Medieval Society, p. 8.
11. Barbara A. Hanawalt, "Golden Ages for the History of Medieval English Women," In Women in Medieval History and Historiography, Ed. by Susan Mosher Stuard (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), p. 9.
