Eleanor Janega

A vibrant and illuminating exploration of medieval thinking on women’s beauty, sexuality, and behavior. What makes for the ideal woman? How should she look, love, and be? In this vibrant, high-spirited history, medievalist Eleanor Janega turns to the Middle Ages, the era that bridged the ancient world and modern society, to unfurl its suppositions about women and reveal what’s shifted over time—and what hasn’t. Enshrined medieval thinkers, almost always male, subscribed to a blend of classical Greek and Roman philosophy and Christian theology for their concepts of the sexes. For the height of female attractiveness, they chose the mythical Helen of Troy, whose imagined pear shape, small breasts, and golden hair served as beauty’s epitome. Casting Eve’s shadow over medieval women, they derided them as oversexed sinners, inherently lustful, insatiable, and weak. And, unless a nun, a woman was to be the embodiment of perfect motherhood. In contrast, drawing on accounts of remarkable and subversive medieval women like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Hildegard of Bingen, along with others hidden in documents and court cases, Janega shows us how real women of the era lived. While often mothers, they were industrious farmers, brewers, textile workers, artists, and artisans and paved the way for new ideas about women’s nature, intellect, and ability. In The Once and Future Sex, Janega unravels the restricting expectations on medieval women and the ones on women today. She boldly questions why, if our ideas of women have changed drastically over time, we cannot reimagine them now to create a more equitable future.

The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women's Roles in Society

Taira Robles

The message was clear: women's sexuality was a demonic force against which men had to invoke God's protection. Men were not responsible for their obsessions or demonic possessions. Women were. They invited their own damnation and inflicted it on fully grown men who apparently still needed their mothers' protection. 

Once a field became truly profitable, men nudged women out of it. It was all well and good to let ladies have fun with a needle and thread. But if there was cash to be made, men suddenly showed up front and center and excluded women from the role.

Women have always been workers. In addition to domestic chores, they worked in farming, brewing, and the like, laboring for rather a lot more hours than most men did. For this reason, medieval women might attempt to warn others off of married life and point them toward the somewhat less stressful confines of the nunnery instead. The idea that women didn't work until recently is, ironically, a modern construction. Medieval people may not have lauded women for their professions, but working women were common enough that they didn't necessarily bear mentioning.

Where then, did we get this idea? Partially it has to do with the way that medieval people approached both women and work. Women were understood less as individuals than as commodities. They were traded through marriage to be productive laborers, working alongside their husbands and carrying out reproductive labor as well. Even if they managed to leave their family while unwed, they were expected to labor within a household, or to join an order of religious women, performing religious labor and praying for their families. While an argument could be made that the combination of domestic, reproductive, and religious labor was an overlooked sink of energy for women, we don't need to get that theoretical. Women were working at every level of society alongside or in partnership with men—and received almost no credit for doing so.

Domesticity was a privilege accorded to those who could get by on a husband's wage or who inherited wealth. Working-class women have always worked—the hint is in the name.

To tell ourselves that we are the newly liberated, women-respecting heroes is to ignore millennia of women who got up, did their jobs, took care of their kids, and were every bit as engaged in and integral to society as men were. 

We obfuscate these women and their history if we tell a story about ourselves rather than the past. These stories that we tell about the history of women and work, like those about beauty standards and sex, show us in the best possible light but often have very little to do with history. If we are to confront these false narratives, we first have to make room in our minds for the factual story of women and work. Only then can we begin to understand why our narrative differs so much from the reality, and what we are avoiding when we write it.

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