A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [140]
Medieval girls, like boys, became adults in their mid-teens. Marriage was generally consummated at fourteen or thereafter, although in the case of the highborn it might be legally concluded in infancy or childhood. Another young girl, the fifteen-year-old heroine of Deschamps’s poem “Suis-je belle?”, clearly inspired by Agnes of Navarre, also had control of the key to her “treasure,” although this probably represented a literary echo of Agnes rather than a common possession. Often spoken of as if it were familiar, the chastity belt rests on only the faintest factual support in the Middle Ages and was then probably more of a literary conceit than an item of customary use. Believed to have evolved from the Moslem practice of infibulation, which involved attaching a padlock to the labia, it is said to have been imported to Europe with other luxuries through the crusades. An occasional actual model exists, but non-literary evidence such as lawsuits does not appear until the Renaissance and later times. As a device of rabid male possessiveness, the chastity belt afflicted medieval women less than their successors.
Deschamps’s luscious damsel details her charms in each stanza-sweet red mouth, green eyes, dainty eyebrows, round chin, white throat, firm high breasts, well-made thighs and legs, fine loins and fine “cul de Paris”—following each with the refrain “Suis-je, suis-je, suis-je belle?” (Am I, am I, am I not fair?). She is a male vision of the amorous girl, but Agnes and the taunting Fiammetta were real enough, though both are known, as are virtually all medieval women, only through the pens of men. What is rare is a woman’s account of herself. The anguished Héloïse in the 12th century and the feminist Christine de Pisan in the later 14th speak out, and both are bitter, although that does not necessarily establish a rule. In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
Given the non-privacy of medieval life, little about sexual habits was likely to be hidden from the unmarried girl, noble or otherwise. That the Chevalier de La Tour Landry really designed his tales of carnality for the moral edification of his motherless daughters need not be taken at face value, but it is interesting that this was his excuse. His book covers lechery, fornication, and rape, with examples drawn from Lot’s daughters, the incest of Tamar, and cases nearer home, such as the lady who loved a squire and contrived to be with him by telling her husband she had vowed divers pilgrimages so that he let her go where she list, or another lady who was told by a knight that if she were wise and good she would not “come to men’s chambers by nights darkly without candle nor to coll and kiss men in her bed alone as she did.” Life in the castle was evidently easy-going. Knights and ladies stayed up late, “singing, playing and japing and making such noise they could not have heard thunder,” and “when one of the men held his hand under one of the women’s clothes,” he had his arm broken by the angry husband.
Entertainment was not only the recital of lofty epics of chivalrous if tedious adultery. The coarse comic fabliaux in quick rhymed couplets, satiric, obscene, often cruel or grotesque, were told for laughs like dirty stories of any age, to noble as well as bourgeois audiences. Often written by court poets in parody of the romances, they treated sex more as pratfall than ennoblement, and their recital or reading aloud was as welcome in the castle as in town, tavern, and probably cloister.
Isabella could well have listened to the tales of Jean de Condé, poet in her lifetime at her mother’s native court in Hainault. His style is illustrated by a story about a game of truth-telling played at court before a tournament. A knight, asked by the Queen if he has fathered any children, is forced to admit he has not, and