A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [145]
The châtelaine of a castle more often than not had to manage alone when her husband was occupied elsewhere, as he generally was, for the sun never set on fighting in the 14th century. If not fighting, or attending the King, he was generally being held somewhere for ransom. In such case his wife had to take his place, reach decisions and assume direction, and there were many besides Jeanne de Montfort who did so. Marcia Ordelaffi, left to defend Cesena while her hot-tempered husband (he who had stabbed his son) held a second city against the papal forces, refused all offers to negotiate despite repeated assaults, mining of walls, bombardment day and night by stones cast from siege engines, and the pleas of her father to surrender. Suspecting her councillor of secretly arranging a surrender, she had him arrested and beheaded. Only when her knights told her that collapse of the citadel would allow no escape from death and that they proposed to yield with or without her consent did she agree to negotiate, on condition that she conduct the parley herself. This she did so effectively that she obtained safe-conduct for herself and her family and all servants, dependents, and soldiers who had supported her. She was said to fear only the wrath of her terrible husband—not without cause, for, despite all the talk of courtoisie, lords of chivalry, no less than the bourgeois, were known to beat their wives. In a case of particular brutality and high rank, the Count of Armagnac was accused of breaking his wife’s bones and keeping her locked up in an effort to extort property.
Woman’s status in the 14th century had one explicit female exponent in Christine de Pisan, the only medieval woman, as far as is known, to have earned a living by her pen. Born in 1364, she was the daughter of Thomas of Pisano, a physician-astrologer with a doctor’s degree from the University of Bologna who was summoned to Paris in 1365 by the new King, Charles V, and remained in his service. Christine was schooled by her father in Latin, philosophy, and various branches of science not usual in a woman’s education. At fifteen, she married Etienne Castel of Picardy, one of the royal secretaries. Ten years later, she was left alone with three children when her husband, “in the flower of his youth,” and her father died within a few years of each other. Without resources or relatives, she turned to writing to earn the patronage that must henceforth be her livelihood. She began with poetry, recalling in ballades and rondeaux her happiness as a wife and mourning her sorrows as a widow. Though the forms were conventional, the tone was personal.
No one knows the labor my poor heart endures
To dissimulate my grief when I find no pity.
The less sympathy in friendship, the more cause for tears.
So I make no plaint of my piteous mourning,
But laugh when I would rather weep,
And without rhyme or rhythm make my songs
To conceal my heart.
The plaintive note (or perhaps more sympathy than Christine pretended) loosened the purses of nobles and princes—whose status was reflected in patronage of the arts—and enabled Christine to undertake studies for a flow of didactic prose works, many of them adapted or translated from other authors, as was the common practice of the time. No subject deterred her: she wrote a large volume on the art of war based on the Roman classic De re militari by Vegetius; a mythological romance; a treatise on the education of women; and a life of Charles V which remains an important and original work. Her own voice and interest are strongest when she writes about her own sex, as in La Cité des dames on the lives of famous women of history. Though