Stories of Women in the Middle Ages is the translation of a book originally published in Italian as Storie di donne nel Medioevo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016), written by Maria Teresa Brolis, an independent scholar of medieval history from Bergamo. This new English edition, translated by Joyce Myerson, also incorporates a very brief foreword by Giles Constable that supplements the previous and rather puzzling seven-page foreword by Franco Cardini. While Constable sees Stories of Women in the Middle Ages as a book that "opens the door to further wide-ranging research into many questions that need to be studied" (xi), for Cardini it "shows that behind every great woman not only is there always a great man, but often there is more than one" (xiv). Cardini also celebrates the fact that Brolis does not engage with "fashionable" approaches (that is relating to feminism, gender, and sex), and chose instead to write what he calls a "feminine history," a "history about the many complexities of femininity," that he also characterizes as "history on the grand scale" (xiii). In his view, one model to frame women's history is the "classic" work of Georges Duby (xii). Cardini--channeling the nickname that Marc Bloch gave to his renowned student, Jacques Le Goff--imagines the historian as an ogre in a fairy tale, and therefore, describes Brolis as an "admirable, graciously insatiable ogre" (xviii).
After the two prefaces and a short introduction, Stories of Women in the Middle Ages is organized in two sections, each containing biographical sketches of medieval European Christian women: eight very well-known or "famous" women and eight unknown or "ordinary" women from Bergamo. In her introduction Brolis specifies that her objectives are "to investigate the female condition at the center and on the periphery of the medieval world; to bring together large-scale history with what should never be called local history, in a narrow and restricted sense of the word." (3) One could frame Brolis's contribution as a sort of modern take on older studies of remarkable women, such as Boccaccio's De mulieribius claris--studies that were themselves modelled on the antique genre of De viris illustribus. As Constable remarks in his foreword, this book certainly invites the reader to think about wide-ranging questions. For instance, it made the present reviewer wonder what a contemporary scholar might see as remarkable compared to what Giovanni Boccaccio, Alvaro de Luna, or Christine de Pizan might have seen. Or, how our canon of remarkable characters has been created and why it endures. Is it time to be more inclusive, more intersectional, and embrace other regions, religions, and approaches in gender studies? Is gender still being questioned as a useful tool of historical analysis? And last, but not least, how do we write history?
Part One covers eight illustrious ladies who together comprise the usual suspects of medieval women's history. These include queens, writers, nuns, and saints, from the European locales that have been at the heart of old school historiography of the Middle Ages: France, Germany, England, Italy, and Sweden. Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) "The Genius"--writer, composer, visionary, preacher, and abbess--opens this section. Hildegard, canonized in 2012, is celebrated for her erudition: "either...God revealed everything to her in a vision, or the reality is that some medieval women were indeed able to attain an extraordinary degree of culture" (14). Chapter two is about Raingarde "the Mother," on the occasion of whose death in 1134, her son, Peter the Venerable, the great reformer and abbot of Cluny, wrote a consolatory letter to himself and his brothers in which he recounted her life of devotion. Chapter three follows with "Heloise, the Love-Struck," while chapter four is dedicated to that most famous medieval queen, Eleonor of Aquitaine, "wife of two kings, mother of ten princes and princesses, patroness of artists, regent for her son, indomitable traveler" (34). The next two chapters focus on Clare of Assisi and Bridget of Sweden, each of whom were canonized within a few years of their death. Chapters on Christine de Pizan and Jean of Arc close the section on "famous" women.
The second part of this book is rather more interesting because it offers new material. Divided into eight chapters, it focuses on the daily lives of "ordinary" women, who may be unknown but are nonetheless noteworthy. Brolis encountered these individuals in notarial records of Bergamo, were they were typically recorded as giving or receiving assistance from or leaving bequests to the Misericordia Confraternity. Giovanna de Cumis, the childless widow of Pietro Grimoldi, known as "Flora," opens this section. After her husband's passing, she was in charge of administering his possessions and dedicated herself to a profession sanctioned by the Church: moneylending. Thus, in her last will and testament of 1338, she charged the Misericordia Confraternity with distributing her money and properties among the poor of Bergamo. Brolis puts Flora alongside accounts of other resourceful women who successfully administered their patrimony. The following chapter is on Agnesina, an orphan and servant in the house of the Lord of Crema, who in 1362 married a certain Paciolo, who had been a servant in a different household. Agnesina and Paciolo, along other similar characters Brolis found in the records of the Misericordia Confraternity, provide a window onto the role of this institution in the lives of the poor of the city. Chapter eleven features upper middle class Ottebona Uliveni and her last will and testament of 1309. From this document Brolis deduces the profound love that united Ottebona to her husband, Pietro Lorenzoni da Vertova, who at the time of her death had been exiled from Bergamo. Their daughter's will is analyzed in similar terms. For Brolis, their tales serve to explore the role of love in marriage, conjugal law, the figure of the mundoald, and female agency. Like Leclercq and LeGoff before her, she contends that the development of Marian devotion contributed to a rise in the status of women, the transformation of marriage into a sacrament, and the promotion of the nuclear family and notions of childhood.
The book continues with the figure of the aristocrat, Grazia d'Arzago, who for more than forty years ruled as abbess of Santa Grata, the oldest and most famous nunnery in Bergamo. She was involved in the charitable works of the Confraternity, and therefore could "cross over the wall, while continuing to live within the cloister" (124). Brolis considers her "a sort of local Hildegard von Bingen, a lover of culture and open to the world outside the cloister" (122). In chapter thirteen, the noblewoman Gigliola Suardi, who dictated her will in 1327 as a childless widow, reflects an interest in fashion, particularly beautiful garments and trousseaux. Next Brolis turns to Bettina, the widow of Rambono Ravizzoni and an inhabitant of a mountain village east of Bergamo, who provides an opportunity to discuss religious orthodoxy and heresy in the region. A popular healer, Bettina not only made potions, but also talked with the dead--practices that led the religious authorities of Begamo first to interrogate her and, subsequently, to caution her to refrain from any further suspicious activities. Next Brolis turns to Margherita de Cortona, who after her lover's death moved with her son to Cortona, became a Franciscan tertiary and founded a hospital, before retiring as an urban hermit. The final chapter focuses on women pilgrims, among them, Belfiore, a childless widow who in 1350 expressed in her will her desire to go on pilgrimage to Rome.
Stories of Women in the Middle Ages is a book intended for a popular or pedagogical audience. It does not have footnotes, but every chapter has a section of suggested readings. The style is narrative, at times incorporating excerpts from relevant literary works, letters, and documents. Brolis is unabashed in her admiration of these women, as she acknowledges in the introduction: "I openly declare that these women definitively enjoy my sympathy" (4). In fact, she dedicates the book "in grateful homage" to the women it features (170). If there is a thread that runs through these sixteen character sketches, whether their subjects are nobles or commoners, famous or "invisible," it is the theme of religion, spirituality, and devotion. In a short conclusion, entitled: "In an effort not to conclude...", Brolis states that what she has done is to present an alternative to a simplifying dichotomy that characterized the historical treatment of women with "the goliards (proponents of carnal pleasures), on the one side, and the misogynist ascetics, on the other." (169) And it is true: her sixteen ladies certainly exemplify agency and defy narrow stereotypes. While this is a book that may indeed inspire the reader to reconsiderations, it also makes this reader miss the approaches that Cardini dismissed as "fashionable"--approaches centering on feminism, gender, and sex.