Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 How Northwestern Europe Was Strange
- 2 Marrying Early and Marrying Late
- 3 The Riddle of the Western Family Pattern
- 4 The Women and Men of Montaillou and Salem Village
- 5 Communities in Crisis
- 6 What Men and Women Want
- 7 Interpreting the Western Past with the Women and the Households Left In, 1500–1800
- 8 The Late-Marriage Household, the Sexes, and the Modern World
- Epilogue
- Index
4 - The Women and Men of Montaillou and Salem Village
Patterns of Gender and Power
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 How Northwestern Europe Was Strange
- 2 Marrying Early and Marrying Late
- 3 The Riddle of the Western Family Pattern
- 4 The Women and Men of Montaillou and Salem Village
- 5 Communities in Crisis
- 6 What Men and Women Want
- 7 Interpreting the Western Past with the Women and the Households Left In, 1500–1800
- 8 The Late-Marriage Household, the Sexes, and the Modern World
- Epilogue
- Index
Summary
In the tiny early-fourteenth-century village of Montaillou, perched on a hillside in the Pyrenees, men wore their misogyny on their sleeves. In testimony before the Inquisitor, who questioned them about an outbreak of heresy in the village and its surrounding communities, they were offhand in their reflexive denigration of women. Husbands called their wives “old women,” “old heretics,” and “old sows.” Male servants even dared to join in when masters hurled these epithets at their wives. One remarked that, like his master, he had called his mistress “Bad mother, devil!” Another, learning that his master's wife had disobeyed her husband, stated matter-of-factly to the master in the wife's presence, “Women are demons.”
One man, insulting a local woman, declared, “The soul of a woman and the soul of a sow are one and the same thing – in other words, not much.” A heretic priest or “goodman,” having married his pregnant lover to an unsuspecting shepherd to preserve his own reputation, announced to the new couple: “A man is worth nothing if he is not his wife's master.” The same goodman volunteered that the soul of a woman cannot be admitted to Paradise unless the woman is reincarnated, however briefly, as a man.
These examples can give only the flavor of an omnipresent misogyny in the mountain community, where men's grudging admission that a woman might be “good” or “kind” was reserved, if the testimony is accurate witness, not so much for wives as for mothers – or, failing that, for the memory of mothers.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Household and the Making of HistoryA Subversive View of the Western Past, pp. 111 - 143Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004