The appropriate androcentric thing to do in the medieval era would be to view midwives with suspicion. Midwifery was akin to witchcraft. A good midwife brought with her to the delivery chamber an assortment of concoctions and chants and herbs and talismans all designed to lessen the suffering of the mother-to-be and to ensure a smooth delivery. The church struck a deal with midwives. Bishops would license the midwives and give them the power to perform emergency baptisms — in case the need arose to baptize a dead or dying baby — so long as the midwife promised to not use magic on a birthing woman.
If magical incantations were off-limits, devote prayer was not. In fact, praying super hard to St. Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth, was the best advice given to expectant mothers. If labor was painful, it must be because she didn’t pray hard enough. There were a few other things an attending midwife could try if prayer didn’t work. Heated poultices, made with herbs, ivory, or eagle guano, could be applied to the skin. Or the vagina and external genitalia could be massaged with scented oils. Drinking vinegar and sugar may also help, it was thought. Certain stones were thought to have curative properties and laboring ladies were told to wear coral or sard stone or hold a magnet. All of these were to relieve the pains of labor. (No LaMaze breathing techniques here.)
We may imagine a medieval mother lying in a bed with a midwife at her side, but the horizontal position is not the most conducive position for birthing a baby, gravity being what it is and all. Besides, giving birth is a messy affair which would most likely ruin a perfectly good straw tick bed. Birthing chairs or stools were utilized during the Middle Ages. These chairs kept the woman in a more upright position and featured an open seat for baby, umbilical fluid, and after-birth.
Immediately after the birth, the umbilical cord was ritualistically burned in the family fireplace as a way to protect the newborn child from evil and erase the sinful fornication that resulted in the child’s conception.
Occasionally something would go wrong during labor and delivery. For instance, the baby could be breech, or simply too large for the woman to expel. Or there could be twins. To reposition the infant, a midwife may shake the bed or turn the child either by pushing on the mother’s belly or by inserting a helping hand up the vagina to manually maneuver the baby into place. A baby who died in the womb was dismembered and brought through the vagina piece by piece, as was the placenta if it refused to slide out on its own. It was a horrifying experience, to be sure.
All in all, giving birth in the Middle Ages was a barbaric ordeal and the medieval vagina took the brunt of the force, either from natural causes or from the intervention of a midwife. Like women, however, the vagina is a remarkably resilient organ. It couldn’t be kept down. Again and again, women endured the perils of childbirth.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Chapter Overview
The Middle Ages were not immune to crime and wrong-doing and the vagina was often on the receiving end of criminal activity. The concept of rape was quite different then as it is compared to now. It also gives us a concrete example of how the society was so completely male-centric; a crime that is delivered onto a woman was somehow twisted around to become a crime against another man. The role of the victim, because she was female, was minimized.
But occasionally women were the perpetrators and not simply the victims. Punishment for crimes committed during the Middle Ages was gender-specific and the female serving of justice was often delivered to the vagina, as we will discuss in this section.
Rape: Assault on the Medieval Vagina
Just as this infamous passage from Canterbury Tales shows us, the down side of owning a vagina is that it can be the target of violence. The crime of rape is not a modern invention. Indeed, medieval literature is replete with anecdotal evidence of vaginal violence. What has changed since the Middle Ages is the attitude about the causes and punishment of rape.
Criminal psychologists today recognize rape as more of a crime of power or dominance than a crime of passion. Not so in the Middle Ages. Rape was viewed as a manifestation of uncontrollable lust. Oh, those poor horny boys! How difficult it must be to resist those natural urges! So whose fault was it? In typical rape-culture fashion, the victim was often to blame. Women were viewed as the weaker sex, not just in the brute strength department but in will-power, too. Translation: women could more easily give into the sinful temptations of the flesh and would drag a pure-minded lad down with her. If the rape victim was not guilty of out-right seduction, then she was at least guilty of looking too pretty. Driven to lustful madness by her beauty, the perpetrator was merely acting on his natural hormonal, animal instincts. Who could blame him? (Sadly, victim blaming still exists today.)
Citing scripture equating women with Eve and the demise of paradise on Earth, medieval clergymen were quick to fault women as the responsible party in their own rapes. Yet author John Marshall Carter, in his book Rape in Medieval England: An Historical and Sociological Study, explained that “Clerics, or those claiming to be clerics, formed the largest percentage of rapists” in medieval England.
Medieval women, as the inferior, non-power-holding gender, lacked activists who championed their causes and sought solutions to their problems, such as rape. The rights of victims in rape cases went utterly ignored. Consider the rape scene in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, as an example. After the Knight commits his insult on the maiden, she is never to be mentioned again, for her role in the affair is merely to supply the vagina. Instead of writing, “And happed that, allone as he was born, He saugh a mayde walkinge him biforn” (line 885-886), Chaucer could have written, “The Knight, all alone, happened upon a vagina in front of him.” Throughout the remainder of the Tale, Chaucer shows no concern for the maiden and the effects the rape has had on her. She is forgotten as the focus of the Tale deals with the Knight-perpetrator and how the rape has impacted him.
A rape accusation is often a case of “he said-she said,” and in the medieval courts, no one cared what she said. Lacking absolute proof, rape cases were often dismissed, sentenced mildly, or settled out of court. Such was the case with good ol’ Geoffrey Chaucer who was himself accused of rape by Cecelia Chaumpagne in 1380.
A dutiful and trusted employee of the court, Chaucer was able to settle his rape case out of court and no record of the details of this settlement have surfaced. Most likely, he paid for her silence. But soon afterwards, he wrote Canterbury Tales and included the crime and punishment of rape within the Wife of Bath’s Tale. In this case, which Chaucer tells us takes place long ago, the Knight is condemned to death for his deed but is spared by the Queen.
As a woman and owner of a vagina herself, we would assume the Queen would be sympathetic to the victim. Yet the Tale centers on the Knight and what he has learned from his deplorable actions. Perhaps this was Chaucer’s way of letting the world know that he learned to keep his manhood to himself, following his own rape allegation. Or is he telling us, as many scholars contend, that the crime of rape is insignificant and unimportant. After all, the tale ends with the rapist Knight married to a beautiful, faithful, and lusty wife. Is the message here that the rapist always wins? Is there no justice for the victim?