The expected role of women in Europe in the Middle Ages was determined by the Church, and are in a way different than the gender roles of today, but they still had patriarchal components to them. For example, social divisions separated women in terms of their socio-economic status, it "meant that upper-class women had more in common with the men of their class than with the peasant women" (Chadwick 44). Regardless of economic status, women's roles were still defined by Christian ethics that promoted obedience. The era of the Gregorian Reform (1073-85) "lead to a dramatically restricted role for women in the church and to the emergence of a new tradition of female mysticism" (55). This period really put an emphasis on the ideology of divine women-hood, which reached "its apogee in the twelfth cult of the Virgin Mary" (45). Women were also banned from education, and the only way for a woman to learn was through becoming a nun in the Church. The covenants had access to education, but could not teach. From the sixth century on, the Benedictine Rule shaped the community life of both men and women and really defined their roles in religious society. Women were barred from any form of which the Church exercised its power. However, access to any resources (education, the convent, the center of women's intellectual and artistic life) was determined by the nobility status of the women.
We read the restrictions on the limitations women had when it came to work, education, and the necessary activities of life. However, not all women followed the rules and the trend of obeying the laws of the Church. We see this rebellion in the work of Scivias by Hildegard of Bingen, and it is considered to be one of the "most remarkable religious compilations by women in Western History" (55). She became one of the first Christian women who had to deal with ideas like femininity, and she had to endure the denial and rejection of her outstanding work from men. "Churchmen who wrote about mystics tended to emphasize their inspiration and minimize their education" (Chadwich, 61). In Hildegard's instance, we see women being dismissed and labeled as uneducated for the mere fact of her bravery and artistic talents that threatened the status quo held by men.
Women in the Renaissance were not allowed to participate in the "governmental patronage that created the public face of Renaissance Italy" (67). Women were only able to participate in the restricted area of patronage outside the covenant. The Renaissance Era was a time when the political system of the Medieval feudal system changed. The relationship between the sexes was changed and restructured to women being dependent and men being dominant and where men ruled over everything. Women were the inferior group of society with no say. Women were categorized by their clothing, and they were extremely powerless. Queens were ruling countries, yet women did not have fundamental rights to existence or freedom. They were supposed to be seen and not heard, to breathe but not exist. Their thoughts and ideas were to be shaped by men, and their entire lives to be deemed as inferior. Sofonisba Anguissola, who was an artist in the Renaissance that was born to a relatively poor noble family. Her paintings usually construct her to be a woman of virtue and of the true modest ideals that were important at that time. Female virtue was also understood to include obedience, modesty, and silence.
Another Renaissance icon is Properiza de Rossi, who is known to be the only Renaissance woman to have sculpted in marble. She was able to work and provide for her own, which "give people plenty to talk about," and was later accused of being a prostitute (The Guerrilla Girls 31). She had an excellent understanding of human anatomy and the human body, and her work reflected that. For a woman to have all of that knowledge was unbearable for men.
Work Cited:
Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, And Society. Thames & Hudson, 2007.
The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. Penguin Books, 2006.
http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth200/artist/sofonisba.htm
http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth200/artist/sofonisba.htm
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