From Robbins Library Digital Projects.
An Exploration of Women with Magic in European 12th Century Literature
by Erina Lee, Lucy Smith, Colby Wagner
Magicians and mythical beings populate the European literature produced during the twelfth century, from the enemy Saracen sorcerers in The Song of Roland to the faerie ladies in Chrétian de Troyes’s courtly romances. Medievalists such as Corrine Saunders in her article “Otherworld Enchantments and Faery Realms” have examined the presence of these beings in depth, finding that its otherness challenges the social norms that the romance genre in particular otherwise tends to uphold (204). However, magical women, or women who are perfectly human yet wield magic in some way, occupy a blind spot in this field of research. There has been little to no academic conversation about how the descriptions of magical women in twelfth-century European literature reflect how women were treated at the time, especially in court. This is a serious oversight because women in the Middle Ages are already understudied, so overlooking the key role that magical women play in the literature of the time results in further suppression of their significance. In this paper, we will argue that the black-and-white characterization of magical women as users of either love magic or evil magic parallels the view of courtly women in the Middle Ages as either aides or saboteurs of men, with no middle ground or relevance outside of them.
While the medieval period was a transformative time in human development, that does not necessarily mean it was one that saw equality among all people. Women were at a large disadvantage for the most part, as they were seen as the bottom of the social ladder. As Elisheva Baumgarten contends, “They were, in many cases, twice removed — both from the men in their communities and from the majority communities within which they lived” (212). While some of this sentiment stemmed from the longstanding belief that women were only meant to perform menial house tasks and raise children, a lot of the negativity lay in the belief that women were inherently magically evil, using their magic to disillusion men. Despite the attempts of women to gain equality, they faced a hard uphill battle in their society, having the church and male counterparts against them at most turns. While women of nobility were favored quite more than common workers, even those of the upper class still faced discrimination in comparison to their male equals. Of the many ways women were hurt the most, imprisonment seemed to be the most effective way, a central theme to both petty crime and as a way to enforce the “witch” perception that women held. While men traditionally had a formal court hearing for their innocence before being put in prison or killed, women did not find this luxury, of jailed without, “formal accusation of trial”. This set a negative precedent, allowing women to easily be seen as the enemy to the public, especially when they weren’t even given the chance to defend themselves in any way from the public.
This sentiment is reflected in the literature of the twelfth century, namely epics such as The Song of Roland and the courtly romances of Chrétian de Troyes. Upon generating a list of the most frequent words in The Song of Roland, we found that “sister,” “queen,” “wife,” and other words indicating women did not appear in even the first 100. After all, there are only two women characters in The Song of Roland, Aude and Bramimonde, and Aude is so minor that she appears and dies in the span of a single verse. Richard Serrano in his article “No Place for a Lady in ‘the Song of Roland’” points out that Ganelon’s wife, Charlemagne’s sister, and Roland’s mother are one and the same, yet she is never even mentioned by name in order to suppress the shame of incest. Aude then passes away from the sheer heartbreak of learning that Roland, her fiance, is dead (147), which goes to show that her role in the story depends wholly on his continued existence. Queen Bramimonde also loses her husband, Marsile, and gets baptized by Charlemagne as a direct result (156). Her conversion represents a triumph over the pagans, who are associated with dark magic. This is exemplified by the characters of King Corsalis, who is “well versed in the black arts” (57), and Siglorel, described as the “enchanter who once visited hell; Jupiter led him there by sorcery” (73). Archbishop Turpin slays them both, his status as a holy man eradicating their potential for “sorcery.” Powerless from beginning to end, neither Aude nor Bramimonde wield magic.
In sharp contrast to The Song of Roland, there are many significant female characters, several of which wield magic, in Chrétian de Troyes’s Arthurian romance Yvain, the Knight of the Lion. According to Roberta L. Krueger in “Transforming Maidens: Single Women’s Stories in Marie de France’s ‘Lais’ and Later French Courtly Narratives,” it is true that Chrétien de Troyes, the pioneer of the Arthurian romance, sometimes cast magical women such as the enchantress Morgan in the Vulgate cycle as fearsome, vengeful figures (167). This is not the case in Yvain, where Lunete gives Yvain a ring that will turn him invisible (306) and Laudine gives Yvain another ring that protects him from harm as long as he remains faithful to her (326). An unnamed lady also uses an ointment made by Morgan to cure Yvain’s madness (330). In her article “Otherworld Enchantments and Faery Realms,” Corrine Saunders explains that “[w]omen enjoy a special relation with the supernatural in romance” (185). However, the women in Yvain have magical objects with purely beneficial effects rather than inherent magical powers that could be used for evil. Moreover, they use these objects for Yvain’s benefit instead of their own. Morgan is a striking example of someone who is seen as evil when she uses her magic for her own sake, such as in the Vulgate cycle, and good when she does not.
Despite the seemingly positive association between women and magic, a sentiment analysis of Yvain reveals some surprising results to the contrary.
The jagged blue curve on the graphs represents the sentiment values at different points in the romance, while the smooth curves represent the frequency at which the word it is associated with appears throughout the romance. As can be seen in the first graph, the peak of the smooth dispersion curve for the word “lady” is directly above the nadir of the sentiment curve. This is likely the point at which Laudine casts Yvain away for breaking his promise to her. Interestingly enough, replacing the word “lady” with the magical “rings,” as in the second graph, produces an equally high and even more focused peak over the same nadir. Laudine’s act of sending a messenger to take away Yvain’s ring causes the most negative sentiment values in the entire novel, which goes to show the effect women can have on men by giving or withholding their magic.
In order to build off of our findings from Yvain which separated the use of magical women as a good and a bad, many historians have spoken to the relevance of love magic representative of the weakness of women. Love magic is characterized as the use of magic to either influence or aid love. This can come in the form of using magic to force someone to fall in love with you, to use invisible rings to hide a man who loves the woman you aid (Yvain) or even to protect the person you love.
To contextualize, many historians such as Rider have argued that love magic specifically was being used by both men and women. That based on how the church described love magic in their manuals based on gender, there were clear church based sexist ideals at present. The use of pastoral manuscripts has helped to define love magic through many historians’ work on magic from the 12th – 15th century and it is clear from the state of the 12th century as described above that the influence the church has on beliefs and societal norms is incredibly widespread. Specific to love magic, the church has characterized women as weak to the devil, forcing themselves on men and forcing fidelity. While men used love magic to protect their lover or show them their love. Outside of the church, secular men were held in the highest order during this time, they saw women as the biggest threat to their power as they began to express sexual and gender freedoms, a step that they feared would lead to further power in society since many of these women claimed to hold love magic.
To look at Yvain, though on the surface the magic used by women were all acts of positive love, the context in comparison to the magical forest shows the true misogyny at the time. Laudine used an invisible ring to help Yvain find his love. This is love magic because it is bringing two people together, but it also shows the full duty of women to aid and prioritize man. Laudine helped Yvain not to help Lunette find love, but to find a man who can protect the court’s land. Similarly, Lunette gives Yvain rings to remember her when he is off on his adventure, but in reality these rings were used to influence Yvain out of infidelity. To compare these two examples to the description of the magical forest, though the forest is ungendered the descriptive differences highlight more of the tone towards women at the time through Chretiens voice. The forest is all encompassing, the only being to defeat the magic is the manliest of men, and has the power to control all the strongest knights and their honor. No magic demonstrated by women had the ability to defeat. Yvain highlights the undertones of misogyny constantly present in the 12th century descriptions of love magic, but Chretien’s tone of writing makes it less obvious.
Alternatively, past the 12th century and into the 15th the tone of sexism towards witchcraft became more and more obvious. Many current historians have based their magical women research on one specific text, Malleus Maleficarum, which defined the visualization and sentiment we have towards witches today. Translated to the Hammer of Witches, Heinrich Kramer turned sorcery into a crime of heresy with the need for secular prosecutions. Coming from the perspective of a Catholic clergyman, he describes witch craft as weakness to the devil and suggests the torture of those persecuted to the point of confession. He even went on to condone the death penalty to any use of magic.
What makes this text and the witch hunt era so obviously sexist is a lot of reasons. With kramer, he associated the syllables “fe” or “fides” and “minus” which translated to faith- less represents that women have less faith. This in turn, from his perspective meant women interact more with the devil through witchery. This specifically talks about women because he comes from a perspective of the clergy where women and religion only are represented through the following. For Kramer, “women are weaker to begin with and have no power against the strength of the devil.” This is particularly interesting because it was understood in the early middle ages magic just was not an urgent problem for people to be concerned about. But to the church, and clergy men like Kramer, these women posed a threat to their spread of christianity.
Though we don’t see any form of direct witch hunting in Yvain, though Lunete does almost burn at the stake for alleged treason towards Laudine, it is important to see Chretien’s romances as a charge in sexist descriptions of magic. Kramer characterizes witches as having the ability to change nature and weather which is very interesting to compare to the magical forest in Yvain. The fact that the magical forest requires a knight to splash water on its rock in order to cause the weather change, brings power to men and in some way that is making man a witch. For the action of the knight is changing the weather. But within Yvain, this phenomenon was seen as honorable and respectable for a knight to survive. Otherwise, with Kramer’s definition, as stated previously being very feminized, any change of weather is worthy of death. In Yvain, there are 26 instances of negative conversations about women. This reaches very far over the positive conversations. This analysis helps to highlight the dynamic of the negative and positive descriptions of women and magic. There is a clear negative sentiment towards women using magic and from this figure it is clear that that phenomenon came up in Yvain as well.
Chretiens tone not only towards women but their use of magic was just the beginning of the misogyny women believing in magic faced in the middle ages. This in turn highlights the perspectives of churches in the 12th to 15th century towards women with any form of strength or power, magical or not. Since witches were characterized as the submission to the devil, it is their choice to follow the devil and not God’s will which makes them so dangerous. To propose a reasoning, Kramer’s text defined witches so feminily because witchcraft was a form of power for women within the sphere of the church. And to propose further, it was more the fear of women with any power which caused such a sexist text to be written.
Conclusion
Despite some of the positive connotation that women were expressed in during this time, they were largely more negative than anything else. In most forms of magic, women were seen as manipulators of men, something that ewas extensively pushed by both literature of the time and the church, keeping women in subjugation of their male counterparts. After learning of this through our text anlysis and analytical research, many of the stories of this time can come into a new light, showing that it was very intentional that there was a lack of female representation in popular forms of writing and in the cases that there were, portrayed them in a very negative light, keeping par with the ideology of the times. Going forward, the research into women of medeival times could greatly benefit from the expansion of analysis of more medieval texts and documents of the time, looking directly into the comparison between men and women in magic. While it is undisputed that men were viewed more favorable than women of these times, a further analysis into their role in magic would be important to the study. In addition, more studies into the description of everyday women would be crucial, especially as a comparison to court women or women in magic.
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