THE ONCE AND FUTURE SEX

A British scholar revisits the medieval era to investigate long-held beliefs about women’s roles, bodies, and sexuality.

Janega, a professor of medieval and early modern history at the London School of Economics and author of The Middle Ages: A Graphic History, traces entrenched ideas about women largely created and reinforced by male writers, philosophers, and clergy. She first returns to the ancient writings of Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Galen for theories about women’s nature—namely, that they are comprised of the cold and wet humors (men being warm and dry) and their bodies, “prone to sickness.” In an era before dissection, women’s bodies were simply unknown. “If men were essentially the default humans,” as taught by Plato and Aristotle, women were the afterthought, an idea elaborated on by the early church fathers. Since so much of medieval thought was drawn from ancient writings, the sense of women as inferior creatures prevailed, and thanks to the doctrine of original sin, women were regarded as oversexed. They were denied serious education and thus locked out of the “standard pedagogic system.” Examining sermons, mystery plays, and troubadour songs, Janega shows the constant reinforcement of many of the stereotypes about women, and she pays close attention to the ancient and medieval standards of beauty, many of which persist to this day. Women’s sexuality, menstruation, and childbearing caused male thinkers innumerable conundrums. Yet women were always out in the world laboring, essential to the medieval economy as farmers, brewers, seamstresses, laundresses, midwives, and teachers of children—though their work was regarded as less valuable than that of men. In the final chapter, “Why It Matters,” the author challenges specious scientific studies in our own supposedly feminist era and emphasizes how many expectations of women about marriage and motherhood remain unchanged since the medieval era.

A breezy, pertinent study that demonstrates how learning about social constructs is crucial to changing them.