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Acknowledgements.
My thanks go to many people who have assisted in the production of this work. These include Terry O'Keeffe, Sandra Lambert, Judy Parker, Mark Hall, Margaret Cazabon, Meg McKone, Ross Burns, Mike Hanley, Pam Terrill, Matthew Larkin and my students.
Introduction
"Unfinished Being"
Medieval women, like modern women, were infinitely variable in character, lifestyle and culture. Each regional medieval society and each rank had peculiar characteristics. The life of an Icelandic peasant had little in common with that of an aristocratic nun in Florence.
It is therefore difficult to generalise about Medieval Women as a single group.
But many thousands of women from throughout the West shared in a common experience when they joined in those great pilgrimages we know as the Crusades.
Women of all estates were central figures in the Crusades. These massive migrations changed fundamentally and forever the ways in which European women as a whole lived their lives. The Crusades marked the most far reaching change in European women's lives between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
Through examining the lives of some women on the Crusades and in the Kingdom of Jerusalem we are able to gain a more complete picture of all medieval women.
Not unexpectedly, there are severely limited sources of information about women and their participation in the Crusades. Females in the pages of most medieval chronicles are usually defined in circumscribed ways, mainly in terms of their sexual identity as wives, mothers, whores and virginal saints.
A careful reading of the biographies behind those chronicle pages nevertheless shows glimpses of complex people: women who were queens, courtesans, spies, mothers, soldiers, field workers, industrialists, merchants, religious, poets, lovers, politicians, housewives, adventurers and creators - in fact, everything it was possible for a human to be at that time. Such women whom the modern South American poet Alaide Foppa described as:
Unfinished being,
Not the remote angelical rose sung by poets of old,
Nor the sinister witch burned at Inquisition's stake,
Nor the lauded and desired prostitute,
Nor the blessed mother...
Women were present at all the major events of the Crusades, and they helped shape the spirit of the age. For the history of medieval women is not separate from the history of men. The stories of medieval women and men are the same story, intertwined and interessed In the words of the twelfth century visionary, Hildegard of Bingen:
The woman is the labor of the man.
The man is an aspect of comfort for the woman.
One does not have the capacity of living without the other.1
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