Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland

S. Sheehan, A. Dooley, S. Sheehan, A. Dooley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349296613, 9780230115255
• eBook ISBN: 9781137076380
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: Social Sciences

Medieval Irish texts reveal distinctive and unexpected constructions of gender. Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland illuminates these ideas through its fresh and provocative re-readings of a wide range of texts, including saga, romance, legal texts, Fenian narrative, hagiography, and ecclesiastical verse.

CHAPTER 1

TRAVELERS AND SETTLED FOLK: WOMEN, HONOR, AND SHAME IN MEDIEVAL IRELAND

Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha

The dialectic of gender and space has benefitted from the attention of anthropologists, cultural geographers, architects, and archaeologists, among others. This paper offers some thoughts on this dialectic as found in medieval Irish society. Gendered space is socially produced, whether by the actual design of space in buildings or landscape, or by the lived experience of space. Human beings invest with meaning the spaces they inhabit or experience, and they gender space in terms of power relations, between men and women, rulers and subjects, clean and unclean, public and domestic, and so forth. The aim in explicating such power relations is to gain a better understanding of the society in question. The following pages consider travel on the part of medieval Irishwomen, how it was viewed and how it informed their subjectivity; it also considers the impact of the enclosure or nonenclosure of certain categories of women, including, in particular, various types of female poets and entertainers. The dialectic of gender and space has an obvious bearing on these issues.

Brian Bórama (d. 1014), one of the most successful Irish kings, was celebrated long after his time as one who brought law and order to all levels of society. The seventeenth-century historian Séathrún Céitinn tells that “it was in the reign of Brian that a lone woman travelled from Tonn Tuaighe to Tonn Chlíodhna, carrying with her a gold circlet or ring on a rod, and she was neither robbed nor raped, so vigorously was Brian’s rule upheld in Ireland.”¹ This idealized image of a solitary woman walking unmolested from the northern coast of Antrim to the far south begs the question of what traveling was like in reality for women in early medieval Ireland. How unusual was it for women to travel alone, and how were women who traveled, either alone or accompanied, viewed by society?

As it appears that men always have had greater freedom of movement out of doors than women, one might not expect to gain much insight into the mentalité of medieval Irish society by pursuing this question. However, constraint or freedom of movement is highly determinative of the kind of lives people live, and moreover it is bound up with their gendered experience of space, both open and enclosed. In the following pages, I aim to show that by taking issues of movement and space into account we can gain a better understanding of the reality and the representation of women’s lives in medieval Ireland. I shall pay special attention to women who spent time in the company or “retinue” [dám] of poets, not only because there are interesting clusters of references to them in the sources but also because considering them is particularly helpful in distinguishing differences in degrees of respectability between various classes of women, and also between women and men.

Medieval Irish society, as is well known, was highly inegalitarian. The deepest divide was between the enslaved and the free. Slaves aside, lay and clerical society operated through an elaborate system of hierarchies of status, each hierarchy relating to a separate function.² Thus there were distinct hierarchies for the grades of the church, for secular rulers, for lords and their clients, and for learned poets. There was also a system of equivalences between these functionally distinct hierarchies, which may derive from conversion to Christianity and familiarity with its egalitarianist philosophy.³ Nonetheless, medieval Ireland continued to be a deeply and essentially inegalitarian society. A freeman’s formal status derived from the rank he held within the hierarchy that defined him, and his honor-price and his capacity to perform legal acts were reckoned in relation to this rank. Yet rank on the basis of wealth or office was not the only determinant of status. As Thomas Charles-Edwards has said, “Personal excellence not measured by status can be given recognition by the more fluid standard of honour.”⁴

For most men, most of the time, status was simultaneously a matter of rank and personal honor, but while loss of the latter might reduce the status of laymen in the eyes of society, it rarely resulted in a nominal change of rank. In the case of the ordained grades of the church, certain sins were said to result in their “stumbling” or “falling” [tuisled] below their grade, but restoration through penance was usually possible. The fact that elaborate functional hierarchies pertained only to males is the main reason that honor was of such importance in establishing the status of women. Here and there in the sources, one can find lists of female functionaries (such as the list of women who are excluded from sick-maintenance according to Bretha Crólige [Judgments of sick-lying]),⁵ but they do not constitute differentiated functional hierarchies. One can trace rudimentary functional hierarchies for women’s monastic houses, but the classification of all women associated with the church as either virgin nuns, chaste wives, or holy widows has greater salience in the sources than any functional hierarchy.⁶ At any rate, it seems that for the majority of women, status was determined on the basis of honor, and the measure of their honor was their sexual conduct.⁷

Irish legal sources describe marriage in terms of a hierarchy of sexual unions, all of them having legal status of some kind, from the most legally secure union of an equally well-born man and woman down to unions by rape and exploitation.⁸ This hierarchy can also be construed in honorific terms, but significantly, these refer to female honor. Most women lived in a state of legal dependence on male guardians, which meant they were at a remove from any greatly differentiated functional hierarchy. While injuries to laywomen were undoubtedly perceived as offenses against themselves as well as their guardians, it is crucial that the penalties were reckoned in terms of the guardians’ honor-price. Consequently, while women might keep within the household enclosure for their own safety, male honor was also upheld by their remaining there. Women of the church submitted themselves even more emphatically to enclosure, as one would expect of those whose lives were spent in or near sacred space. Anxiety concerning their enclosure was intensified by the proximity of male monastics. All in all, the monastic life strengthened the association of social stability and well-being with the enclosure of females.

In fact, female honor and freedom to roam tended to be opposed to each other in medieval Irish sources. This is not to say that life “out of doors” was incompatible with women’s honor; after all, the legal tracts provide ample evidence that farmers’ womenfolk did a great deal of work outside. Women were particularly associated with milking, dairying, animal feeding, textile production, and food preparation, but the point is that women’s work was concentrated in or near the home.⁹ It seems reasonable to assume that unaccompanied women rarely engaged in aspects of farming that took them far beyond the enclosure into the open countryside. Women did take part in summer grazing, when cattle were brought from the homeplace to graze on hillsides or other rough land. But their time there was usually spent in the company of other family members, and as families returned annually to what were recognized as their traditional grazing lands and booleys (“cattle-enclosures,” from Irish buaile), it was akin to coming to a second home, however makeshift.¹⁰

The male sex in general is larger, stronger, more combative, and better at self defense than the female, and exceptions to this at points across the broad human spectr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1. Travelers and Settled Folk: Women, Honor, and Shame in Medieval Ireland
• 2. Sex in the Civitas: Early Irish Intellectuals and Their Vision of Women
• 3. Looking for “Mr. Right” in Tochmarc Becfhola
• 4. Playing for Power: Macha Mongrúad’s Sovereign Performance
• 5. Feasts for the Eyes: Visuality and Desire in the Ulster Cycle
• 6. They Kept Their Skirts On: Gender-Bending Motifs in Early Irish Hagiography
• 7. Human Frontiers in Medieval Irish Religious Literature
• 8. Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Late Medieval Irish Rómánsaíochtai
• 9. Speaking with Forked Tongues: Gender and Narrative in the Acallam
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index