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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture Dear Maddy, you are right. That leads to the simple question: From when on and where people sit in the church in a row? Another segregation is given with the "pace"-kiss: When I remember right, the deacon gives it to one person in the public, but than it would be improper, when it went from a woman to a man or vice versa. yours Karl Am 13.09.2013 um 09:55 schrieb Madeleine Gray <[log in to unmask]>: > medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture > > I haven't followed everything on this thread - but I'm wondering (with our liturgical 'reconstructions' at St Fagans in mind) how this segregation works with the other evidence we have for people moving around during services, engaged in personal devotional activity? Part of our interpretation of the wall paintings at St Teilo's Church has suggested a sort of proto-Stations of the Cross but not in the narrative order, so if they were following the sequence of prayers and images people would have been criss-crossing the church. (We did have a go at doing some of that in the nave and aisle during the celebration of Mass in the chancel and it worked fairly well.) > > Maddy > > Dr Madeleine Gray PhD, FRHistS > Reader in History/ Darllenydd mewn Hanes > School of Humanities and Lifelong Learning /Ysgol Ddyniaethau a Dysgu Gydol Oes > University of South Wales/Prifysgol De Cymru > Caerleon Campus/Campws Caerllion, > Newport/Casnewydd NP18 3QT Tel: +44 (0)1633.432675 > http://www.southwales.ac.uk > http://twitter.com/penrhyspilgrim > http://twitter.com/HeritageUSW > http://twitter.com/USWHistory > > 'We all cherrypick the past but you have to be aware that you're cherrypicking' (Ruth Goodman) > > > From: medieval-religion - Scholarly discussions of medieval religious culture [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of James Bugslag [[log in to unmask]] > Sent: 12 September 2013 23:09 > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: [M-R] Sex-segregation at Mass > > medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture > As far as San Bernardino is concerned, there is a panel painting by Sano di Pietro of him preaching in the Campo, just in front of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, in which a cloth barrier has been set up in front of his pulpit, with the men on one side and the women on the other, so that they are visually isolated from one another. > Cheers, > Jim > > From: medieval-religion - Scholarly discussions of medieval religious culture [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Teaching the Secrets of Mary Bowser [[log in to unmask]] > Sent: September 11, 2013 11:40 PM > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: [M-R] Sex-segregation at Mass > > medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture > A belated thank you to those who responded to my initial post. One of the articles I learned about from query is "Links oder rechts? Zum 'Platz der Frau' in der mittelalterlichen Kirche" by Gabriela Signori. I hired a German-speaking gender studies graduate student to write a summary of it for me, and for those who are interested, I include her write-up below. > Best regards, > Lois Leveen > Left or Right? On the 'woman's place' in the medieval church > > Section one is titled Premodern 'Public' and gives a general theoretical/historiographical framing, countering romantic bourgeois historiography that falsely places the beginning of an association between "women" and the "private realm" in the Middle Ages. Women in the Middle Ages were present in public spaces broadly defined, such as the church. As men were too, they were subject to varied multifaceted rules that choreographed them in different spaces. Gender/sex was just one variable among others such as social and familial status and generation. > > Section two, Gender/Sex Segregation in the Chancel counters the idea that women were never allowed into the chancel (choir). However, it occurred regularly that the heads of the church forbade women to ministrate and to enter the chancel during the mass. In general, this space was originally only for the clergy, later the "church patrons" were allowed as well. > > The title of section three, ... And in the Nave, continues the discussion of sex/gender segregation in the church. This brief section treats early Christianity and finds a general agreement among different writers that men and women should be separated, even though the justifications varied from the need to ward against sexual desire and solicitation (for Chrysostomus), to the need to reflect a hierarchy of men over woman (for Paulus). > > Section four, Norms in Antagonism, is primarily concerned with sermons by some sort of wandering church celebrities, such as Fra Bernardino, who attracted many people to his speeches / sermons when he came to Siena. In one of these sermons, in 1425 or 1427, he inveighed that the church had degenerated into a "whore house." Signori points out that the genre of these kinds of sermons included strong expressions, and left little space for nuance. It seems to me that this could therefore both be seen as evidence that men and women did mingle, though it is not made clear what sort of practices Bernardino denounces as "whorehouse." Signorile suggests in this context that that Fra Bernardina was certainly familiar with Chrysostomus (see above), thereby suggesting that Fra Bernardino might have inveighed against lack of compliance with the separation between men and women, or simply its insufficiency. - At the same time, even if Fra Bernardino complained that the spatial separation of man and women was not always maintained in practice, the incendiary genre of the wandering preacher's sermon calls for caution against taking his words as an accurate representation of actual practice. > > Two contemporary images by Sano di Pietro of Fra Bernardino's sermons (images one and two) serve as an opening into a discussion of the spatial arrangement of men and women in separated sections next to each other, sometimes men on the left and women on the right, sometimes the other way around. Different reasons existed for these different arrangements—both in outside spaces like at the sermons of Fra Bernardino and in the church. Sometimes the nave was also divided between front and back. > > Section five is called Anthropology versus Hierarchy of Saints. First it goes into more different reasons for specific arrangements in churches, namely proximity to images or statues of certain saints. For example, sometimes women were placed in proximity to an image of the virgin Mary. None of these rules however should be given too much importance. Social reasons, such as a need to reflect social hierarchies in the spacial ordering of people in the church, played a role too. Signori discusses how the late gothic pulpits, which became more and more popular in the final quarter of the 15th century, changed what were the "best seats" in the church. > > Section six, Depiction or Ideal?, begins with this passage: "It is known that late medieval images rarely depict things as they were but rather as they ought to be." Signori suggests that the images by Sano die Pietro might not have depicted things as they were, and points to a different image of Bernardino's sermon where the audience is not as attentive and well-behaved. In this image by Neroccio di Bartolomeo Landi (died 1500, image not reproduced here), „eyes wander around, and „in the back rows, occupied by youths, [they wander] across the cloth,“ as Signori describes it. Also in another image by Savonarola (image three) there are groups of people in conversation, with their back to the pulpit. > > Later Signori notes on the iconography of the sermon that "bars or non-transparent cloth to separate women from men seem to be limited programmatically (?), first, to the depiction of notable Bußprediger [penitance preachers], and second, to the Mediterranian area. The borders between depiction and wishful image are fluid. It is very difficult to decide where documentation ends and admonition, cast into the image, begins. Charismatic Gottesmänner [men of God] such as Johannes Capestran (died 1456) or Vincent Ferrer (died 1419) did, according to contemporary chronicals, insist to speak in front of an audience that is strictly separated by sex/gender. Signori refers as an example Capestrano's sermon in Nürnberg in 1452, where clergy was separated from lay people, "another bar separated Jews from Christians," finally men and women were separated, and there was "a fourth audience group that was separated spatially from the community of the city": the sick. The famous Bamberger Capestrano panel (1470-75) however does not show any bars or cloth. "This detail did not become accepted north of the Alps, in the iconography." Signori points to the iconographic model where women and men sit on the same church bench, one to the right and one to the left, as seen in image 4. Another model seems to have been even more prevalent in the iconography of the sermon north of the Alps, namely that women - "and occasionally old men" sat, while men stood behind, such as in image 5. > > Section seven, Women's Chairs, begins by reiterating that the formula "women sit, men stand" seemed to have found widespread circulation, as it comes up in written documents from Zurich as well as in late medieval English contexts. The main topic of this section are the rules of "inheritance" for the church chairs/seats of (noble, "Patrizierinnen) women. The article concludes by stating that the formula "women on the left, men on the right" is a commonly held truth in scientific/academic circles, but falsely so. It needs to be revised. > > With regards to your questions, I also noticed that the concept of a family is absent from the article. Women were regularly differentiated by marital status: Some images depicted women with red (for married women), white (for virgins) and black (for widows) headscarves, but the concept of a "husband and wife" unit or a "family" attending church together never came up. Similarly, children were largely absent from the article. The image of a woman with a baby (image 6) stuck out to me for this reason. There is also the reference to "youths" whose eyes wander across the separating cloth in section six. But I found no mention of a child older than a baby and younger than a youth. I noticed one place where the concept "familia" comes up, namely in the discussion of the women's church seats in Tournai. It says that many women had several seats so they could provide for their daughters, daughters-in-law and the maidservants which also belonged to the familia. This section, however, only deals with places in German and Swiss area. > > > ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: subscribe medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: unsubscribe medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/medieval-religion > ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: subscribe medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: unsubscribe medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/medieval-religion > ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: subscribe medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: unsubscribe medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/medieval-religion ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: subscribe medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: unsubscribe medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/medieval-religion