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On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, Nina Rulon-Miller wrote: > Dear Medieval-R, > > Heloise's remarks about women and drink have made me wonder about > drunken women in medieval literature. In Exeter Book Riddle 12, a woman > is described as "druncmennen," usually translated as "drunken > maid-servant" or "drunken slave woman." (This is the only appearance of > the word "druncmennen" in the OE corpus.) Perhaps Heloise's opinion was > widely held? As far as I can remember, there are no other drunken women > in OE literature. > I wonder if Heloise wasn't just joking around a bit with this one. Classical literature produced Juvenal's attack on the drunken women of Rome and in Roman custom male relatives greeted their female kin with a kiss to check on their breaths (to ensure that they were not drinking). Augustine's mother, Monica, had a narrow escape from becoming a wine-bibber early in life. My command of medieval literature is not very broad but it is certainly one of the faults in women that Andreas Capellanus notes in his last book and I remember (but cannot place precisely) some rather raucous poetry about tavern-haunting women. Maybe in one of G.G. Coulton's old collections of sources. In reading up on nuns, I found one instance where a visiting bishop disdained the sisters' claim that their abbess was an ecstatic visionary with the counter-claim that she was simply a falling-down drunk. In brief, it's my impression that there is good evidence that medieval people knew perfectly well that women could and did get drunk--though whether they did so as commonly as people like Andreas seem to claim is another question. Jo Ann %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%