When thinking about people in the middle age Europe, the first two things bumped into my head are knight, princes, and kings. NO matter derived from movies or books, stories such as "the great adventure of the brave knight" and "the valiant prince fight with the evil dragon" filled all my imaginations of the middle age when I was a child. As I grew up and read some classic literatures written in this time period, an rough structure of the middle ages was formed in my mind. However, one observation has bothered me for a long time and I couldn't find the answer of it: When reading poems and literatures written in this period, I found out that most of these works were associated only with men. It is hard to find traces about the behavior and appearance of women in this period. What did women in the middle ages look like? What social roles did they act?
The legend of the Good Women was written by Geoffrey Chaucer approximately in the 1370s, and it is his third longest poem. The entire poem was divided into nine sections, each section described a woman from ancient Greek and Roman who owned great virtue and praiseful qualities. There were many copies of the poem but since the entire work is too long to display on the webpage, thus only the manuscript of the fifth and sixth section are shown here. The fifth legend, "the legend of Lucretia", described a Roman woman called Lucretia who suicided after raped by a man. Her behavior is largely praised in the poem because she successfully protected her dignity and virginity. The sixth legend, "the legend of Ariadne", is a story about the Greek princess Ariadne, she helped the victims who were supposed to be sacrificed to the sea god. The poet exalted her goodness and courage. The other sections were pretty much the resemble style: Tell an ancient legend of a woman that had great deed. Since Greek and Rome literature was prevailingly translated and studied during the middle ages, the purpose that Chaucer writing about ancient women in Greek and Rome may because he wanted women in middle ages to learn from those "Good women". The good qualities of those "good women" were use as a moral standard to qualify women in Chaucer's time period. From the Pimlico Encyclopedia Of The Middle Ages edited by Norman F. Cantor, I know that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the idea of Aristotle became very important. According to his definition, women have the opposite qualities as men, which were "unlimited, even, plurality, left, oblong, moving, curved, darkness, and evil." Women were considered to be "deprived of the tendency toward perfection"(Cantor, p447). This assumption gave a very bad definition on women and thus the ability and moral of women were underestimated. It can be interpreted that many middle-age women were illiterate, because there were many drawings and illustrations on the manuscript. Since women couldn't read, visual impression might be the most common way for them to learn these stories. It is really unfair that women were judged by men during the middle ages, they drew the moral rule for women and limited the basic right of women. It is also interesting that some of these moral standard such as virginity were still be used even nowadays.