To approach the history of women in the Middle Ages is to play hide and seek with shadows, silhouettes without faces or bodies. Almost dreamed of, these ladies of yesteryear? No, of course. Like a curtain-raiser after a long wait, portraits, startling in their embodied precision, will appear at the end of this period.
We know these women of high status or of humble extraction above all through the eyes and the pen of men, very often clerics, who master the written word. Even in courtly love, it is the feelings of the man that are expressed. The adored lady from the upper echelons of society is a literary figure. What is beyond doubt is the status of institutionalized inferiority of those who were called the “daughters of Eve”. But the reality is often more subtle and more equivocal than the pediment of official truths.
Who are they really, these women who beckon us through the darkness of the centuries? For only a few decades, we have been reconstructing their history with resources that relate medievalists to the finest sleuths. With a kind of joy, Régine Pernoud had revealed to the general public the luminous part of these women from the "time of the cathedrals". Certain famous figures, such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, Christine de Pisan or Catherine de Siena, have pierced the clouds of oblivion up to us, but we must perceive in their wake the large crowd of strong women who knew, in their time, exercise power or mark their influence. Really submissive, the woman of the Middle Ages? Doubt is allowed.