The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women's Roles in Society

by Eleanor Janega

Overview

A “provocative, colloquial and entertaining” (Carolyne Larrington, Times Literary Supplement) exploration of medieval thinking about women’s beauty, sexuality, and behavior.

“A timely corrective…Ms. Janega’s witty but merciless dissection of medieval misogyny is a welcome challenge to us to stop recycling the same old prejudices.”—Elizabeth Lowry, Wall Street Journal

What makes for the ideal woman? How should she look, love, and be? In this vibrant, high-spirited history, medievalist Eleanor Janega turns to the Middle Ages, the era that bridged the ancient world and modern society, to unfurl its suppositions about women and reveal what’s shifted over time—and what hasn’t.

Enshrined medieval thinkers, almost always male, subscribed to a blend of classical Greek and Roman philosophy and Christian theology for their concepts of the sexes. For the height of female attractiveness, they chose the mythical Helen of Troy, whose imagined pear shape, small breasts, and golden hair served as beauty’s epitome. Casting Eve’s shadow over medieval women, they derided them as oversexed sinners, inherently lustful, insatiable, and weak. And, unless a nun, a woman was to be the embodiment of perfect motherhood.

In contrast, drawing on accounts of remarkable and subversive medieval women like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Hildegard of Bingen, along with others hidden in documents and court cases, Janega shows us how real women of the era lived. While often mothers, they were industrious farmers, brewers, textile workers, artists, and artisans and paved the way for new ideas about women’s nature, intellect, and ability.

In The Once and Future Sex, Janega unravels the restricting expectations on medieval women and the ones on women today. She boldly questions why, if our ideas of women have changed drastically over time, we cannot reimagine them now to create a more equitable future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324074465
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/16/2024
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	119,129
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Eleanor Janega teaches medieval and early modern history at the London School of Economics. The creator of the popular blog Going Medieval and author of The Middle Ages: A Graphic History, she lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

"Robust and well-sourced…There are colourful anecdotes on almost every page."

New Statesman - Rachel Cunliffe

"A bouquet of delightful grace notes and weird facts from the age…Janega is a thoroughly modern medievalist, able to inform and contextualize while entertaining and amazing."

Cory Doctorow

"Entertaining and revealing…Janega skilfully weaves a modern cultural commentary through her research into the medieval world, highlighting similarities and differences to today’s world for women and focussing our attention on the importance of analysing history as a way to understand the present."

All About History - Emily Staniforth

"Hugely entertaining and informative…[R]eminds us that we can only tackle present injustices if we remember that there is nothing universal about the ways in which people treat one another."

BBC History Magazine - Hannah Skoda

"Both the subject matter and the author’s engaging conversational style make this a book of many delights…[V]ery entertaining."

Spectator - Gillian Kenny

"With a deft hand, Eleanor Janega plots the maze of contradictions, restrictions, prejudice, unrealistic ideals, and outright dangers that medieval woman were forced to navigate. In doing so, she will elicit rage, admiration, horror, and wonder from her readers on behalf of their frequently indomitable female ancestors. Compelling and revelatory."

Lindsey Fitzharris

"[A] lively exploration of medieval women’s social roles."

The Conversation - Laura Kalas

11/14/2022

This incisive revisionist history tracks “societal expectations of women” from the Middle Ages to today. Blogger and historian Janega (The Middle Ages: A Graphic History) notes that early Christian theologians relied on ancient and scientifically erroneous assumptions to argue against women’s education, sexual agency, and professional equity, and examines how these viewpoints still influence modern schools, churches, and workplaces. Throughout, she documents the gap between the Middle Ages’ virginal ideal of womanhood and women’s actual roles in society, noting that medieval women farmed, brewed alcohol, and ran large estates while taking primary responsibility for homemaking and childcare, or outsourcing those duties to other women. Janega also shows that modern and medieval women faced similar pressure to effortlessly achieve the right body shape (hourglass today; pear-shaped in the Middle Ages) and dress stylishly, and draws on theologian Hildegard of Bingen, poet Christine de Pizan, and other medieval women to offer an alternate perspective on their era. Accessible, informative, and clear-sighted about the insidious workings of misogyny, this is a persuasive call for deconstructing the past to create a more equitable future. Illus. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Once and Future Sex is a bracing and witty exploration of how gender is constructed. Eleanor Janega shows it is high time we stop using 'medieval' as a pejorative and we stop patting ourselves on the back for our supposed progress. Combining incisive cultural criticism, meticulous research, and juicy historical tidbits, The Once and Future Sex proves that the path towards a more equitable future can be found by way of the medieval past."

Shelley Puhak

"Humorous, slightly irreverent…This book offers fresh, insightful takes on the medieval period from a feminine standpoint."

Booklist

"Reading this book is like hanging out with your brilliant, hilarious historian friend, raging together at misogyny’s extraordinary adaptability over time and plotting how to change the world once and for all."

Carissa Harris

"A timely corrective…[A]ccessible and entertaining…Ms. Janega's witty but merciless dissection of medieval misogyny is a welcome challenge to us to stop recycling the same old prejudices."

Wall Street Journal - Elizabeth Lowry

"In this witty, entertaining, and highly learned book, packed full of colorful characters and the texture of a long-past time, Eleanor Janega never loses sight of the bigger picture: how these old ideas underpin our own conceptions of gender and how modern conceits of progress are no less deeply flawed than those of the past."

Patrick Wyman

"A startling rethinking of why the medieval past still matters. Eleanor Janega tells how women’s roles are fundamentally constructed and the ways they have both changed over time and unfortunately stayed the same. With erudition and humor, this book offers the reader a perfect case study of how a fuller accounting of the past opens up new, better possible worlds."

Matthew Gabriele

2022-10-12
A British scholar revisits the medieval era to investigate long-held beliefs about women’s roles, bodies, and sexuality.

Janega, a professor of medieval and early modern history at the London School of Economics and author of The Middle Ages: A Graphic History, traces entrenched ideas about women largely created and reinforced by male writers, philosophers, and clergy. She first returns to the ancient writings of Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Galen for theories about women’s nature—namely, that they are comprised of the cold and wet humors (men being warm and dry) and their bodies, “prone to sickness.” In an era before dissection, women’s bodies were simply unknown. “If men were essentially the default humans,” as taught by Plato and Aristotle, women were the afterthought, an idea elaborated on by the early church fathers. Since so much of medieval thought was drawn from ancient writings, the sense of women as inferior creatures prevailed, and thanks to the doctrine of original sin, women were regarded as oversexed. They were denied serious education and thus locked out of the “standard pedagogic system.” Examining sermons, mystery plays, and troubadour songs, Janega shows the constant reinforcement of many of the stereotypes about women, and she pays close attention to the ancient and medieval standards of beauty, many of which persist to this day. Women’s sexuality, menstruation, and childbearing caused male thinkers innumerable conundrums. Yet women were always out in the world laboring, essential to the medieval economy as farmers, brewers, seamstresses, laundresses, midwives, and teachers of children—though their work was regarded as less valuable than that of men. In the final chapter, “Why It Matters,” the author challenges specious scientific studies in our own supposedly feminist era and emphasizes how many expectations of women about marriage and motherhood remain unchanged since the medieval era.

A breezy, pertinent study that demonstrates how learning about social constructs is crucial to changing them.

Kirkus Reviews