Historical Romance Author Sarah Woodbury stopped into day with a wonderful History lesson!
As you know, I love history and am tickled to death to have her visit!
Women in Celtic
Society
It is a stereotype that women in the Middle Ages had two
career options: mother or holy woman, with prostitute or
chattel filling in the gaps between those two.
Whether we like it or not, for the most part this stereotype is
accurate and the status and role of women in that era revolved around these
categories.
This is one reason that when an author sets fiction in this
time, it is difficult to write a self-actualized female character who has
any kind of autonomy or authority over her own life. Thus, it is common
practice to make fictional characters either healers of some sort (thus opening
up a whole array of narrative possibilities for travel and interaction with
interesting people) or to focus on high status women. Such women may or may not actually have had
more autonomy, but their lives didn’t consist of drudgery and child care from
morning until night.
This is not to say that men in the Middle Ages weren’t
equally restricted in their ‘careers’. A serf is a serf after all, of
whatever gender. Men as a whole, however, did have control of women, of
finances, of government, and of the Church, and thus organized and ruled the
world. Literally.
There are obvious exceptions—Eleanor of Aquitaine,
anyone—but women such as she were one out of thousands upon thousands who were
born, worked, and died within five miles of their home.
At the same time, within Celtic cultures, women at least had
the possibility of greater personal autonomy. In Ireland, where
the Roman Church had less influence, women had a viable place both within
the Druid religion and within the Celtic/Irish Church. Wales too was less subject to the
restrictions of the Church. There, women had a higher status than in
Christendom as a whole, including the right to divorce her husband and societal
acceptance of illegitimate children.
The Laws of Women (part of the Laws of Hywel Dda) included
rules that governed marriage and the division of property if a married couple
should separate. Women usually married through contract, but elopement was
allowed, with the provision that if the relationship lasted seven years, a
woman had the same entitlements as if she’d been given to her husband by her
kin.
My book, Daughter of Time, tells the story a young widow, Meg, who falls
through time into the Middle Ages—and into the arms of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd,
the last Prince of Wales. One aspect of
the book that I found very interesting to write was her reaction to the status
and role of women in medieval Wales,
and how a modern woman might deal with it.
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