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Educating a
Crusading Princess
The upbringing of notable individuals such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and Hildegard of Bingen suggests much about the formation of the characters of the noble ladies involved in the Crusades.
Evidence about women's education during this period indicates surprising degrees of empowerment through learning, given an educational regime that stressed rigidity, religious orthodoxy - "education was the creature of religion" - and the essential superiority and hence greater need for learning of the man, and the man of high rank at that.
In England, for instance, between 598 and 1670, all educational institutions were exclusively under church control, and for most of this period the major task of most of these schools was to produce scholars suitable for the priesthood.1
Occasionally, a parish priest might establish a local elementary school, or a monastery or some other religious institution might begin a grammar school in which were taught some philosophy and theology, or perhaps an almonry school for the instruction of those wishing to become priests. Professor Coulton estimates as around 26,000 the number of (male) students in such schools at any one time during the medieval period.2
However, females did have access to education, even in the rawer years of the early Crusades.
Perhaps the most famous - or infamous - of these was Heloise of Paris. She fell in love with her tutor Abelard, who was then castrated at the orders of her uncle and guardian, Fulbert. Abelard and Heloise then carried on a famous platonic love affair by correspondence. Through her letters to her former lover Abelard, she displayed not only a keen mind trained by the finest teacher of that generation, but also a broad and thorough scriptural and philosophical understanding.
Is it not remarkable that Heloise - who was possibly the illegitimate offspring of her guardian's brother - should have been eagerly sponsored to private tuition under the auspices of the brightest star of Paris university, Abelard?
Abelard says that her uncle Fulbert, a canon of the university, so loved Heloise that he did everything in his power to advance her education in letters, in which she stood supreme. And so, fatefully, he hired Abelard, and left the girl entirely in his tutelage, with the tragic results which became the stuff of legend.
According to Abelard, after they had been forcibly separated by her uncle, it was Heloise who argued against Abelard's proposal that he should secretly marry her.
She argued cogently on a number of grounds, including her loss of honour, but more particularly, because of the detriment to the Church and the grief of philosophers at the loss to the academic world that would surely ensue if Abelard married.
She also advanced the Pauline argument of the difficulties of marriage, quoting verses such as the dire warning:
"...those who marry will have pain and grief in this bodily life, and my aim is to spare you."
Heloise went on to quote St Jerome in her diatribe against marriage, all the time appearing to argue on behalf of the one who was begging her for marriage with the intention of protecting her!
One cannot help feeling at this point that Heloise was enjoying the argument for its own sake. She enlists the aid of Jerome in his book Contra Jovinianum, as he described the difficulties inherent in a philosopher trying to contend with the distractions of domestic life.
And Heloise continued her denial of Abelard's suit with her own attack on marriage as a hindrance to study.
"What harmony can there be between pupils and nursemaids, desks and cradles, books or tables and distaffs, pen or stylus and spindles? Who can concentrate on thoughts of Scripture or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying, nurses soothing them with lullabies, and all the noisy coming and going of men and women about the house? Will he put up with the constant muddle and squalor which small children bring into the home?...."
And then she draws on the advice of Seneca that philosophy is not a matter for the dilettante, but must be pursued to the exclusion of all else.3
Heloise thus demonstrated a very complete grasp of higher education as it was then known.
Formal education of a general nature, however, may not have been the usual experience of women who were taught letters. It is more probable that when women were taught, they were educated under the stricter guidance of the Church proper in one form or another.
Hildegard of Bingen, for example, attained a level of instruction which permitted her to correspond powerfully with the most powerful figures of the age, and to write with fervour and logic on every topic under the medieval sun in an extremely wide range of formats from letters, to disputations to poetry, music, songs and even plays.
Hildegard appears to have had no formal instruction before the age of seven, as was normal in that age.4 After that, she was dedicated as an oblate under the supervision of the anchoress Jutta of Spanheim in a cell at Disibodenberg. The two were literally entombed together, and Hildegard thus passed her formative years constantly in the presence of her spiritual guide.
From Jutta, Hildegard received her education, which her official life describes as learning humility, innocence, the psalms, and how to pray accompanied by a ten string psaltery.5
In other words, she learned religious values, letters by studying a book of psalms, and music by playing a psaltery, a musical instrument rather like a dulcimer.
She was also probably introduced to manual work such as making clothes and embroidery.
Certain things were not taught to her, however. Hildegard in a letter to St Bernard says quite specifically that she could not read German. Obviously, however, she was
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