Long before John Knox first blasted his trumpet about the ‘monstrous regiment of women’ rulers, the fear of a female head of state was considered just and natural in Medieval Europe. Several kingdoms had codified Salic Law from 500 AD onward to prevent a woman from inheriting a throne. In the 12th century, England had embraced anarchy rather than crown a queen. Henry VIII spilt from the religion of his birth in his desperate quest to get a male heir.
Why? Why was there such fear of a woman’s rule?
It wasn’t simply misogyny and patriarchal assumption of gender roles. In the Medieval period people genuinely believed women were inherently, biologically, and inescapably unfit to rule. The inferiority, and the insufficiency, of women was taught as a medical fact, as well as a religious truism. To allow a woman to hold the throne was to invert natural and religious order, and would endanger everyone in the kingdom.
Ancient pre-Christian philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, had argued that a person was ‘split’ between the mind/soul and body. The mind/soul was the site of all that was good and pure in humanity, and the body was the locus of all the animalistic evils people were guilty of doing. Men, it was believed, were controlled by their mind/soul, and capable of great things, while women were controlled by their bodies, and were thus naturally animalistic and less rational than men. The early Christian theologians, like St Augustine, agreed with the ancients regarding women’s animalistic state, and therefore it became the official teachings of the Church that men could think, but women could only feel and react. (Although it should be noted that the idea that the early Christian Church debated about whether or not women even had souls at all was mostly propaganda.)
The medical beliefs at the time also called into doubt women’s ability to form rational thoughts. It was was theorized that a woman’s reproductive organs, particularly the uterus, controlled them rather than their minds. Worse, the uterus was like a wild animal within the already animalistic woman. As far back 2100 BCE the Kahun papyrus shows that Egyptian physicians believed the uterus could slip its moorings if denied pregnancy and sexual activity and wander about a woman’s body, causing a range of physical and mental ailments. This idea was still in force a thousand years later in Classical Greece, where medical luminaries such as Hippocrates wrote texts explaining that the uterus caused disease in women by damaging other internal organs it collided with as it blundered through the abdomen. Plato maintained that this organ was possessed with an almost sentient longing to generate children, which if not satisfied, caused it to move about the body in a melancholy frenzy. The renown ancient physician, Aretaeus, wrote that the uterus closely resembled an animal, and that women should obtain sex partners as soon as they were able in order to tame their unruly uterus.
Furthermore, the core beliefs of Medieval medicine was almost entirely based on the ancient Greek physician Galen’s humoral theory of bodily function. Galen had written that women’s humors were too ‘cold’ to expel the penis and scrotum, creating an ‘inside-out’ model of the female reproductive organs.
Women, therefore, were physiologically ‘men gone wrong’ — men who had been deformed into women by their lack of the essential humoral ‘heat’ needed to think and act. Nor was Galen the only source for this ‘fact’. Aristotle also argued that women were mutilated males, the end result of a normal process that had gone ‘wrong’ and failed to produce a male.
This image of women as deformed men mean that women were de facto ‘monsters’. The woman was therefore inherently, as a monstrous deformed man, an anomaly which must be feared and restrained. How could any kingdom be ruled by a monster?
Even if monsters/women were given a crown, how could they rule? Women were equivalent to the uterus, the “Tota mulier in utero” (woman is a womb) argument, and an animalistic organ was not fit to run a country in the same way a man’s rational mind was. The uterus – and thus women – was too fluid, too out of control, to allow it’s owner to rule. A woman, a monster controlled by an even wilder uterus, could not possibly debate and generate laws.
In sum, many Medieval men would have rejected a female heir to the throne for reasons they would have seen as just and good. A solo-reigning queen was against nature. A female ruler was against God’s own divine plan. Even an infant boy would have been seen as a better leader than an adult queen. After all, the baby boy would have eventually grown up, free from uterine interference, able to safely rule with the power of a rational mind within a non-monstrous body.
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Thanks , always interesting to read your blog.
Ashawna
Did it not occurr to any of those wise men that they were born from those monstruosities and, as a consequence, the fruit from that monstruosity should also be one?
Well, Galen argued that there was a good REASON for the deformed men … you needed them to make men. 🙂