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REPRESENTING GENDER IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES
The Fleming Family and Representations of Gender
My PhD project deals with the representations of gender in documents written about and by the members of the powerful Fleming family, a very influential but also a heterogeneous kin-group in the late medieval Kingdom of Sweden (especially in the eastern areas of the kingdom, now known as Finland; in the Middle Ages, however, Finland had no real separate status in this kingdom).
I am focusing on the ideas of the roles of women and men among the Northern European nobility in the Late Middle Ages. Using the concept of representation and identity, I discuss the complicated ideas of gender - ideas of the roles of the women and men in different phases of lives and positions. I have chosen to study the material left by and on the Fleming family - and some other families related to them. The surviving documents - letters, accounts, court material, wills, short memoirs - offer relatively abundant and diverse information about the members of the family and their cooperation and conflicts with each other.
The surviving material allows the researcher to discuss the positions of the prosperous and even poor members of the family and how their roles were perceived in the reciprocal networks of the family and the society. There are also plenty of possibilities to observe the representations of gender, which illustrate the mentalities of the contemporaries and their way of perceiving their society.
The period of research - the 15th and 16th centuries - is seen as a long transitional stage between the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period in the history of the Norther Scandinavia. The conflicting ideas of catholicism and reformation, for example, can be seen to shatter the family relations. Because of this, the period also provides the historian with possibilities. It was during these centuries when the Fleming family had its residence in the eastern areas of the Kingdom of Sweden.
The roots of the family, however, were originally in medieval Flanders, and there were some distant descendants of the family living in on the Continent, too. Some members of the family were holding very high posts in the Kingdom, while other relatives were in a less favourable position. There are two generations, one born in the 1480's and 1490's and another (the children od the former generation) born in the 1530's and 1540's, which I find to be of special interest.
These generations faced a changing society with old and new traditions and ways of perceiving the world. In the documentation of the members of these generations of Fleming family, there were mighty noblemen, officers and nuns, old maids and mighty wives, rascals and illegitimate children, orphaned relatives and relatives working as servants of the mighty family. These people were described by each others in the documents, giving their action interpretations connected to the gender and their social position.
The aim of my study is to explore the representations of gender in these documents and descriptions - what kind of representations there were, how they were connected to the position of the family memebrs and how they were used by the others and by themselves. My PhD project is based on my Master's Thesis which discussed the role of gender in medieval society of Sweden. This is a pioneering project when it comes to studying the medieval Sweden and Finland; there has been little research from the gender history point of view, and almost no research connected to the international discussion of gender, representations or mentalities. What I aim to do is to combine careful reading of medieval sources with new concepts and new research traditions.
I have found the concept of representation useful as a tool for understanding how the contemporaries perceived and constructed the world they were living in. Instead of trying to find out "what took place in the mansions of the Fleming family" I direct my attention to what the roles of men and women were supposed to be - and in what cases there might have been ideals conflicting with each other or with the practice of everyday life. In the words of Marjo Kaartinen, "representations are discursive elements of culture", formed on mentalities and the culture of the past. This is how the representations help us to understand the cultures of the past and to contextualize the people's ways of acting and reacting.
To give one example of the usefullness of the point of view of my research: Some of the documents are very contradictory when referring to the past they are describing. The family members had, for example, disputes on landed property and inheritance. The disputants would justify their ownership by referring to inheritance and marriage arrangements, family relations, - and they would try to contest the ownership of the others, describing the former behaviour of them as unworthy and adulterous.
In these cases, it would be futile to try to find out "what really had happened". Instead, these disputes provide the reader with ideas of what were the roles of women and men in the family and marriage strategies; what kind of behavior was expected from women and men, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons etc. There were gender specific ideas of what kind of behavior was acceptable for women and men, and how improper behaviour could be used as a justification for denying someone's ownership, for example. By studying these questions, I also wish to discuss to what extent the documents can be used as sources referring to the actual past - a complicated question not to be focused on in this project but to be considered and discussed. One of my points is that the historians ought to pay more attention to the medieval Finnish documents on a textual basis, as examples of complicated ways of negotiation and persuasion.
The documents offer also other kinds of aspects - not only those of conflict but those of cooperation. There are letters and memoirs describing the writers themselves or their family relations - or the relations such as they were expected to be. The material also includes ideas of the roles of women and men in the alliances and networks of the family, in the interpersonal ties with their relatives and other influential families. In these networks and alliances, the women and men were thought to have different kind of roles, but not only those of a wife and a husband.
I find it important to emphasize the possibility of women and men to negotiate with the general representations of gender, using the accepted roles to achieve goals of their own. The representations of gender were among of the elements structuring the identities of single persons, but the single persons could also negotiate between different ways of representing the gender. On the other hand, the hierarchies of the society must not be explained away. Again, it is the very complicated but interesting task of a historian to find the way in between.
My aim is to discuss the gendering of different features and behavior in a way which allows the past to be complex and heterogeneous. In my opinion, it is important that the past is not thought to be monolithic and homogeneous. The material offers the possibility to discuss cultural change and reciprocity between different local cultures - Swedish, Finnish, Danish, German, Hanseatic, or those of noblemen, peasantry and others - in the Northern Europe, which also had their effect on the way the gender was represented. I have already mentioned the reformation, which had its effects on the accepted roles of women and men.