Words in Favour of Women

Thirty years ago I published in Medium Aevum a short article entitled "Words against Women." It was a brief edition and commentary on some anti-feminist lines found in the manuscript Vatican Reg. lat. 1659. The lines were used to fill up an empty column and seem to have been linked to a longer passage in the Vatican copy of a moralising debate poem, the Petit Plet by the Anglo-Norman poet Chardri. The Petit Plet lines are marked in this manuscript by drawings of hands with the index finger pointing to particular couplets that deal with the unflattering characteristics of women. If there are many medieval texts that clearly see women in an unfavourable light, there are, however, a few that speak out in praise of women; in this paper I present some aspects of one of those, an unpublished poem in defence of women that Professor Francoise Vielliard of the Ecole nationale des Chartes and I are in the process of editing. Though this paper may be intended primarily to remind us of that rather small literary current, it also underlines the value of hunting through manuscripts ostensibly devoted to one subject but where marginalia and fill-in material can reveal a few unknown gems which often pass unrecorded—or at least passed over in the standard catalogues.