Guardianship over women in medieval Flanders: a reappraisal

Guardianship should not be confused with procuration, in which the procurator acts under the direction of the person he is representing.(21) Guardianship is usually marked by the word voogd (Dutch), tutor (Latin) or tuteur (French); advocacy is usually meant by the words procurator (Latin) or advoe (French, from Latin advocatus). The fact that the Dutch word landvoogd has historically been used for procurator has doubtless contributed to the tendency to confuse the distinctions between guardians and procurators.(22) Guardians are most systematically used with minor children.(23) Because they are young, children are incapable. The presumed incapacities associated with female gender are not as obviously manifested as those associated with a lack of years. Variations in social practice may therefore have yielded variations in terminology.

Flanders

Was social practice in medieval Flanders sufficiently uniform to permit valid generalizations about guardianship? The medieval county of Flanders, after all, consisted of both the francophone south (now largely part of the region in northern France known as "French Flanders"(24)) and the Flemish-speaking north (western Belgium). Godding, for good reasons, has no trouble treating the region as a coherent whole. The county was small enough to ensure that social and economic intercourse would be common among Flemish urban centers. Both Agnes de Harnes and Crestiene de Hazebruech, inhabitants of Douai, for example, received routine life rents from Bruges;(25) Marie file Pance, who made her will in Douai, came from Bethune.(26) Major towns exercised sufficiently constant influence over the more rural regions that surrounded them to guarantee considerable uniformity of practice between town and countryside.(27) During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the county was moreover developing into a cohesive political entity.(28)

A number of other circumstances conspired to give Flemish society in general its distinctive texture and shape. Perhaps one of the most important was the economic growth and ferment that had come to characterize thirteenth-century Flanders. Advantageously located astride a number of trade routes and blessed with many towns and with a thriving textile industry, Flanders early became the commercial and industrial center of Northern Europe. Economic principles and institutions were inherently opposed in a number of ways to the maintenance of traditional feudal and religious practices. The buying, manufacture, transportation, and selling of goods did not fit into the warlike ethos that fed feudalism, nor was it easily accommodated to the isolated, other-worldly context of medieval religion. Preconceptions rooted in feudal and religious order, although by no means without influence in thirteenth-century Flanders, took a back seat to economic demands.(29)

Distinctive religious factors also helped to shape the county and the social status of women within it. Although, like much of the rest of medieval Europe, it was home to numerous monasteries and abbeys, Flanders had no episcopal see within its borders, and it was far less subject to episcopal influence than were many other parts of Europe.(30) In addition, there were a number of convents, such as Flines, Marquette, and Messines, whose powerful abbesses were embroiled in most of the religious and secular affairs of their respective regions.(31) Flanders also saw one of the greatest flowerings of the beguine movement.(32) As pious but unprofessed women, usually living collectively in communal institutions called beguinages, Flemish beguines were initially not subject to the authority of any religious rule, let alone to that of a distant bishop.(33)