| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2002)

AS SHARON FARMER admits in the last sentence of this book, "many of the things that we would like to know about the poor of medieval Paris were buried with them when they died."(169) This book, then, is more about gender and ideology than it is about the daily lives of the poor; that, however, as every medievalist knows, is less the fault of the author than a result of the tyranny of the sources. Moreover, whatever picture that emerges about the poor in Paris in these pages — both men and women — is mediated by men who were not themselves poor. Thus, "firsthand knowledge of poor people" (2) remains beyond the secure grasp of the modern historian. It is not surprising, therefore, that very few pages in this book actually treat "perspectives of the poor," the vast majority being about "perspectives on the poor." Fortunately, this book's value lies not in a recounting of actual experiences of poor folk, but rather in a close and convincing analysis of the intellectual construction — the ideology — of cultural values and stereotypes about poverty, physical disability, and begging.

This ideology comes to us largely from the writings of "preachers, teachers of preachers, and theologians,"( 2) and these provide Farmer with the backbone of sources for her book. She plumbs the sermon literature of Humbert of Romans, Jacques de Vitry, and Gilbert of Tournai, and extensively uses The Life and Miracles of Saint Louis by Guillaume de Saint-Pathus. Guillaume was a mendicant friar and the confessor of the wife of the French King Louis IX, (d. 1270) and wrote Life and Miracles (1303) in an effort to promote the canonization of the dead king. He based his book upon an actual canonization inquest that interviewed 330 witnesses to 65 posthumous miracles between 1271 and 1282. Only a fragment of the original transcript survives, but Guillaume had access to the entire document and summarized its contents. Guillaume's narrative, no less than the sermon literature that the author scrutinizes, was coloured by male, clerical prejudices and assumptions, as well as by those of the intended audiences of this literature. Acutely aware of this cultural shaping, Farmer is able to write a book built around a very important theme: that gender and socioeconomic status were integral parts of the hierarchical ideologies of the cultural élite "that imposed expectations and prejudices upon the poor."(1) As a result, she argues convincingly that "poor men and women were gendered differently from élite men and women."(2)

Guillaume's narratives of miracles provide information on the social status of 52 beneficiaries of miracles, and the places of origin of 32 beneficiaries and witnesses. Most of these people were from artisanal, labouring, and poor backgrounds. From this rather meager database, Farmer tries to elicit evidence that would push the conjugal "European household pattern" as the norm before the Black Death, and to establish that female "celibate servitude was an indefinite arrangement rather than a life-cycle phenomenon that ended with marriage when the[se women] reached their mid-or late-twenties."(27) These are provocative suggestions that challenge current historiographical assumptions, but the jury remains out on the question of whether these are anomalies (Farmer insists that they are not), or if they point to "significant numbers of people."(29) (Farmer insists that they do.) Invoking corroborating evidence from 15th-century Reims and 14th- and 15th-century England does little to confirm what still seem to be speculations.

Farmer is more convincing when she turns her attention away from empirical social history (the subject of chapter 1, "Wealth, Migration, and Poverty") to the cultural construction of gender stereotypes (chapter 2, "Adam's Curse," and chapter 4, "Eve's Curse"). Here Farmer notes the well-known division of labour articulated in Genesis — that man's lot after the Fall would be productive labour, woman's lot reproductive. From this premise medieval clerics elaborated a binary and gendered schema that associated male/mind/public and female/body/domestic. The clerical authors of the 13th and 14th centuries did just this, associating men with reason and matters of the spirit and women with irrationality, the body, and lustful appetite. This created a "blind spot," for clerical authors tended to ignore female productive labour, and have left modern historians with the difficult task of accounting for female participation in the market, and not just the household, economy. These male, clerical assumptions are important components of the ideology of poverty that Farmer is reconstructing, but she goes further. Guided by methods of recent feminists of colour and post-colonial feminists, Farmer also analyzes "medieval gender categories within the hierarchical 'grids' of difference that medieval people constructed,"(41) and finds that the clerical authors had more complex notions of gender in mind than this simple binary construct would suggest. Indeed, Farmer convincingly argues that "medieval clerical authors in fact constructed various hierarchies of masculinity, and associated lower-status men both with necessary bodily labor and with moral weaknesses arising from the body."(42) Property, in other words, was an important determinant of gendering. This assumption then allowed clerical authors to perceive men who begged as not masculine. Female gendering was more complex than the Genesis-inspired dichotomy as well, and once again, as with males, social status and property were important categories of difference for clerical authors. Propertied women, we find, could be more closely associated with matters of the mind and spirit even than lower-status males, and were poles apart from poor women who were closely tied to bodily, sexual, and irrational characteristics.

These grids of difference generated in the minds of the cultural élite a distrust of poor and especially disabled people. For the élite, the body became a sign, and poor and disabled bodies to them were a sign of the consequences of sin. Thus, surprisingly, we find (in chapter 3, "Men in Need," and chapter 5, "Women in Need") that the élite really were not significant benefactors of the poor, nor were established, formal institutions like guilds or hospitals. The true line of defense for the disabled indigent against death was informal and non-institutional — family, employers, neighbours, and friends of similar socio-economic status. Repeatedly in the narratives of the miracles recounted by Guillaume de Saint-Pathus we read of help offered to the ill, blind, lame, deaf, and mute by artisans, labouring poor, and, in the case of disabled and poor females, companions of the same sex.

Largely because of the kinds of sources available to the author, this book is less successful as social history than as cultural, but the strengths of the latter are substantial. This book cautions us from thinking too simply about gender constructs, and, most importantly in my opinion, brings property and social status to the center of the discussion about what constitute masculinities and femininities which were, Farmer convincingly argues, various and several.


James R. Farr Purdue University

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