Medieval Friendships: No Girls Allowed

What is friendship for? In medieval Europe, elite male writers saw it as an intense bond reinforcing virtuous behavior—something only possible between two men. As medievalist Alexandra Verini writes, two very different women writers challenged this idea, insisting that friendship existed among women and expanding the view of what that friendship might achieve.

Verini notes that medieval scholars drew on ancient sources for their understanding of friendship. One important one was Cicero’s De Amicitia, written in 44 BCE, which describes friendship as a positive relationship based in sameness: “He who looks upon a true friend, looks, as it were, upon a sort of image of himself.”

To Cicero and those who followed him, friendship was possible only for men. As French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote in the sixteenth century, “the ordinary capacity of women is inadequate for that communion and fellowship which is the nurse of this sacred bond.”

The first woman writer Verini examines, Christine de Pizan, was a commissioned author working in the French royal court. In 1405, she published a text called The Book of the City of Ladies. In it, Pizan herself appears as a character who encounters three female figures, Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, and works with them to build an allegorical city, drawing on the stories of virtuous women from history.

The other writer, Margery Kempe, was born to a middle-class family in England and had fourteen children before receiving mystical visions that led her to devote her life to God. The Book of Margery Kempe, a dictated autobiography written twenty years after the City of Ladies, tells of her visions, which often involve female saints, and also of her many pilgrimages.

Verini argues that both Pizan and Kempe echo Cicero’s notion of friendship as a vehicle for mutually reinforcing the virtue of two people—Pizan in her imagined relationship with figures representing wholesome qualities and Kempe in both her visions of saints and her encounters with real women.

Yet, Verini adds, both writers diverge from the idea of friendship as a mirror, instead showing how women with different skills and strengths can collaborate on shared projects. This is visible in Pizan’s idea of drawing from the different virtues embodied in the allegorical figures and, perhaps, in the production of her book. Some scholars believe that she worked with female artists to illuminate the text.

Meanwhile, Kempe recalls various instances of mutual support, as when wealthy women invited her to their home for meals, in exchange for which Kempe offered them spiritual comfort. Other times, she received something without offering anything in return, as when she sought and received guidance from Julian of Norwich regarding the authenticity of her visions.

“In guides to male friendship, each member of the pair must give exactly what he receives,” Verini writes. “In Margery’s life, however, there are many instances of uneven reciprocity in which she gives more than she gains and vice versa, creating a system in which no women’s resources are depleted.”

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