“She’s his wife. She has no choice in the matter.”
Excerpt…
Milano, fall, 1324
“She lied to us!” Alaric said. “We owe her nothing!”
“Alaric!” Jaufre’s voice cracked like a whip. “She bargained herself for us, traded herself for our freedom. There was nothing to stop him from killing us and burying us there. No one would ever have known.”
Alaric’s gaze dropped and a tinge of color might have crept up the back of his neck. Still, he said, “We don’t even know where he took her.”
“We have a name,” Jaufre said. “Ambroise de L’Arête.”
Alaric fired up again. “And they’re nobility! You saw the circlet he wore on his helmet!”
Shasha, startled, said, “Is this true?”
“And they were my lord and my ladying it all over the place,” Alaric said, triumphant.
Jaufre’s face was hard. “It doesn’t matter. She sacrificed her freedom for our own. She didn’t want to go with him, Alaric. Surely you saw that for yourself.”
“She’s his wife,” Alaric said. “She has no choice in the matter.”
Dana sez—
The more research I did on the Middle Ages the more astonished I was by the freedom at least some women had to do what they wanted. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror is about nobleman Enguerrand VII de Coucy, who married Isabella, the daughter of Edward III of England, who you will meet before the end of this book. Isabella was no shrinking violet and pretty much did as she wanted, including divorcing Enguerrand.
But yes, of course, for the most part women were still regarded as property, whose degree of freedom of choice depended on the men in their lives. Isabella was a king’s daughter. Lesser nobility had fewer choices and the peasantry none at all. Here, it’s 1324, twenty-five years before the bubonic plague reduces the population of Europe by a third, which drastically reduced the amount of available labor, upended social norms and gave rise to the guilds. Forty years later Chaucer would write The Wife of Bath. The times they were a’changing.
But before that there were always outliers, as history has shown us time and again there always are. Johanna is one such.
Chatter Silk and Song A Distant Mirror Silk and Song silk road The Wife of Bath
