Gathering the Gossips

From Hermione’s claim in Euripides’s Andromache that “men of sense” should never allow their wives to visit each other to eighteenth-century condemnations of girls being raised together lest, even in the words of Mary Wollstonecraft, they inspire each other to grossness through their “bodily wit” and “intimacies,” the threat posed by communities of women has been represented primarily in terms of their speech acts. ¹ In the Middle Ages, the preoccupation with the damage done to men by “word-mad” women did not preclude medieval authorities from also considering the threatening aspects of women’s interpersonal communications. ² If, Edwin Craun asserts, women were particularly associated with transgressive speech, then “groups of female speakers were perceived as particularly potent agents of such threatening speech.” ³ The increase of artistic depictions of women’s gatherings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reflects this growing preoccupation with a battle of the sexes fought collectively throughout late medieval and early modern Europe. The preoccupation with women’s collective speech that we examine in medieval English texts (and their French sources) has analogues in German, Italian, and Iberian literature, and in genres ranging from French popular ballads to the works of major poets, like Boccaccio or the Nürnberger Meistersinger Hans Sachs. ⁴