Page 306 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

the natural order, men were active and domineering while women were passive and submissive. As more and more lawyers, doctors, and priests, who had been trained in universities where these notions were taught, entered society, these ideas of man’s and woman’s dif- ferent natures became widely acceptable. Increasingly, women were expected to forgo any active functions in society and remain subject to direction from males (see the box on p. 270). A fourteenth-century Parisian pro- vost commented that among glass cutters, “no master’s widow who keeps working at his craft after her hus- band’s death may take on apprentices, for the men of the craft do not believe that a woman can master it well enough to teach a child to master it, for the craft is a very delicate one.”10 Although this statement suggests that some women were in fact running businesses, it also reveals that they were viewed as incapable of under- taking all of men’s activities. Thus, fourteenth-century Europeans imposed a division of labor roles between men and women that continued until the Industrial Rev- olution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In practice, however, some women benefited from the effects of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. The loss of so many male workers in cities opened up new jobs for women, including positions as metalworkers and
Giotto, Lamentation. The work of Giotto marked the first clear innovation in fourteenth-century painting, making him a forerunner of the early Renaissance. This fresco was part of a series done on the walls of the Arena Chapel in Padua begun in 1305. Giotto painted thirty-eight scenes on three levels: the lives of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and her parents (top panel); the life and work of Jesus (middle panel); and his passion, crucifixion, and resurrection (bottom panel). Shown here from the bottom panel is the Lamentation. A group of Jesus’s followers, including his mother and Mary Magdalene, mourn over the body of Jesus before it is placed in its tomb. The solidity of Giotto’s human figures gives them a three-dimensional sense. He also captured the grief and despair felt by the mourners.
stevedores. In clothmaking, women were allowed to assume better-paying jobs as weavers. Brewing became an all-female profession by 1450. Widows also occasion- ally carried on their husbands’ shops or businesses.
Inventions and New Patterns
Despite its problems, the fourteenth century witnessed a continuation of the technological innovations that had characterized the High Middle Ages. The most extraordi- nary of these inventions, and one that had a major impact on European cities, was the clock. The mechani- cal clock was invented at the end of the thirteenth cen- tury but not perfected until the fourteenth. Because clocks were expensive, they were usually installed only in the towers of churches or municipal buildings. The first clock striking equal hours was in a church in Milan; in 1335, a chronicler described it as “a wonderful clock, with a very large clapper which strikes a bell twenty-four hours of the day and night and thus at the first hour of the night gives one sound, at the second two strikes . . . and so distinguishes one hour from another, which is of greatest use to men of every degree.”11
Clocks introduced a wholly new conception of time into the lives of Europeans, revolutionizing how people
268 Chapter 11 The Later Middle Ages: Crisis and Disintegration in the Fourteenth Century
Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy//Scala/Art Resource, NY