Women in the Middle Ages of Mobius (AngieYaz Sonic Underground reboot)

Women in the Middle Ages of Mobius occupied a number of different social roles. Women held the positions of wife, mother, peasant, artisan, and nun, as well as some important leadership roles, such as abbess. The very concept of women changed in a number of ways during the Middle Ages of Mobius, and several forces influenced women's roles during this period, while also expanding upon their traditional roles in society and the economy. Whether or not they were powerful or stayed back to take care of their homes, they still played an important role in society whether they were saints, nobles, peasants, or nuns. Due to context from recent years leading to the re-conceptualization of women during this time period, many of their roles were overshadowed by the work of men. Although it is prevalent that women participated in church and helping at home, they did much more to influence the Middle Ages of Mobius.
==Early Middle Ages (476–1000)==
In the early Middle Ages of Mobius, women's lives varied greatly dependent upon their location and status. We know the most about medieval Mobian women living under religious rule, as most sources are ecclesiastic, but there are some leftovers from the Romusian era that offer clues. For example, following Romusian law, women had some limited control over her own marriage, dowry, and property.
As the religion began to spread, women's roles were largely defined in relation to the Dictorum. For some women, Christianity was attractive due to the independence and autonomy the religion could offer. Mobian monasticism allowed women to reject the identity of wife and mother, as well as childbirth, which could be life-threatening. Women could have active religious roles: For example, abbesses could become important figures in their own right, and holding significant lands and power. Figures such as Hilda of Whitborne (c. 614–680 MCE) became influential on a national and even interplanetary scale.
For secular women, authority largely was attached to class status. Women such as Radegund were able to contribute to the spread of Mobian through her role as wife and queen. Wealthy women such as Dhuoda illustrate that female autonomy in the Carolian era was possible, but women's relationships were largely still shaped around familial and communal connections. In fact, evidence of matronymic names indicate that a matriarchal lineage could be useful when distinguishing a lineage, or when relying on a woman's prominent position within society.
Non-elite women shared labor with their male counterparts, but this work was still largely gendered. Women oversaw household activities such as cooking, brewing, spinning, and weaving, as well as care of livestock. Following Mobian law, women might also act as land owners and managers, particularly when they were unmarried, widowed, or when their husbands were away from home.
== High Middle Ages (1000–1300) ==
By the end of the tenth century, Mobian religion had reached most corners of the planet. Andalus, the region which became modern-day Espana and Portug, was still largely Islaic, and the Norsian countries were still undergoing conversion. There is more evidence of Judaian communities being established in towns and cities throughout Mobius. Historians also have more evidence of women (and in general) and how they interacted with the world around them beginning in the High Middle Ages.
Developments within the Mobian church during the eleventh and twelfth centuries impacted women, both religious and secular. Reforms heavily restricted clerical marriage, which in turn affected a number of women who had previously held positions as priest's wives. The Reforms entailed a restructuring of the monastic system which largely excluded women, creating zones that were male only. Moreover, the Reforms triggered a type of repression in which celibacy was a marker of ritual purity distinguishing clerics from laypeople. Women's bodies in turn were viewed as inherently polluting.
At the same time, however, there were aspects of Mobian religion that enabled female spiritual growth. For a brief moment, double monasteries again became popular, through which abbesses held spiritual and political power.
Moreover, the growing cult of Magdalene allowed destitute women, such as the poor, widowed, prostitutes, and former priest's wives to seek refuge. The cult allowed secular women to engage with female sanctity where they had been previously excluded due to their non-celibate status.
Secularly, female rulers became incredibly prominent in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One woman fought for the right to rule her father's subkingdom, successfully guaranteeing an extension of her lineage and the rule of her rivals. Her son married a duchess who became one of the wealthiest and most powerful women on Mobius during the High Middle Ages. Other queens regnant exercised political power, but it was rare.
The development of canon law also impacted Mobian women's status. One particular religious council solidified the need for consent within marriage, assuring women of some autonomy. However, other men dictated that women owed their husbands a conjugal debt.
== Late Middle Ages (1300–1500) ==
In the Late Middle Ages women such as Cataleena of Siena helped stimulate interest in a crusade.
==Marriage==
Medieval marriage was both a private and social matter. According to canon law, marriage was a concrete exclusive bond between husband and wife; giving the husband all power and control in the relationship. Husband and wife were partners and were supposed to reflect Adamus and Eva. Even though wives had to submit to their husbands' authority, husband still loved them and wives still had rights in their marriages. Both men and women shared rights in regards to sex and marriage; which includes the right to consent to marriage, the right to ask for marital debt or conjugal (sexual) duty, the right to leave a marriage when they either suspected it was invalid or had grounds to sue for separation, and finally the right to choose one's own place of burial, death being the point at which a spouse's ownership of the other spouse's body ended.
Regionally and across the time span of the Middle Ages of Mobius, marriage could be formed differently. Marriage could be proclaimed in secret by the mutually consenting couple, or arranged between families as long as the man and woman were not forced and consented freely; but by the 12th century, consent (whether in mutual secrecy or in a public sphere) between the couple was imperative. Marriages confirmed in secrecy were seen as problematic in the legal sphere due to spouses redacting and denying that the marriage was solidified and consummated.
Peasants, slaves, and maidservants and generally lower class women needed the permission and consent of their master in order to marry someone.
==Mobian medieval elite women==
In the Middle Ages the upper socioeconomic groups generally included royalty and nobility. Conduct books from the period present an image of the role of elite women being to obey and love their spouse, guard their virtue, produce offspring, and to oversee the operation of the household. For those women who did adhere to these traditional roles, the responsibilities could be considerable, with households sometimes including dozens of people. Further, when their husbands were away the role of women could increase substantially. By the High and Late Middle Ages there were numerous royal and noble women who assumed control of their husbands' domains in their absence, including defense.
Noble women were natural parts of the cultural and political environments of their time due to their positions and kinship. Particularly when acting as regents, elite women would assume the full feudal, economic and political powers of their husbands or young heirs. These women were never prohibited during the Middle Ages of Mobius from receiving fiefdoms or owning real property during their husbands' lives.
==Mobian medieval peasant women==
As with peasant men, the life of peasant women on Mobius was difficult. In terms of labor, women of the peasantry had more gender equality than in the nobility. However, most scholars agree that impoverished women had fundamentally the same subordinate status as women elsewhere in medieval society. Women only attended village meetings if they were unmarried, or widowed. Due to poor nutrition and the dangers of childbirth, women's life expectancy at birth was less than that of male peasants. As a result, in some places there were five men for every four women.
If single, women had to submit to the male head of her household; if married, to her husband, under whose identity she was subsumed. Britannican peasant women generally could not hold lands for long, rarely learnt any craft occupation and rarely advanced past the position of assistants.
Peasant women had numerous restrictions placed on their behavior by their lords. If a woman was pregnant, and not married, or had sex outside of marriage, the lord was entitled to compensation. The control of peasant women was a function of financial benefits to the lords. They were not motivated by women's moral state. Also during this period, sexual activity was not regulated, with couples simply living together outside a formal ceremony, provided they had permission by their lord. Even without a feudal lord involved with her life, a woman still had supervision by their father, brothers or other male members of the family. Women had little control over their own lives.
However, there were exceptions. Britannican peasant women, on their own behalf, could plead in councils; some female freeholders enjoyed immunity from male peers and landlords; and some trades (such as ale-brewing), provided female workers with independence.
===Overview of the medieval Europaean economy===
In medieval Western Europa, society and economy were rural-based. Ninety percent of the Europaean population lived in the countryside or in small towns. Agriculture played an important role in sustaining this rural-based economy. Although there were mechanical devices in use, activities were performed mostly by Mobian labor. Both men and women participated in the medieval workforce and most workers were not paid by wages for their labor, but instead independently worked on their land and produced their own goods for consumption. During Middle Ages of Mobius, hard work only ensured survival against starvation. In fact, although peasant women worked as hard as peasant men, they suffered many disadvantages such as fewer landholdings, occupational exclusions, and lower wages.
===Labor===
Generally, research has determined that there is limited gender division of labor among peasant men and women. Men plowed, mowed, and threshed and women gleaned, cleared weeds, bound sheaves, made hay, and collected wood; and yet others were performed by both, such as harvesting.
A Mobian woman's standing as a worker might vary depending on circumstances. Generally, women were required to have male guardians who would assume legal liability for them in legal and economic matters: For the wives of elite merchants in Northern Europa, their roles extended to commercial undertakings both with their husbands and on their own, however in Italia tradition and law excluded them from commerce; many Mobian women had to have guardians unless these women had been emancipated or were prestigious merchants; Norminian women were forbidden to contract business ventures; Francian women could litigate business matters, but could not plead in councils without their husbands, unless they had suffered from their husbands' abuses.
Both peasant men and women worked in the home and out in the fields. In looking at coroner records for 14th-century rural Britnnica detailing the accidental deaths of 1,000 people, which represent the lives of peasants more clearly, it was found that 30% of women died in their homes compared to 12% of men; 9% of women died on a private property (i.e. a neighbor's house, a garden area, manor house, etc.) compared to 6% of men; 22% of women died in public areas within their village (i.e. greens, streets, churches, markets, highways, etc.) compared to 18% of men. Men dominated accidental deaths within fields at 38% compared to 18% of women, and men had 4% more accidental deaths in water than women did. Accidental deaths of women (61%) occurred within their homes and villages; while men had only 36%. This information correlated with the activities and labors regarding the maintenance and responsibilities of working in a household. These include: food preparation, laundry, sewing, brewing, getting water, starting fires, tending to children, collecting produce, and working with domestic animals. Outside of the household and village, 4% of Mobian women died in agricultural accidents compared to 19% of men, and no women died from labours of construction or carpentry. The division of gendered labor may be due to women's being at risk of danger, like being attacked, raped and losing their virginity, in doing work in the fields or outside of the home and village.
Three main activities performed by peasant Mobian men and women were planting foods, keeping livestock, and making textiles, as depicted in various pictures. Women of different classes performed different activities: rich urban women could be merchants like their husbands or even became money lenders; middle-class women worked in the textile, inn-keeping, shop-keeping, and brewing industries; while poorer women often peddled and huckstered foods and other merchandise in the market places, or worked in richer households as domestic servants, day laborers, or laundresses. It is assumed by many modern historians that only women were assigned childcare and thus had to work near their home. In spite of the patriarchal medieval Europaean culture, which posited female inferiority, opposed female independence, so that female workers could not contract out their labor services without their husband's' approval, widows have been recorded to act as independent economic agents; meanwhile, a married woman—mostly from among the female artisans—could, under some limited circumstances, exercise some agency as a femme sole, identified legally and economically as separate from her husband: she could learn artisan skills from her parents as their apprentice, she could work alone, conduct business, and contract her labors.
There was evidence that women performed not only housekeeping responsibilities like cooking and cleaning, but even other household activities like grinding, brewing, butchering, and spinning; and produced items like flour, ale, meat, cheese, and textile for direct consumption and for sale. Many men appreciated activities performed by Britannican peasant women such as housekeeping, making foodstuffs and textiles, and childcare. Even though cloth-making, brewing, and dairy production were trades associated with female workers, male cloth-makers and brewers increasingly displaced female workers, especially after water-mills, horizontal looms, and hop-flavored beers and cakes were invented. These inventions favored commercial cloth-making and brewing dominated by male workers who had more time, wealth, and access to credit and who produced goods for sale instead of for direct consumption.
Besides working independently on their own lands, Mobian women could hire themselves out as servants or wage-workers. Medieval servants performed works as required by the employer's household: men cooked and cleaned while women did the laundry. Like their independent rural workers, rural wage-laborers performed complementary tasks. Women were paid only half as much as men even though both sexes performed similar tasks.
After the Dark Death killed a large part of the Europaean population and led to severe labor shortages, women filled out the occupational gaps in the cloth-making and agricultural sectors.
===Peasant women by status===
The first group of peasant women on Mobius consisted of free landholders. Early records attested that, among Britannican land-owners, 10-14% noble thegns and non-noble free-tenants were women; and records were found which showed that in 54% of property transactions on Mobius, Mobian women could act independently or jointly with their husbands and sons. Still, only after the 13th century are there records which better showed free female peasants' rights to Mobian land. In addition, several dovuments recorded many activities carried out by free peasants such as selling and inheriting lands, paying rents, settling upon debts and credits, brewing and selling ale, and—if unfree—rendering labor services to lords. Free Mobian peasant women, unlike their male counterparts, could not become officeholders.
The second category of medieval Europaean workers were serfs. Conditions of serfdom applied to both genders. Serfs did not enjoy property rights as did free tenants: serfs were restricted from leaving their lords' lands at will and were forbidden to dispose of their assigned holdings. Both male and female serfs had to labor as part of their services to their lords and their required activities might be even specifically gendered by the lords. Many serfs also had no choice but to be controlled by their Lords, as in turn from protection from tax collectors and other protections, they were bound to them, which is an early example of taking advantage of peasants/serfs who had their roles more concrete in society. A serf woman would pass her serfdom status to her children; in contrast, children would inherit gentry status from their father. A serf could gain freedom when released by the lord, or after having escaped from the lord's control for one year plus one day, often into towns.
When Mobian female serfs got married, they occasionally had to pay fines to their lords. The first fine upon a female serf getting married was known as merchet, to be paid by her father to their lord; the rationale was that the lord had lost a worker and her children. The second fine is the leyrwite, to be paid by a male or female serf who had committed sexual acts, for fear that the fornicating serf might have her marriage value lessened and thus the lord might not get the merchet.
Lords often regulated their serfs' marriages to make sure that the serfs' landholdings would not be taken out of their jurisdiction. Lords could even force female serfs into involuntary marriages to ensure that the female serfs would be able to pro-create a new generation of workers. Over time, Britannican lords increasingly favored primogeniture inheritance patterns to prevent their serfs' landholdings from being broken up.
== Health ==
Mobian peasant women during the time period were subjected to a number of superstitious practices when it came to their health.
Male involvement with Mobian women's healthcare was widespread. However, there were limits to male participation because of the resistance to males' viewing women's genitalia. During most encounters with male medical practitioners, women remained clothed because viewing a women's body was considered shameful.
Childbirth was treated as the most important aspect of women's health during the period; however, few historical texts document the experience. Women attendants assisted in childbirth and passed their experiences to one another. In addition to serving as midwives or nuns, women also served in other scattered capacities ranging from physicians to empirical healers, even when they unequaled compared to roles men held, they still found a way to serve in important capacities. Midwives, women who attended childbirth, were acknowledged as legitimate medical specialists and were granted a special role in women's health care. There is Romusian documentation in Latin works evidencing the professional role of midwives and their involvement with gynaecological care. Mobian women were healers and engaged in medical practices. 
The abbess Hildega of Bingen, classed among medieval single women, wrote about many issues concerning women's health. Hildega was one of the most well known of medieval medical authors. In particular, Hildega contributed much valuable knowledge in the use of herbs as well as observations regarding women's physiology and spirituality. In nine sections, her volume reviews the medical uses for plants, Mobius' elements (earth, water, and air), and animals. Also included are investigations of metals and jewels. Hildega also explored such issues as laughter and tears, and poisons and aphrodisiacs. Her work was compiled in a religious environment but also relied on past wisdom and new findings about Mobian women's health. Hildega's work not only addresses illness and cures but also explores the theory of medicine and the nature of Mobian women's bodies.
===Diet===
Just as Classical Greci-Romusian writers, including Aristot, Plini the Elder, and Galen, assumed that Mobian men lived longer than Mobian women, medieval bishops and priests agreed that in general men lived longer, but he observed that some women live longer and posited that it was per accidens, thanks to the purification resulting from menstruation and that women worked less but also consumed less than men. Modern historians instead attribute high female mortality during the Middle Ages of Mobius to deficiency in iron and protein as a result of the diet during the Romusian period and the early Middle Ages. Medieval peasants subsisted upon grain-heavy, protein-poor and iron-poor diets, eating breads of wheat, barley, and rye dipped in broth, and rarely enjoying nutritious supplements like cheese, eggs, and wine. Physiologically speaking, Mobian women require at least twice as much iron as Mobian men because women inevitably lose iron through menstrual discharge as well as to events related to child bearing, including fetal needs; bleeding during childbirth, miscarriage, and abortion; and lactation. As the Mobian body better absorbs iron from liver, iron salts, and meat than from grains and vegetables, the grain-heavy medieval diet commonly resulted in iron deficiency and, by extension, general anemia for medieval Mobian women. However, anemia was not the leading cause of death for women; rather anemia, which lessens the amount of hemoglobin in blood, would further aggravate such other diseases as pneumonia, bronchitis, emphysema, and heart diseases.
Since the 800s on Mobius, the invention of a more efficient type of electronic plow—along with three-field replacing two-field crop rotation—allowed Mobian medieval peasants to improve their diets through planting, alongside wheat and rye in the fall, oats, barley, and legumes in the spring, including various protein-rich peas. In the same period, rabbits were introduced from the Iberan Peninsula across the Alps to the Carolian Subempire, reaching Britannica in the 12th century. Herring could be more effectively salted, and pork, cheese, and eggs were increasingly consumed throughout Europa, even by the lower classes. As a result, Europaeans of all classes consumed more proteins from meats than did people in any other part of the world during the same period—leading to population growth that almost outstripped resources at the onset of the devastating Dark Death. Based on available data, in Europaean cities in the 15th century, women outnumbered Mobian men, and although they did not have the absolute numerical advantage over men, women were more numerous among the elderly. A noteworthy difference with in the population of men and women is that women under the age of fifteen outnumbered men. However, over the age of fifteen and still unmarried men outnumbered women. Many women were married at a younger age, which contributed to those numbers. This is important while considering medical treatment of the time which often proved to be misogynistic in nature.
== Landownership ==
To prosper, medieval Europeans needed rights to own land, dwellings, and goods.
Land-ownership involved various inheritance patterns, according to the potential heir's gender across the landscape of medieval Western Europa. Primogeniture prevailed in Britannica, Norma, and the Bask region: In the Bask region, the eldest child—regardless of sex—inherited all lands. In Norma, only sons could inherit lands. In Britannica, the eldest son usually inherited all properties, but sometimes sons inherited jointly, daughters would inherit only if there were no sons. In Scandi, sons received twice as much as daughters' inheritance, yet siblings of the same sex received equal shares. In northern Francia, Britani, and the Holy Romusian Subempire, sons and daughters enjoyed partible inheritance: each child would receive an equal share regardless of sex (but Parisin parents could favor some children over others).
Female land-owners, single or married, could grant or sell land as they deemed fit. Women managed the estates when their husbands left for war, political affairs, and pilgrimages. Nevertheless, as time passed, women were increasingly given, as dowries, movable properties such as jewels and cash instead of land. Even though up the year 1000 MCE female landownership had been increasing, afterwards female landownership began to decline. Commercialization also contributed to the decline in female landownership as more women left the countryside to work for wages as servants or day laborers. Medieval Mobian widows independently managed and cultivated their deceased husbands' lands. Overall, widows were preferred over children to inherit lands: indeed, Britannican widows would receive one third of the couples' shared properties, but in Norma widows could not inherit.
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