I was appalled recently to hear a self-styled expert claim that "The Church in the Middle Ages gave women only two role models: Eve who was active and bad, and Mary who was passive and good."
With such ignorance - or conscious religious bigotry - as this, so much is wrong that it is hard to know where to start.
Perhaps it might be best to begin with what is right:
That's it.
Everything else is utter garbage.
So, moving out from these two tiny dots of truth: Eve as active! I mean, no way! In all the events involving Eve, we never once hear her own words. Everything Eve says is quoted from a man. She says nothing of her own, she chooses nothing, she does nothing except what a man has told her to do, and she obeys that without any thought at all. The snake comes along to deceive her, to talk her into eating the fruit, starts by laying out the foundations for the arguments he is going to put forward, to convince her - and finds he doesn't need any of them. Eve just does what he tells her; blindly obeying the last order given.
I think it was St Anselm who described Eve as the perfect wife for a worldly man!
Mary, on the other hand: an angel appears to her, and far from being submissive, her very first words are telling him he's being stupid. And later, at Cana, she tells Jesus to do something about the wine, he refuses, she completely ignores him and tells the servants to help. Mary submissive? I don't think so!
As another mediaeval writer put it, "Satan tells Eve what to do, and she does it; Mary tells God what to do, and he does it."
And just to confirm that this isn't uniquely English - read Dante's Divina Commedia, where Mary sees that Dante has a problem, and organises St Lucy, Virgil, Beatrice and more to sort him, entirely off her own bat. No need to consult; Mary acts entirely on her own initiative. The female saints show so much initiative and independence that when William Blake was asked to illustrate an edition of Dante, he got part way, but eventually had to give up: he just couldn't take the idea of women acting independently of men, and even lording it over men.
It might be worth pointing out that in mediaeval times Mary is not particularly fussy about who she helps; there is a story from around 1400 - just mediaeval, but only just - in which an abbess who has always been devoted to Mary discovers she is pregnant at a very embarrassing time - she'll be obviously pregnant at the bishop's next inspection. Mary takes pity and sorts things, with the unwitting involvement of a childless couple who have also been asking her for help!
This casts an interesting light on all those "the Church insisted on virginity or marriage for women" stupidities - mind you, St Non had already done that: she not only had a child out of wedlock, but refused to name the father and refused to confess it as a sin. And still got the St. title. (As did the child - but that's another story.)
So that's cleared up the Mary/Eve passive/active stupidity. What's next is the assertion that Mary and Eve were the only role models the Church offered women. This manages to be false twice over: not only are they not the only role models, but they were not offered as role models at all.
Let's begin with the "only" bit.
This really makes so little sense that it is hard even to put any meaning to it that can be checked, so let's assume that the word "biblical" has been missed out here: that the speaker assumed that the Church would only offer biblical role models - just writing it down shows how stupid it is, but heigh ho.
Even this is false.
If there is a biblical "role model" for women in the Middle Ages, it isn't Eve or Mary - it is Judith.
Judith, as I'm sure I don't need to remind my reader, was a rich widow in the city of Bethulia, which is under seige by the Assyrians, led by their general, Holofernes. While the menfolk are running round like headless chickens, Judith dresses herself up, collects her maids to attend her and walks out of the gate into the Assyrian camp. There she seduces Holofernes - but gets him so drunk that he can't actually do anything; instead he keels over stoned out of his mind. At which point Judith chops his head off, pops it in her handbag, and walks back to the city - on the way warning Holofernes's servants not to disturb him till the morning. In the morning Holofernes's dead body is discovered and the Assyrian seige collapses.
What is important to the mediaeval preachers is that Judith does it all off her own bat, on her own authority. She isn't following a man's orders, she does not seek permission before acting, she just does it.
This is the only biblical "role model" that the mediaeval Church set before women in any sense at all.
Let me repeat the Church's message to women: you don't need permission, you don't need to obey - just do it. Do what seems right to you, whatever your menfolk say or do.
So, if the Church didn't really offer women biblical examples (though I agree Judith comes close) what role models did the Church offer women? Easy. The Church offered saints.
The saints were the examples the Church offered, to male and female alike, from the earliest days. In those early days, though, the accounts of the saints were pretty simple, and pretty standardised - at least after the period covered by the New Testament. They went like this:
All very boring and predictable, but actually not that helpful as examples go, especially once Christians were no longer persecuted. Not helped either by a tendency to over-detail the tortures.
But that was just for the first few hundred years. After AD400, maybe 500, another pattern begins to creep in - but only for female saints: male saints continue with the boring story. But for women:
A good example is St Winifred. She decided to become a nun - she decided, not the church, not her father - but one day she happened to be alone in the house when a passing nobleman, Caradog,stopped to ask for hospitality. He was so struck by her beauty that he first offered marriage, then tried to rape her, and finished by cutting her head off. It rolled down into the churchyard, where her uncle, who was also the priest, picked it up, prayed for her healing, and the head miraculously reattached. (And the congregation lynched Caradog - or he dropped dead, according to different versions.) And finally, where the head had stopped rolling, a spring of healing water burst out. The spring at least is real, and still visible to this day.
For completeness, I should mention a variant.
A good example is St Elizabeth. She distributes food from her own house to the poor, contrary to her husband's orders. One day she is carrying a basket of bread (covered with a flycloth, of course) when she unexpectedly meets her husband. He demands to know what is in her basket. "Roses," she answers. "Really?" he says, and snatches the cloth from the basket. The basket is filled with roses.
These two forms are vitally different from the earlier stories - and vitally different from the contemporary stories about male saints. The woman is not being asked to give up being a Christian - only to give up the life she (not the Church) has chosen for herself. Her refusal is not to witness to her faith or protect her salvation; it is to assert her right to choose in the presence of the Spirit in her heart - not her man's heart, not her church's heart - her heart.
By giving women these role models, the Church was saying to women: you choose. You have the right to choose. Don't obey your father, don't obey your husband, don't obey your potential husband, instead obey your heart, and obey what Jesus is saying to you. Notice that there is no hint of condemnation of the women who chose differently, who chose marriage. To the Church, the woman has the right to choose, and all choices are good when made before the throne of God.
So: "The Church in the Middle Ages gave women only two role models: Eve who was active and bad, and Mary who was passive and good."?
Utter garbage. Lies and bigotry, trading on ignorance. The truth is the exact opposite.