The medieval revival: aesthetics, capitalism and womanhood
The medieval revival: aesthetics, capitalism and womanhood
What lies below the surface of the medieval aesthetics revival? On the origins of capitalism and the increased control over women's body. It's spooky season, and what's scarier than the witch hunts?
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On a particularly tough September day in Brussels, homesick for a place only existing in my memories, I went for a walk. Under the rain, I got lost in once familiar streets and stumbled upon a small activist library. After what seemed like an eternity of pondering between books, I bought Sorcières by Mona Chollet, and Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici - and a tote bag because of course I had nothing with me but my phone and wired earphones. I had been in a witchy mood all of August, as every autumn,1 I let the occult pull me in. I didn’t anticipate the influence Federici’s words would have on me and how, after I turned the final page, I was ready to start it all over again to devour her brilliant thoughts. She laid the crucial piece of a puzzle I didn’t know was missing, I was certainly not expecting to find it there.
The Middle Ages (MA) never interested me. It was all about crusades, plagues and princesses in high towers waiting to be rescued by a knight riding a snail; it was certainly not about class struggle, the dawn of capitalism and the codification of gender roles. I believed it was a period of great ignorance, an empty era that started with the Dark Ages and ended with the Enlightenment. Mistakenly, I was sure the epoch’s ignorance and illiteracy explained the witch hunts and the gendercide that took place. But it was not right and, as I was about to read, the part of history I had been avoiding, was crucial to my knowledge of class, feminism and racism: an intersectional key to the world.
Medieval aesthetics are no stranger to catwalks, for decades, they inspired subcultures without becoming part of the mainstream. As mentioned in last week's article, Joan of Arc: feminism and the aesthetics of a martyr, Joan of Arc’s iconography inspired everyone. From Fiona Apple to Zendaya, references to the Maid of Orléans are a staple of pop culture, but it’s Chappell Roan’s looks at the VMAs that brought it home for me. Seeing her on the red carpet in that long green cape, armour boots and sword in hands, made me tick (not to mention her armoured performance). How long before we can buy cheap falconières at h&m? The medieval revival articles pile up; from chainmail decoration in Architectural Digest to medieval girl fall fashion features in Haloscope and Joan of Arc as the ‘patron saint of Gen Z’ in Polyester, there is definitely something on the surface.
More importantly, is there something below, a tangent to analyse what we, as a society, are going through? After all, cultural movements take place in a wider societal context, and I would like to believe there are no coincidences. Could all these medieval references find their roots in current social crises?
Spanning close to a thousand years, the Middle Ages was marked by strong urbanisation and population growth, the establishment of the Church as an organisation, agricultural advances, the introduction of a new form of political governance, but also climate change, wars, famine and, of course, the plague. In many ways, we are facing similar challenges as medieval societies. It is easy to draw parallels between the two eras. As put in Escaping the Internet: we are shifting. A conjecture of crises between class friction, economic and political transition, climate change, heightened racism and misogyny, and low natality.
The 14th Century started with a series of plagues and famines that put a halt to centuries of European prosperity and growth, marking the end of the high Middle Ages and the beginning of the late MA. Those calamities brought social unrest and the collapse of the social cohesion of labourers,2 and it resulted in the relegation of women to productive labour, at home. A period of profound turmoil that would last well into the Renaissance (see badly scaled timeline below).
Two distinct, yet interconnected, social events piqued my interest: the ongoing discourse about work and the place of work in our lives; and the increased control over women’s bodies in the context of declining natality. Two of the struggles also encountered by society during the late Middle Ages, at a time of transition from feudalism to capitalism and demographic change. The conjecture between the dawn of capitalism and demographic decline is, according to Silvia Federici, a key trigger element to the witch hunts and the enslavement of women.3 Let’s dig into it.
The demographic decline that ensued from the plague created a scarcity of workers, shifting the balance of power from the lords to the peasantry. Indeed, the servility inherited from Romans’ slavery had remained a burden through the MA but, it also introduced a new aspect in the lords-serfs relationship: serfs now had direct access to the means of production.4 The subsistence economy that prevailed during feudalism meant there was no need for labourers to actually work: they could live off their products. Strong solidarity between all workers and the wide access to common land (or commons) provided them with increased power, and more essentially, domestic work was shared and valued within the household and the wider community.
To regain power, the elites introduced a monetary economy and it was the beginning of the end. Suddenly only men’s work was valued as they were the only ones getting paid a salary, and domestic work was relegated to women as unvalued, free labour. The politic of enclosure added a nail to the community coffin and further imprisoned women at home. The commons were privatised, restricting workers to their (landlords) properties, and domestic chores that were done in groups were now done alone. From class identity and solidarity, society shifted to gender identity and solidarity, women were now fully second-class citizens and perfect scapegoats in the making (as is often the case with minorities).
A few tweets are going around, joking about how medieval peasants had more free time than workers under late capitalism, it hurts how accurate it is, even more so for women. The work for both men and women was harder in many cases but they benefitted from the fruit of their harvest, I, on the other hand, am still waiting for my Excel spreadsheet to provide me any type of satisfaction - but let’s not go there. There was also a strong sense of community and work, whether productive or reproductive,5 was done in group settings, as opposed to the extreme individualization of life under capitalism. Today, places where we possibly could organise as workers, such as third place, are rarefying. More and more, we must pay to access spaces that are not the home (1st place) or work (2nd place), and in economic struggles, only a few privileged can afford to spend money on unnecessaries (think pubs, museums, cafés, restaurants).
Here is where I draw the first parallel, an imaginary red string going from medieval disappearing communities to our near-extinct third places, from the introduction of free productive labour to today’s push to ‘go back to traditional gender roles’. At the intersection: a struggling economic model and scared elites thirsty for power, the removal of class solidarity via the scapegoating of minorities (migrants, people of colour, disabled, homeless, unemployed, etc) and increased misogyny.
This second parallel is crucial to understanding why feminism is becoming the scapegoat for men’s struggles.
In a capitalist system, the production of workers is critical to productivity: more workers, more products, more money. A large workforce to pick from means workers are disposable, giving them less power and thus making them less inclined to protest. Therefore, capitalists need a strong natality rate in order to accumulate more capital, which is an element absent from Karl Marx’s work and the preconditions of primitive accumulation.6 Federici noted, in her description of primitive accumulation, three missing historical phenomenons from Marx’s definition:7
development of a new gendered division of labour subjugating women and their reproductive means to the reproductive part of the workforce;
the construction of a new patriarchal order founded on the exclusion of women from paid labour, and their submission to men; and
the mechanisation of the proletarian body and its transformation, in the case of women, into machines to produce new workers.
Earlier this year, a Lancet study made the headlines after it found out that the birthrate could fall for ‘the first time since the Black Death’. Around 1580, the population started to decline in Western Europe, a drop that would last until the 17th Century, and was attributed to the plague, a weak natality rate and, of course, blamed on the unwillingness of the poor to reproduce. It’s within this context that the link between labour, population and wealth accumulation arrives on the political agenda.8 It is also, still according to Federici, at this point between the 16th and 17th Centuries that there is an intensification of the witch hunts and the introduction of ‘new disciplinary methods adopted by the State to regulate procreation and break women’s control over reproduction’. Not only were women increasingly excluded from the control over their own bodies and when to procreate, but sexuality also became regulated in terms of with whom and how to have sex.
A large part of the witch hunt was consecrated to removing women’s knowledge of contraception and abortion, so that only men, trusted by the Church and the State, could be in charge of reproduction and birth. Misogyny, via the witch hunts, was the cornerstone of this transition. Women could no longer trust each other, communities were tainted by fear and grief, all ill of society were blamed on witches - were blamed on women.9
As abortion rights were overturned in the USA, women in Western societies got a bitter reminder that nothing is guaranteed.10 For years, far-right parties have been pushing white heterosexual people to make more babies to avoid a so-called ‘great replacement’, promoting regressive policies to control women’s bodies. We are now seeing similar messages gaining traction from all sides of the political spectrum; between French president Macron calling for demographic rearmament (includes fertility testing for people over 25!), and the Giorgia Meloni’s demographic boost for Italy (to offset the great replacement), we also have alarms bell from bigoted capitalists (of course, I am talking about Elon Musk).
An increased control of sexuality and women’s bodies, tying in with a rise of misogyny.
Under the cover of a ‘revitalisation of the population’, policies to boost natality are shaping around the control of women. Fear that the social system will collapse due to a lack of workers, while at the same time criminalising homelessness and barricading borders against “hoards of refugees and immigrants” (of colours, everyone else is welcome), reeks of racism and classism, but it is also an attempt to reinforce the patriarchy and force women back into the house to perform free productive labour, subjugated to a man. Thus, hidden behind the racist ‘great replacement’ or the thin social veil of ‘who will pay for your pension’, we find the real desire to police people and prevent an uprising by scapegoating minorities over the demographic decline, and the state of the economy.
Witches were the 16th Century scapegoats. Feminists, or any women not obeying the traditional gender norms, are quickly becoming the scapegoat for 21st-century men's problems. From loneliness to higher suicide rates and lower education, feminists are blamed for it all. Rapidly, they are becoming the target of natalists and their policies: women hunted once again.
/sources + resources/
Caliban et la Sorcière, Silvia Federici, Entremonde (in French)
Why the Phrase 'Late Capitalism' Is Suddenly Everywhere, The Atlantic
Ministers face Tory revolt over plans to criminalise rough sleeping, The Guardian
Homelessness in England at highest level on record, watchdog says, The Guardian
British summer? never heard of her.
I favour the use of labourers (from ‘labour’: to do hard physical work; unskilled work) for the period rather than workers which I find connotates the Industrial era. Additionally, in French ‘labourer’ translates to ‘to plow’.
I much prefer the French ‘asservilissement’ which is closer to ‘servility’ or ‘subjugation’ of women.
Caliban and the Witch, p.39 (all quotes are translated freely)
Reproductive work, or nowadays unpaid labour, refers to housework and childcare; while productive work refers to economically productive work.
Primitive accumulation as “a concept developed in Karl Marx’s Capital and Grundrisse to designate that process which generates the preconditions of the ongoing accumulation of capital.” (Springer, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-20572-1_47)
Caliban and the Witch, p.21
Caliban and the Witch, p.155
True, men were also tried and executed for witchcraft but it was, in huge majority, women.
I am aware of the Western/European orientation of this article, although feminism must be intersectional, in this precise case I focus on Europe and the West. Witch hunts are closely linked to colonisation, but that is for another article.