13th century CE

The 13th century CE serves as a revealing moment in Simone de Beauvoir’s account of women’s history: religious and literary culture could elevate women’s symbolic prestige while leaving their social position subordinate. The period’s idealization of the Virgin Mary and the influence of noblewomen as patrons did not, in her analysis, overturn the structures that denied women reciprocal authority.

Religious and Cultural Prestige

The chapter describes a religious shift from the figure of Eve, associated with sin, toward the Virgin Mary, the Mother of the Redeemer. By the 13th century CE, Mary’s following had grown so powerful that the author remarks that God seemed to have been made woman. This development supported a mysticism of woman: femininity acquired heightened religious significance, but that symbolic elevation did not make women social or political peers of men.

Court life also created conditions in which noblewomen could influence cultural production. Leisure in the châteaux encouraged conversation, politeness, and poetry, while women of letters such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, her daughter Marie of France, and Blanche of Navarre attracted and patronized poets. This cultural activity gave women new prestige, first in the south of France and then farther north. Its scope, however, remained tied to the resources and leisure of noble households rather than establishing a general change in women’s status.

Courtly Love and Marriage

The account treats courtly love as a contested development, not as straightforward evidence of women’s emancipation. The origins of the tradition are uncertain: explanations connect it variously to relations between lords and young vassals, Cathar beliefs and devotion to Mary, or the transformation of religious love into secular love. It is likewise uncertain whether formal courts of love ever existed.

Literary ideals and marital practice diverged. Courtly love was often represented as platonic, and Chrétien de Troyes largely excluded adultery from his romances, apart from the love of Lancelot and Guinevere. In practice, however, the feudal husband could function as both guardian and tyrant, and a wife might seek a lover outside marriage. The author interprets courtly love as compensation for the harshness of official marital customs, rather than as proof that those customs had been transformed.

The Limits of Historical Change

The 13th-century examples belong to a wider argument against treating cultural admiration as equality. Women could be honored as sacred figures or celebrated as patrons and inspirations while remaining outside the reciprocal relations of power that the author identifies as the basis of social authority. Symbolic importance and concrete independence were not the same thing.

The chapter therefore places the period within a history of continuity as well as change. Religious devotion and aristocratic cultural life opened particular forms of prestige to some women, but marriage continued to organize relations between men through women, rather than securing women’s standing as autonomous subjects. The 13th century CE marks a visible elevation of feminine ideals, not a decisive break with women’s subordination.