giant agapic axe wound

"Imbued with land-centered biases, the mutable category of kaizoku signified both the perceived alterity of and potential criminality of groups of sea people. From ancient times through the sixteenth century, Japanese accepted the possibility of female as well as male pirates. In 869, the Japanese court recorded the capture of four pirates, two women and two men. The Kamakura bakufu’s 1232 Jōei Formulary (Goseibai shikimoku) marked the family specifically as a locus of piratical activity and assumed that wives might both know of and participate in such activities. However, by limiting the wife’s punishment to the confiscation of holdings, Kamakura lawmakers may have assumed that women participated in a lesser capacity than men.

Borrowing from ancient precedents, Kamakura law, and other sources, the Muromachi bakufu and sixteenth-century warlords condemned piracy as acts in which whole communities engaged or at least of which they possessed knowledge. It was thus a crime that obliged authorities to hold entire villages responsible.

In the late medieval period, women participated in both the violent and nonviolent aspects of sea-lord bands. A glance around the world reveals that there was nothing anomalous about women pirates in this period. In late medieval Japan, violence included the protection businesses at the heart of attempts by family-based bands attempting to assert maritime lordship. For example, in 1315, a “woman, Tokumame” was arrested for perpetrating an “evildoer toll barrier [akutō sekisho]”—for intercepting ships trying to enter Hyōgo port and charging them protection money without the permission of the proprietor.

Evidence from land-based Japanese warfare suggests an ongoing, if decreasing, involvement of women in late medieval sea-lord mercenary bands in a military capacity. Through the fourteenth century, women actively participated in battles as “comrades” in equal status to, though in fewer numbers than, men. Rates of female participation in warfare are thought to have decreased after the fourteenth century when changes in inheritance practices reduced women’s autonomy. However, in order to survive the endemic warfare of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, some women turned to fighting. They worked as infantry, accountants, quartermasters, and laborers and were conscripted as sex workers. Facing capture and enslavement, they might fight to the death in defense of their castles and homes.

The social acceptance of women fighting at sea in late medieval Japan may have been encouraged by popular belief in Jingū, the empress who supposedly led conquests on the Korean Peninsula and gave birth to the god Hachiman. Medieval Japanese enshrined Jingū at sites throughout the Inland Sea world and believed her to be a deity protecting Japan. In the summer of 1419, one court diarist reported several manifestations of Jingū in response to a Korean attack on Tsushima. The diarist recorded a report from the Kyushu Regional Governor (Tandai) in which Jingū led Japanese to victory in a battle:

“At the most difficult time of the battle, something miraculous occurred. Four large ships with streaming brocade banners arrived unexpectedly out of nowhere. It seemed that their leader was a woman with immeasurable power. She boarded the enemy ships and, grappling with the enemy, threw three hundred of them into the sea to drown.”

Despite the biases inherent in land-based ethnographies of the sea, accounts of the practices of boat people in the late medieval littoral suggest that types of violence in the maritime world may have been gendered as a result of a division of labor in which women dove and men sailed ships. 1510 description of “pirates” (kaizoku) given by a Japanese informant to the Korean court describes how

“they normally sail with women and children aboard their ships when making raids. . . .They are adept at archery and skilled at wielding swords. They dive deep into the ocean and drill holes in ships.”

If the divers point to women, the archers and sword wielders may point to men."

"In the beginning there were a few women in France who braved the wrath of the Roman church, broke through social barriers, and went on the stage – maybe because they wanted to, maybe because they had to, maybe out of serendipity. We have no way of knowing. What we have known since 1888 is that a woman named Marie Ferré, or Fairet, actress and acrobat, was contracted to Antoine de L’Esperonnière’s troupe in 1545 in Bourges.” Ferré was the wife of Michel Fasset, a bateleur, or street entertainer, who lived in Normandy and was not present when the contract was signed. Given that circumstance, Ferré was permitted to sign for herself, but with the stipulation that if her husband did not approve, the contract would be void. She agreed to travel with L’Esperonnière and perform the “antiquailles de Rome” or other “histoires, morales, farces et sobressaults,” that is, histories, moralities, farces, and acrobatics. In return she was to be nourished and lodged and to receive the sum of 12 livres tournois per year.

This contractual arrangement is not what we might have expected from what we know of the professional theatre later on in seventeenth-century France; Ferré is to be an employee of L’Esperonnière, not a sharer in the troupe’s income. The contract does, however, require her to share any gifts she receives of money or clothing with Gaillarde, the wife of the director and, presumably, also a performer. Marie Ferré is to be allowed to keep whatever deniers, small change, she receives as a tip after a private performance, provided that L’Esperonnière has first received her share of the earnings.

The information in this contract can be amplified by an act of association signed the previous year, 1544, in Paris by members of a troupe led by Jehan Anthoine, a document that forces us to deprive Ferre´ of her title as the first known professional actress in France. Although her given name is not included, “Anthoine’s wife” will be permitted to perform if her husband agrees and, unlike Ferré, she can share in the profits, but only if everyone in the troupe consents to it. Both documents confirm that in the early years of professional theatre companies in France, women’s participation was affected by the civil status of all married women, who were normally restricted from signing contracts and other legal agreements. Throughout the ancien régime, most documents concerning the various theatrical troupes were signed by the men, sometimes by the unmarried women, and sometimes by the married women with their husbands’ permission, although many variables influenced who signed what. The first extant document signed by an actress after the Ferré contract is an act of association of the troupe of Mathieu Lefebvre in 1608. Lefebvre’s wife, Marie Venière, signed after being authorized to do so by her husband.

(...) Returning to the late Middle Ages, while professional actresses were performing their secular farces, histories, and moralities, a few amateur actresses also appeared in various mystères, miracles, and passions. The best-known reference to a woman on stage is probably the famous description of the 18-year-old daughter of Didiet, a glassmaker in Metz, who played St. Catherine of Siena in a privately funded production in 1468. She learned 2,300 lines of text, spoke them perfectly, and gave such a lively and touching performance that she delighted the audience and made several people cry. What’s more, one Henry de Latour, a gentleman, was so impressed he fell in love with her and married her. Besides this Cinderella story, the first one known of a stage-door Romeo, we have various references to girls and women performing in miracles at Valence and Romans, in a Christmas play at Toulon, and in passion plays at Grenoble, Valenciennes, Mons, Châteaudun, and in Dauphiné. Perhaps more telling, however, is evidence that women also participated in the performance of at least one of Jean Louvet’s Mystères, written for the Paris Confrérie de Notre Dame de Liesse. The manuscript of Adrianus, comte de Flandres, et sa femme, surpris de brigands – more a histoire than a mystère, at least until the miraculous appearance of Our Lady who saves the day – was produced in 1538 and includes a cast list in Louvet’s hand with indications of who played some of the roles. Our Lady was performed by Marie Le Charron, probably the wife or daughter of Maître Pierre Le Charron l’aîné, one of the masters of the confraternity. Even more unexpected, however, is the information that the leading female character, a countess and wife of the title character, was played by “ma bonne,” that is, Louvet’s maid. Unfortunately, this is the only cast list included in the manuscript, but there is no good reason to believe that this performance was anomalous."

#100Days100women Day 4: Josephine Baker, talented, beautiful, smart & brave.

Roller Printed Day Dress

c. 1815

The Hal Hartley collection

Crabtree and Evelyn Sea Shell Soap

1990