Excerpts from The Distaff Gospels

The Distaff Gospels is a late-fifteenth century collection of popular folklore from Belgium and the north of France. The fictional story or “frame” of this work is that a group of women has forced a man to making a written record of their evening meetings, during which they spin flax fibers into thread and comment as an older woman “evangelist” recounts her “gospel” or collection of sayings about topics like marriage, childbirth, health, and magic. At the end of each meeting, the fictional male scribe mocks the women and complains about the ridiculous things they have said.

The anonymous author of The Distaff Gospels, who created this fictional story as a way of collecting and writing about the popular (that is, lower-class) beliefs, clearly was an educated man of the elite who viewed these people and their ideas with both amusement and contempt. The text is a parody that uses the reversal of established norms as a basis for its humor. For example, the women speaking in the text are called educated although women at this time were considered to be inherently less rational than men and were barred from higher education. The women also argued that a man should do what a woman wants when the anonymous author, and his readers, clearly believed that the opposite was true.

Despite being written to mock women and people of lower social classes generally, The Distaff Gospels nevertheless records those classes’ popular beliefs, something that not many premodern texts do.

Link to the source: Excerpts from The Distaff Gospels