Over the course of this study, various ‘types’ of femininity – as defined in the introduction, and as represented within the sources – will be examined. Firstly, therefore, it is necessary to establish a feminine ‘norm’, where ‘norm’ is defined as ‘a standard or pattern of social behaviour that is accepted in or expected of a group’. The group in this instance is women. The primary aim of this chapter is therefore to establish whether there was a coherent image of such a ‘feminine norm’ represented by early Irish authors, an image of how ‘ordinary’ women were viewed as behaving, and how they were expected to behave. These are women who were not particularly powerful, not particularly sinful, not particularly saintly. This is, in some senses, a difficult aspect to define: the writers of the sources themselves, perhaps unsurprisingly, do not explicitly describe the people about whom they are writing as ‘normal’. The ‘ordinary’ does not necessarily require a label, for the very reason that it is ordinary. These are, instead, women who are largely unlabelled: they are simply feminae or mulieres, in Latin, or mná, in Irish. They are women as groups, not women as individuals. Over the course of this chapter, therefore, the major source base will be the legal texts – normative sources whose purpose was, at least in theory, to provide an image of the way in which the writers believed society should work, including the most ordinary of people. A key question, however, and the one which will arise first, is whether the authors of those surviving sources do in fact depict women as innately separate from men, whether the most ordinary women were, nevertheless, distinct from ordinary men on the basis of their biological sex.

In the study of gender, as noted in chapter one, ‘masculinity’, across western medieval Europe, has been considered to require the twin attributes of sexual and military prowess. In the Carolingian empire, the swordbelt was an overt symbol of masculinity: its removal signified that a person was ‘unmanned’. So simple a set of distinguishing characteristics has not been found for femininity, although certain roles have been viewed as specifically appropriate to women. Christine Fell has argued of Anglo-Saxon England that the terms sperehand and spinelhealf indicate a gendered distinction between male and female roles ‘as those of the warrior or hunter and of the cloth maker’.