I wrote this as an answer, but several days late...I’ve written about medieval friends and going out (“I’m a hot-blooded young nun...”) before and people have enjoyed it, so, I thought some people might be interested. :)

• If a late medieval young person, especially a girl or young woman, was having a personal crisis and couldn’t turn to her family, where would she look for support?

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Great question!

I'm going to focus on western European women and use an expansive definition of "young person." While some of the options might seem obvious--does it really require sources to say, "medieval people had friends"?--looking at the evidence can show us the dynamics of how different relationships operated in the Middle Ages. How women met their friends; the activities they did; did medieval writers concern-troll women's friendships; and so forth.

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Pets

Ownership of animals in the Middle Ages might conjure up ideas of hunting dogs and ploughing oxen. But even though it's not necessary for anyone familiar with the story of Odysseus and Argos (or, frankly, who has ever owned a dog), there is some fascinating evidence for the emotional connection between people and pets in medieval culture--yes, even hunting dogs. Political and proto-feminist author Christine de Pizan, famously, insisted that she always be illustrated with her fluffy little white dog.

The well-known hunting text Master of Game recommends that the lord hire a young groom to sleep in the kennel with the dogs, with the human-dog bond accustoming the dogs to interaction with people in general. Medical and veterinary texts from Islamic Egypt (I know, out of context, but I love this) try to forbid hunting dog owners from allowing their dogs on the nice cushions or furniture--and especially, explicitly, from sleeping in bed with their humans.

But the best evidence for people’s reliance on animals for actual emotional support, not just companionship, comes from a 13th-century text aimed at religious women. The Ancrenne Wisse is ostensibly a guide for anchoresses (women who elected to spend the rest of their lives in a small cell attached to a church, praying). One of its rules is that the anchoress must have no pets, especially dogs. The only animal she is permitted is one cat, and even then, only to be a mouser. The point is that the emotional bond between anchoress and animal must not distract her from her focus and reliance on God.

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Friends

Medieval girls and young women had informal opportunities and formal institutions to help them make friends. In hagiographies (special biographies of saints), we hear about the future saint shunning playtime with other girls to go pray in church, or to watch wistfully processions of nuns and beguines passing by their house in a thriving town. Joan of Arc testifies at her trial that she used to go to an iconic tree in her village to dance and sing with other girls (she notes that she sang much more than she danced).

Work also provided young people with casual chances to make friends. Rural girls might be responsible for tending flocks in the fields, like Christina Mirabilis did; in Spanish court cases, we hear a lot about groups of girls and mixed-gender groups herding their animals collectively. Girls working in towns, primarily as domestic servants, might interact with other servants in their household, female and male; or meet up with male apprentices. Presumably prostitutes living in organized/legal brothels would have formed friendships with each other, but sex workers are one set of voices from the Middle Ages that we just do not have.

Monastic communities present a bleedingly obvious way that the Church provided a formal infrastructure for young women’s friendships (but I’ll talk about this more later under “special circumstances”). For the vast, vast, vast majority of medieval women who did not take up a “religious life”—a technical term encompassing life in a formal convent or informal religious community—their parish was the nexus. Parishes/parish churches hosted a range of organizations known as guilds or confraternities that were religious/social (not the profession-based economic guilds). A “maidens’ guild” was fairly common. Barbara Hanawalt identifies specific cases where a parish’s maidens’ guild participated in social events that set up groups of girls against groups of boys (the point, obviously, being to provide a self and morality-friendly structure for the genders to interact and meet potential marriage partners; but the means to this end involving plenty of same-sex interaction).

And there are plenty of cases where geographic proximity—neighbors—set up situational friendships and maybe more. With homebrewing a common activity, women whose families were in a period of economic hardship would often brew more and sell it to neighbors, especially from within their own homes as a temporarily tavern; the role of extra-ale-provider would cycle among women in a community. Where Christians had not kicked Jewish citizens out of their homes, Jewish and Christian women would swap clothes and breastfeeding duties, definitely activities that show mutual intimacy and trust.

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Teachers and Mentors

By the fifteenth century, a handful of places in the medieval west offered formal opportunities for girls’ education outside convent schools (which were still generally reserved for future nuns). Nuremberg had civic schools that offered basic education for girls, including vernacular (German) literacy; there are also some brief records of parish schools that taught girls and boys from England. Most educational opportunities outside the home for middle-class (and rarely, lower-class) girls, however, were less established. In cities, a woman might host several girls of nearby families for daily instruction--essentially a teacher and students, but without the infrastructure of a “school.” In many cases, the teacher was a singlewoman or widow who had taken up a religious life outside a convent.

We don’t hear a ton about these arrangements, unfortunately, including a lack of loving testimonies to the close student/mentor relationship. Other educational opportunities, on the other hand, give us quite the extensive picture, so I think it is fair to extrapolate over to the case of informal group teachers.

Noble and aristocratic girls who did not have access to a convent school likely got their education from private tutors. In the late Middle Ages, this was absolutely the case for that tiny, tiny minority of upper-class girls and young women in Italy and Germany whose fathers acquired a humanist teacher and education for their daughters (which, as Lisa Jardine has shown, was still a subject- and time-restricted education and scholarly engagement for women the way it never was for men). (Christine de Pizan was Italian.) In a few of these cases, however, we do have some surviving letter correspondence showing a mentorship relationship between a young humanist woman scholar and her teacher or another member of the early “republic of letters”—or a relationship of intellectual equals and friends. No, that does not mean we have a series of letters of Isotta Nogarella asking Lauro Quirini how to deal with cramps. But the multiple dynamics of surviving letters between humanist women and men demonstrate the sorts of relationships that did open doorways to emotional support—particular in the letter correspondence that was not thought worthy to save.

Holy Women

For some young women, one source of support and advice less rooted in long-standing personal relationships was holy women! The most famous (and rightly so) example is Hildegard of Bingen. But a standard—though often overlooked—trope in late medieval women’s hagiography is their service as a counselor to lay people. Typically this means visitors to a monastery who are drawn there by the woman’s wide reputation as holy and conveying advice from God. Gertrude of Helfta and Mechthild von Hackeborn, both visionary authors and nuns at Helfta, are reputed to have been popular counselors inside and outside their convent community.

Another option presented itself largely in central/northern Europe—England, the Holy Roman Empire, Poland-Lithuania. In the Book of Margery Kempe, Kempe seeks advice from visiting an anchoress (like above) widely identified as visionary theologian Julian of Norwich. Hagiographies of hermits do show their services as a local oracle were fairly standard, despite the idea of an anchorhold being to “bury” the anchoress as “dead to the world.” Paradoxically, though she could not leave her enclosure and she only devoted a very small portion of the day or week to it, an anchoress like Julian, Margareta Contracta (Margaretha von Mageburg), or Dorothea von Montau could be one of the central social institutions of her town.

12th century abbess, theologian, visionary prophet, first named composer in Western history Hildegard of Bingen demonstrates another major way that holy women acted as life advisors to a privileged set of lay and cloistered women (and men, for that matter): letters! Hildegard’s surviving letter collection is stocked with letters to or from people across Germany and other parts of Europe, giving or asking for advice on questions of deep emotional and life-course matters. She advises a lot of people on whether their deceased children or husbands are in purgatory, paradise, or elsewhere (in the surviving letters, the news is always good). She also dispenses wisdom very often to current nuns and monks who have been promoted to positions of more authority in their communities.

Week 84

 

By the third week of May, after the return of the Italian delegation to Paris had failed again to bring back the expected, awaited or just hoped for recognition of the Italian Adriatic aspirations, the Italian political system begun to reveal what an external observer could retroactively interpret with ease as signs of the incumbent political crisis – the one leading to the rapid affirmation of Fascism within a few years. There were voices, and rumors, news left unconfirmed and undenied, incomplete opinions repeated over and over until their pieces barely held together, censorship had returned to strike down words, sentences and paragraphs, men in arms awaited demobilization, laborers were on strike, the "Bolshevik stain" was spreading, politicians prepared for the upcoming national elections and argued about the introduction of proportional system – men confidently shared irrational hopes and even more irrational fears, ready to trust either the absolutely material or to believe only the purely immaterial. The crisis may have had many causes – all of which have been more or less thoroughly investigated and described with a more or less precise terminology – war fatigue, inflation, patriotic disillusionment, socialist maximalism, financial troubles, inability to introduce at last the much desired reform of progressive imposition, culmination of a process of detachment of the middle classes from the liberal system and its values, increased pressure of the nationalist forces and great industrial groups anxious to prolong a climate of international tension which justified their overgrown, encumbering presence, etc.

Many of these symptoms were not unique to Italy – other nations which arguably resisted the crisis with a larger degree of success encountered similar problems at the end of the Great War – and perhaps this can be explained, as has been noted, with the fact that Italy was structurally and even ideologically weaker, less resilient to the infection due to her compromised liberal system, so that a similar exposure may have led to a more severe affliction. But what infection?

Rather than attempt to define one main cause – or even to rank the principal ones according to their relative impact – it seems worth observing (to me at least) that there is a remarkable interlude (at least one year) between this period and the initial stages of the affirmation of the fascist movement as a decisive force in the Italian political system, and that therefore we should take some effort to avoid conflating the many different and often conflicting facts of the crisis into one "crisis", a concept which can always be made appear to provide a convenient explanation as long as we are willing to stretch its temporal boundaries and to leave its content somewhat vaguely defined in an effort to imply all of the above and much more. Nor does this concept provide us with a clear way to solve the many issues that the various interpretative approaches had attempted to answer: for instance, should we regard Fascism as a part of the crisis (or even as main element of the crisis itself) or as an attempted (and arguably failed) solution of the crisis?

In fact it appears that all these interpretations hold some merit as they help illustrate the various facets, disentangle the many threads of the central crisis – thus, for instance, the presence of fascist violence was a symptom, a cause and an answer to the crisis, for instance contributing to the crisis of authority of the state while at the same time operating as an attempt to "react" and solve this crisis of authority. Taking within the "Fascism-reaction" narrative, the form of solution adopted by the bourgeois system to prevent the revolutionary crisis originated by the affirmation of the socialist forces and within the traditional liberal criticism that of a reflection of the same maximalistic tendencies which had infected the masses and made the survival of the liberal system impossible – or, on different terms, becoming expression of a "moral disease" which affected first and foremost the middle and lower bourgeois strata, the administrators and functionaries, unable to uphold their traditional values without the recourse to verbal and physical violence. As these interpretations coexist (we may regard some as better, or more accurate) for us now, they also coexisted and competed with each other as interpretative means in their development and since their origin, and so did those themes and first ideas which informed the understanding and then the action of the men experiencing the crisis. It might therefore be useful to attempt to reconstruct them as they grew and expanded, using our interpretations as instruments of research, or better as the end of the many threads which we can follow back in time, through their development, until the point where they connect with and rather become the historical matter.

The main weakness in this process is that it loosens the fabric of its subject to the point where it may allow for the "historical matter" to fall apart in a thousand shreds and particles, impossible to hold together and make sense of, unless one is able to keep track of all threads – or most of them at least – which connected them. And thus it naturally builds an inclination to reframe the crisis as a sort of progressive distemper, a softening of the social formations and of the relations which informed the action and the interpretation of contemporaries, and their transformation and replacement with new formations and new interpretations – a legitimate approach, maybe, but also possibly a consequence of, and difficult to distinguish from the inability to locate the "core truth" of the historical matter.

Then, again, knowledge of the truth is not required for those who make history; and perhaps it should not be regarded as a necessary element in writing about it. After all, objectively speaking, people are wrong most of the time, and most of the time they don't take this fact as a persuasive argument against their existence.

In his Guerra Diplomatica - a composite memoir of his direct experience of a few pivotal moments of the Italian diplomatic trajectory across the Great War, including his presence at the crucial April 1919 sessions of the Council of Four, as secretary (and additional interpreter) for Prime Minister V.E. Orlando – the career diplomat Luigi Aldrovandi-Marescotti had a few interesting anecdotes to share. One of them may serve as introduction.

As it is known, the Delegations of the Dual Monarchy met alternatively every year either in Vienna or in Budapest. When they met in Budapest the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the highest ranking functionaries from the Ballplatz [the seat of the Foreign Ministry of A.H.] moved there. Which happened in May of 1914 as well.

The same split occurred for the main diplomatic missions as well, with one part, led by the chief, moving to Budapest, while the rest remained in Vienna. It was understood that the main diplomatic matters were to be discussed in Budapest by the chief of the delegation, who was in contact with the Foreign Minister and with his closest collaborators, and the lesser matters by the chief advisory or by the first secretary left in Vienna.

The Consulta [the seat of the Italian Foreign Ministry] was obviously informed of this fact. One day I receive a telegram from Rome with instructions to ascertain the presence and number of Austro-Hungarian officers in Albania, where the situation had been murky for some time. Since it was a minor issue, and given that the telegram had been addressed to Vienna, instead of Budapest were those of more urgency were destined, I went to the Ministry to take informations.

What I was told was different than what was later told in Budapest to Avarna [Giuseppe, the Italian Ambassador to Vienna, from 1904 to 1915] who took notice of the fact and wrote me back with a prayer not to discuss political matters in Vienna, since this could "create confusion and equivocations in the nature of what happened, detrimental to the proper functioning of our service".

Back to Vienna from Budapest, Avarna and I spoke again of this small incident, and I remarked to him that, anyways, in between the more or less reticent statements of Vienna and Budapest, in between the black and white told here and there, we had come to know the truth.

To which Avarna replied: "and you think it's useful to know the truth?"