Women’s physical relationship to sacred places of worship in the late Middle Ages was governed by complicated sets of rules, employed and enforced by both ecclesiastic and civic regulations. (5) These rules dictated their experience inside a church space. These regulations, while established by the Church, were enforced and upheld by civic statutes. In Siena, for example, a 1309-10 update to the Sienese constitution forbade women near the altar during the celebration of the Divine Office. (6) The update stipulated that a violation of this law would result in a punitive fine. It can be inferred that this was perceived as a prevalent enough problem for the law to be updated to reflect the prohibition of the act. Hayden Maginnis noted that during the Middle Ages religious interest centered heavily around the Host, perhaps resulting in the congregation desiring a closer relationship to both the altar and the Eucharistic body of Christ. (7) If, as Maginnis concluded, a closer physical relationship to the altar allowed women a more substantial link to Christ’s sacrificial body, then the prohibition of this bodily intimacy would have had significant effects on the worship practices of women. The restriction would have functioned as a clear reminder of their societal and religious subordination. Sidelined and denied religious opportunities given to men, women of the congregation would have experienced worship differently than their male counterparts. These rules were influenced by ideas relating women to impurity. Menstruation was commonly viewed as a punishment from God as well as a physically unclean act. Their menstrual “afflictions” assigned women an unclean status that could put the sacrament at risk if they approached the altar. (8) Largely confined to the domestic space, attending church was often a woman’s primary exposure to the public life of the city in which she resided, one which was regulated in gendered terms.

An underlying preoccupation with sex and sexuality underscores these regulations. Moralists and theologians instructed women to avert their eyes and keep their gaze lowered to their feet, to limit the risk of eye contact with men. (9) Installation of screens or curtains, which divided the men, who typically sat on the right, and the women on the left, demonstrated the preoccupation with the power of the female gaze in sacred spaces. (10) The act of looking in the Renaissance was understood as an active process in which rays from the eyes were thought able to pierce the object of the gaze. (11) The regulation regarding the female gaze also had an inverse: women had the potential to tempt with their gaze but men were likewise prohibited from looking. Their enticing gaze gave women a certain power to ensnare and distract men, designating them as dangerous and furthering the rationale for their control within sacred spaces. (12)

The north/south division of church space was another conception that affected women’s experience and viewing within a church. Adrian Randolph wrote that the segregation of the sexes in church followed an understanding that women were aligned with the north and men with the south, as expressed in the writings of Amalarius, Sicardus, and Dante. (13) The north cardinal direction had negative connotations, as left was associated with evil. (14) In his 1280 treatise Rationale divinorum officiorum, William Durandus wrote,

“In church, men and women sit apart: which, according to Bede, we have received from the custom of the ancients…But the men remain on the southern, the women on the northern side: to signify that the saints who be most advanced in holiness should stand against the greater temptations of this world: and they who be less advanced, against the less; or that the bolder and the stronger sex should take their place in the position fittest for action: because the Apostle saith, ‘God is faithful, Who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able.’ To this also pertaineth the vision of S. John, who ‘beheld a mighty angel placing his right foot in the sea.’” (15)

Durandus rationalizes this separation by affirming the subordinate status of women: asserting men were stronger and more likely to resist temptation and evil. Although through this sectioning men and women are equidistant from the altar, the negative associations of the north and the connotations of left sustained a misogynist consideration of women’s place in church spaces. Assigning men and women to different positions in a church was not ideologically neutral. These ecclesiastic decisions, enforced by governmental bodies, indicated a preoccupation with women’s perceived sinful nature.

Female viewers of the Collegiata fresco therefore occupied a complicated frame of reference for their viewing of the Hell fresco. At first step into the sacred space, they were controlled and regulated due to patriarchal fears about their innate propensity for sin. The belief that they had an intrinsically sinful character, taught to them by harsh religious regulations, compelled women to view Hell as a cautionary tale. If they do not follow the teachings and rules of Christ and the Church in order to resist their inherently sinful natures, they would end up punished in hell, like the wicked women that suffer on the wall above them.