1200 was not in the “Elizabethan period”, which was centuries later.
If your paper was about Elizabethan misogyny, either you or the professors selected the topic. Either way, there was a belief going in or it would not have been the subject of the research or the paper. There can be little doubt that if one wants to find misogyny in the writings of clerics and academicians, he’ll find it. The same would be true today.
I, too, wrote many a research paper with a point of view, and I know how it works. I get it. Want to present a point of view, and have the energy and intelligence to get evidence to support it, and you’ll succeed with the paper or the debate. One does need to be careful not to believe one’s own product overmuch, of course.
And most erotic anything is abusive of its very nature, then as now. And the women were every bit as ribald or saintly as the men, perhaps more so than now as to both.
However, if one looks at the literature of various periods (and you were talking initially about the year 1200, not the Elizabethan period) one can reasonably assume the writers are describing things fairly accurately or their work would not have been popular at the time, let alone stood the test of time. If one looks at Shakespeare, for example, (and understands well enough to know a lot of it is farcical…said for laughs) which really was written in the Elizabethan period, one does not find massive male domination or cruelty toward women. The women give as good as they get in the exchanges. They are represented as often witty, as sometimes controlling, as sometimes cruel, as often outsmarting and outmaneuvering males, as having wealth and engaging in trade. And yes, as sometimes stupid or victimized, just as sometimes the males are.
Going back a bit before the Elizabethan era, could anyone describe Chaucer’s Wife of Bath as downtrodden, poverty-stricken or lacking independence without seeming ridiculous?
Of course, those times were often brutish regardless of one’s gender. If one reads about the lives of common soldiers, landless peasants, sailors, apprentices, servitors of all sorts, debtors, people condemned to servitude, it could be a mighty tough life.