Gender and Status Competition in Pre-modern Societies (Studies in the History of Daily Life 800-1600, 10) 9782503596327, 2503596320

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Acknowledgements
Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb
Part I: Practices
Practices: Introduction
Marta Ameri
Jonas Liliequist
Women, Seals, and Power in Prehistoric Iran and Central Asia
Exaequatio and aemulatio
Regulation of Elite Female Status Competition in Mid-Republican Rome
Lewis Webb
Manly Virtues, Emotions, and Scars
Competition among Italian Renaissance Soldiers through Bodily Practices
Giulia Morosini
Shame and Boastfulness in Early Modern Italy
Showing off Masculinity and Exposing Sexual Submission in Class and Age Competitions
Umberto Grassi
‘I Am as Honest a Man as You’
Gender and Conflicts about Status and Honour in Early Modern Sweden
Jonas Liliequist
Practices — Reflections and Concluding Remarks
Jonas Liliequist
Part II: Performances
Performances: Introduction
Martha Bayless
Jealousy, Gender, and a Moralist’s Mission in Early China
Yiqun Zhou
Early Medieval Board Games
Issues of Power and Gender
Martha Bayless
The Social Circulation of Grief
Status Competition, Mourning, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century China
Martin W. Huang
Just a Humble Petitioner of a Saint?
Devotion as a Strategy for Prestige in Depositions of Fourteenth-Century Italian Canonization Processes
Sari Katajala-Peltomaa
Performances — Reflections and Concluding Remarks
Martha Bayless
Part III: (Re)presentations
(Re)presentations: Introduction
Lewis Webb
Coniunx et sacerdos
Livia as Widow and Priestess of Divus Augustus
Lovisa Brännstedt
Double Martyrdom, Double Crown
Virgin Martyrs and Fourth-Century Ascetic Hierarchies
Sissel Undheim
A Competitive Fantasy Figure and his Female Conquests
ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa
Julia Bray
Hélisenne de Crenne Challenging Male Mastery
Translating Virgil’s Aeneid in the French Sixteenth Century*
Britt-Marie Karlsson and Sara Moding
(Re)presentations — Reflections and Concluding Remarks
Lewis Webb
Index of Subjects
History of Daily Life
(800–1600)

Citation preview

Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF DAILY LIFE (800–1600) Volume 10 General Editor Gerhard Jaritz, Central European University Editorial Board David Austin, University of Wales Lampeter Christian Krötzl, University of Tampere Svetlana Luchitskaya, Russian Academy of Sciences Anu Mänd, University of Tallinn Daniel Smail, Harvard University Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies

Edited by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb

F

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

© 2021, Brepols Publishers n. v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2021/0095/245 ISBN 978-2-503-59632-7 E-ISBN 978-2-503-59633-4 10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.125286 ISSN 2565-8212 eISSN 2565-9561 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgements 8 Introduction 9 Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb Part I Practices Practices: Introduction Jonas Liliequist

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Women, Seals, and Power in Prehistoric Iran and Central Asia Marta Ameri

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Exaequatio and aemulatio 43 Regulation of Elite Female Status Competition in Mid-Republican Rome Lewis Webb Manly Virtues, Emotions, and Scars 79 Competition among Italian Renaissance Soldiers through Bodily Practices Giulia Morosini Shame and Boastfulness in Early Modern Italy 109 Showing off Masculinity and Exposing Sexual Submission in Class and Age Competitions Umberto Grassi ‘I Am as Honest a Man as You’ 125 Gender and Conflicts about Status and Honour in Early Modern Sweden Jonas Liliequist Practices — Reflections and Concluding Remarks Jonas Liliequist

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Part II Performances Performances: Introduction Martha Bayless

165

Jealousy, Gender, and a Moralist’s Mission in Early China Yiqun Zhou

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Early Medieval Board Games Issues of Power and Gender Martha Bayless

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The Social Circulation of Grief 209 Status Competition, Mourning, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century China Martin W. Huang Just a Humble Petitioner of a Saint? 227 Devotion as a Strategy for Prestige in Depositions of Fourteenth-Century Italian Canonization Processes Sari Katajala-Peltomaa Performances — Reflections and Concluding Remarks Martha Bayless

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Part III (Re)presentations (Re)presentations: Introduction Lewis Webb

251

Coniunx et sacerdos 255 Livia as Widow and Priestess of Divus Augustus Lovisa Brännstedt Double Martyrdom, Double Crown Virgin Martyrs and Fourth-Century Ascetic Hierarchies Sissel Undheim

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A Competitive Fantasy Figure and his Female Conquests ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa Julia Bray

299

Hélisenne de Crenne Challenging Male Mastery Translating Virgil’s Aeneid in the French Sixteenth Century Britt-Marie Karlsson and Sara Moding

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(Re)presentations — Reflections and Concluding Remarks Lewis Webb

333

Index337

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1. Plan of Shahr‐i Sokhta26 Figure 1.2. Grave 132inf showing the location of seal MAI 7152 (13) at the wrist of the deceased28 Figure 1.3. Distribution of seals in tombs at Shahr-i Sokhta by sex of tomb owner29 Figure 1.4. Materials of the stamp seals found in the Shahr-i Sokhta cemetery30 Figure 1.5. Distribution of motifs by material on Shahr-i Sokhta seals31 Figure 1.6. Distribution of motifs on seals (stamp and cylinder) by sex31 Figure 1.7. Plan of the House of the Stairs showing find spots of sealings33 Figure 1.8. Examples of impressed sealings from the House of the Stairs35 Figure 1.9. Examples of seals from the House of the Stairs.36 Figure 5.1. ‘En man hängd med rep i galgen’ (A man hanged by the rope on the gallows). Uppsala University Library, MS B68, fol. 141r. Illustration to Tjuvabalken (The section on theft) fifteenthcentury manuscript of Magnus Erikssons Landslag.129 Figure 5.2. ‘Draufskona’, Uppsala University Library, MS B68, fol. 114v. Illustration to Högmålabalken (the section on capital crimes) in a fifteenth-century manuscript of Magnus Erikssons Landslag.134 Figure 11.1. Agnes. Vetro dorato, from the Vatican Museums.289 Figure 11.2. Thesebius’ sarcophagus. Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst.289 Figure 11.3. From the procession of virgin martyrs, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna.291 Figure 11.4. From the procession of male saints, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna.291

Acknowledgements

The idea for this volume started with an international workshop organized by Umeå Group for Premodern Studies (UGPS) in November 2015 with financial support from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Umeå University Faculty of Arts, and Umeå Centre for Gender Studies (UCGS). We would like to thank our sponsors for their generous financial support.

Martha Bayless, Jonas L iliequist, and  L ewis W e bb

Introduction

Sine certamine gloria non potest comparari. Without competition, glory cannot be compared.1

The general theme of the volume is gender and status competition. Historical research on gender is vast and definitions of the concept manifold. Gender is used here to refer to historical notions of supposed natural differences in character between the sexes, underlying cultural and legal notions of manhood and womanhood. The volume’s central question is how gendered practices, performances, or (re)presentations have been used as a means for status competition. This constitutes a new and original approach to historical studies. A lot has been said in gender studies about female subordination, patriarchal power, and the constructions of gendered norms and identities, but less about gender and status, and even less about gender and status competition.2 Studies have, of course, focused on types of competition or conflict that are in fact gendered, though that aspect of the material has not always been the primary focus. War and societal violence, perhaps the most visible forms of conflict across history, are typically gendered male.3 Female methods of status competition have also garnered attention, from the stereotypical, such as beauty, to the less expected, such as the 1920s American women’s craze for the game of mahjong, marketed as elite in a way that positioned these women



1 Scholiasta Gronovianus B on Cicero, In Verrem, ii.1.3 = Ciceronis, ed. by Stangl, p. 343. 2 Notable exceptions include Joye and Le Jan, eds, Genre et compétition; Weikert and Woodacre, eds, Gender and Status; and Stern, The Secret History of Gender. 3 E.g. Van Wees, Status Warriors. Martha Bayless    is Professor of English and Folklore at the University of Oregon (USA) Jonas Liliequist    is Professor Emeritus of History at Umeå University, Sweden Lewis Webb    is a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Oxford. Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 9-13 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126139

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as superior in status to the Chinese originators of the game.4 But there is still enormous scope for analysis of the many ways that gender intersected with status competition across history, and a wealth of insight to be gained. Following Max Weber, a person’s or a group’s status is understood here to be ‘an effective claim to social esteem’ based on lifestyle, education, and ancestral or occupational prestige. Such status is often expressed in connubium, commensality, appropriation of privileged opportunities for acquisition or abhorrence of certain kinds of acquisition, and in various status group traditions.5 Another word for ‘status’ is ‘prestige’, which will be used here as well. Status is thus hierarchical and competitive by nature. In historical research a broad range of issues, from dress and etiquette to gesture and horsemanship, have been studied as attributes and representations of status and social position.6 Performance and symbolic communication, rather than competition, have been the main focus in such studies. Status as an object of rivalry and exercise of power, on the other hand, has most typically been treated in macro-historical studies of state formation and the consolidation of royal power.7 A classic example is Norbert Elias’s foundational study of the French court society.8 In his study Elias combines micro-sociological analyses of etiquette and ceremonies with macro-historical analyses of power shifts in society at large. Aristocrats compete for status at court, but the scene is entirely controlled by the king and status is but an instrument of absolutist power. Indebted and pacified, formerly independent aristocrats were trapped at Versailles to compete and dispute over matters of etiquette and ceremonies. Although praised for insisting on the significance of status in early modern society, Elias’s perspective has been strongly criticized for being static and one-dimensional. In his study of the French court during the reign of Louis XIV, Giora Sternberg uses ‘status interaction’ as a key concept in purpose to cover the multiple perspectives of contesting actors, stakes, and strategies as well as negotiations and effects on society.9 Recent studies recognize that status is fragile and ‘not something which you simply have and keep’,10 but requires constant reproduction through (re)performance, (re)assessment, recognition, acknowledgement, and (re)confirmation.11 Competition has a more specific but not necessarily limited analytical range. The study of competition and rivalry has been divided into the study of gaining an objective, in which prevailing over others is merely an incidental outcome,

4 E.g. Snook, Women, Beauty, and Power; Heinz, ‘Performing Mahjong’. 5 Weber, Economy and Society, pp. 305–06. 6 Blockmans and Janse, eds, Showing Status; Braddick, ed., The Politics of Gesture; Raber and Tucker, The Culture of the Horse. 7 Clark, State and Status; Crawford, The Fight for Status; Clark, Distributing Status. 8 Elias, The Court Society. 9 Sternberg, Status Interaction. 10 Jehne, ‘The Senatorial Economics of Status’, p. 191; Webb, ‘Gloria muliebris’, pp. 9, 35–40. 11 Webb, ‘Gloria muliebris’, pp. 9, 35–40.

i nt ro d u ct i o n

and the study of striving for superiority, in which there is no fixed end.12 Status competition clearly belongs in the latter category, as there is no overt object to be gained, and status must be continually shored up; thus the game is ongoing. Key dynamics in such status competition include escalation, regulation, exclusion, and rejection.13 These efforts underlie studies that ostensibly focus on another aspect of interpersonal manoeuvring, for instance the uses of humour in the English court of the twelfth century.14 The struggle for advantage has formed a part of most cultures for the millennia of recorded human history, forming one important facet of human behaviour, one that is often understood in opposition to the creation of community. Competition can certainly divide competitors and communities, but it can also ‘display shared values and encourage a sense of community’,15 that is, sociability can be effected through competition. These factors are an intrinsic part of human interaction, and have been studied, for instance, even as components of gossip, a practice that seeks both to build community and to give the gossiper a status advantage over the gossip target.16 The role of this kind of interpersonal intrigue has been increasingly recognized as a potent social force.17 Indeed, competition has long been recognized as having a powerful socializing effect, especially where two or more parties compete for the favour of another.18 Vital preconditions for status competition are the ‘comparison and comparability of competitors’, as well as ‘a consensus about its rules and conditions’.19 Competition could be both positive and negative. Status competition in a positive sense is a struggle for superiority in some domain, a competition for the intangible and volatile resource of elevated social status. Negative competition or shaming is the process by which a person gains superiority by questioning and degrading another’s social status, human value, or gender appearance. These various features of status competition ensure that it has catalysed social growth and conflict in numerous societies. A basic premise for this study is the omnipresence of status and status competition across culture and time. The ambition has been to collect studies covering a broad range of cultures, time periods, and research disciplines. The aim is to point to similarities and differences across time and culture, not in the strict sense of a comparative approach but more heuristically, as inspiring examples for further research. To accomplish this, contributions have been selected according to the following three aspects: practices, performances,

12 Van Wees, ‘Rivalry in History’, pp. 2–3. 13 Van Wees, ‘Rivalry in History’, p. 3. 14 Jones, Laughter and Power. 15 Damon and Pieper, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 16 Dunbar, ‘Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective’; Jaeger and others, ‘Who’s Up on the Low Down’. 17 E.g. Feely and Frost, eds, When Private Talk Goes Public; Schein, ‘Used and Abused’. 18 Simmel, ‘Soziologie der Konkurrenz’, p. 1012. Cf. Van Wees, ‘Rivalry in History’, p. 6; Damon and Pieper, ‘Introduction’, esp. p. 4. 19 Hölkeskamp, Reconstructing the Roman Republic, pp. 106, 103.

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and (re)presentations that constitute the subthemes and structure of the volume. Each part starts with an introduction of the chapters and ends with concluding remarks and reflections. A large-scale overview of such practices, illustrated by detail from societies ranging from prehistoric Iran to early modern Sweden, will, it is hoped, offer comparative material for reflection, a recognition of the many and ingenious means by which humans have sought to gain advantage in interpersonal relations, and the ways in which gender has influenced and complicated these efforts.

Works Cited Primary Sources Ciceronis orationum scholiastae, ii: Commentarios continens, ed. by Thomas Stangl (Leipzig: Freytag, 1912) Secondary Studies Blockmans, Willem P., and Antheun Janse, eds, Showing Status: Representation of Social Positions in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999) Braddick, Michael J., ed., The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives, Past and Present, 203, Issue Supplement, 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Clark, Samuel, State and Status: The Rise of the State and Aristocratic Power in Western Europe (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995) ———, Distributing Status: The Evolution of State Honours in Western Europe (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016) Crawford, Michael J., The Fight for Status and Privilege in Late Medieval and Early Modern Castile, 1465–1598 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014) Damon, Cynthia, and Christoph Pieper, ‘Introduction’, in Eris vs. aemulatio: Valuing Competition in Classical Antiquity, ed. by Cynthia Damon and Christoph Pieper (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 1–25 Dunbar, Robin I. M., ‘Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective’, Review of General Psychology, 8 (2004), 100–10 Elias, Norbert, The Court Society (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006) Feeley, Kathleen A., and Jennifer Frost, eds, When Private Talk Goes Public: Gossip in American History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan) Fisher, Nick, and Hans van Wees, eds, Competition in the Ancient World (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2011) Heinz, Annelise, ‘Performing Mahjong in the 1920s: White Women, Chinese Americans, and the Fear of Cultural Seduction’, Frontiers, 37.1 (2016), 32–65 Hölkeskamp, Karl-Joachim, Reconstructing the Roman Republic: An Ancient Political Culture and Modern Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)

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Jaeger, Marianne E., Anne A. Skleder, and Ralph L. Rosnow, ‘Who’s Up on the Low Down: Gossip in Interpersonal Relations’, in The Dark Side of Close Relationships, ed. by Brian H. Spitzberg (Mahwah: Erlbaum, 1998), pp. 103–17 Jehne, Martin, ‘The Senatorial Economics of Status in the Late Republic’, in Money and Power in the Roman Republic, ed. by Hans Beck, Martin Jehne, and John Serrati (Brussels: Latomus, 2016), pp. 188–207 Jones, Peter, Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) Joye, Sylvie, and Régine Le Jan, eds, Genre et compétition dans les sociétés occidentales du haut Moyen Âge (ive-xie siècle) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018) Raber, Karen, and Treva J. Tucker, The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline, and Identity in the Early Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) Schein, Sylvia, ‘Used and Abused: Gossip in Medieval Society’, in Good Gossip, ed. by Robert F. Goodman and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), pp. 139–53 Simmel, Georg, ‘Soziologie der Konkurrenz’, Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 14 (1903), 1009–23 Snook, Edith, Women, Beauty, and Power in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Stern, Steve J., The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) Sternberg, Giora, Status Interaction during the Reign of Louis XIV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Van Wees, Hans, Status Warriors: War, Violence and Society in Homer and History (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1993) ———, ‘Rivalry in History. An Introduction’, in Competition in the Ancient World, ed. by Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2011), pp. 1–36 Webb, Lewis, ‘Gloria muliebris: Elite Female Status Competition in MidRepublican Rome’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Gothenburg, 2019) Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) Weikert, Katherine, and Elena Woodacre, eds, Gender and Status in the Medieval World (= Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques, 42.1 (2016))

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Part I

Practices

Jonas Li liequist

Practices: Introduction

This section deals with competition in social and institutional settings following internalized repertoires of values and norms in doing and sayings. The section starts with a chapter by Marta Ameri on female status and competition in a settlement six millennia back in time in today’s south-eastern Iran. Excavations of an extensive graveyard show that both women and men were buried with seals typically associated with the management of resources in early economies. However, the great majority of seals are found in women’s tombs and located in positions at the deceased’s wrist or pelvis, where they would have been clearly visible, which suggests that they were also status markers and thus possible objects for competition. Moving from prehistoric Western Asia to mid-republican Rome, Lewis Webb studies how prohibitions against the conspicuous display of gold, purple, expensive jewellery, dresses, and vehicles by women fomented immense discontent and opposition. The reaction reveals a strong inclination among married elite women to compete for status on their own terms. Far from being a simple by-product of the husband’s social position, married elite women’s successful competition for status was of vital importance in increasing the social prestige of their husbands and families as well. Thus Roman elite women’s protests and collective action against the prohibitions were supported by their male relatives. Emotional and bodily practices of status competition among Italian Renaissance soldiers is the topic in the following chapter by Giulia Morosini. Based on biographies of lives and deeds of the condottieri, Morosini shows how status competition was guided by the sophisticated mobilization and management of different emotional states communicated through actions, gesture, and face. The soldier’s body was the central site for acquiring this emotional skill through continuous military training to endure pain and display manly military virtues. Early modern Italy and the republic of Lucca is the scene for Umberto Grassi’s study of status competition in the performance of sexual acts between men. Male same-sex practices could be tolerated by local society as long as hierarchical class and age boundaries were not transgressed, with socially established men taking the active role in sexual acts with youths of lower status. Starting from a spectacular case where tables were turned, Grassi shows how Jonas Liliequist    is Professor Emeritus of History at Umeå University, Sweden.

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these conventional rules could be exploited by young men penetrating older men of higher status as a competition for male prestige and proof of virility. The section ends with a chapter by Jonas Liliequist on the ways competition and conflicts about status were interwoven with notions of gender and honour in early modern Sweden. Drawing on examples from disputes about the seating order in churches, refusals to drink to each other, joking relations turning antagonistic, and authority conflicts related to the household, it is argued that competition and conflicts about status could easily slide into more serious and sometimes fatal conflicts about honour. One

Marta Ameri, ‘Women, Seals, and Power in Prehistoric Iran and Central Asia’ Two Lewis Webb, ‘Exaequatio and aemulatio: Regulation of Elite Female Status Competition in Mid-Republican Rome’ Three Giulia Morosini, ‘Manly Virtues, Emotions, and Scars: Competition among Italian Renaissance Soldiers through Bodily Practices’ Four Umberto Grassi, ‘Shame and Boastfulness in Early Modern Italy: Showing off Masculinity and Exposing Sexual Submission in Class and Age Competitions’ Five Jonas Liliequist, ‘Gender and Conflicts about Status and Honour in Early Modern Sweden’

Marta Am eri

Women, Seals, and Power in Prehistoric Iran and Central Asia

In the 1930s, Father Antoine Mostaert, a Catholic missionary in the Ordos region of Inner Mongolia, reported that the local people excavated metal seals from graves and elsewhere and that, although ‘they know nothing of their history, [they] wear them on their girdles, especially the women, and use them with a lump of mud to seal up doors’.1 While these practices may have seemed unusual to a European priest at the beginning of the twentieth century, the use of seals to safeguard both household and institutional goods has long been associated with the management of resources in early economies.2 In fact, although the earliest publications of the cross-shaped metal seals discussed by Mostaert interpreted them as significant remains of the Nestorian Christian communities that first reached these areas in the fifth century ce,3 excavations carried out in Central Asia from the 1970s onward have proven conclusively that these can be dated as early as the late third millennium bce. More recent research also suggests that the Mongolian women who tied these ancient seals to their belts, where they could be seen, and used them to impress lumps of mud to lock doors, to control access to certain goods, were also continuing a long-standing tradition of women displaying and performing control over resources. This tradition of using the display and performance of control over resources to enact and represent social status can be traced back to the fourth and third millennia bce in Iran and Central Asia, where evidence from tombs and settlements gives us insight into how some women may have worn and used seals to express their status and economic power.

1 Moule, Christians in China before the Year 1550, p. 264. 2 See for example Ameri and others, Seals and Sealing. 3 Saeki, The Nestorian Documents and Relics in China, pp. 423–25. Marta Ameri    teaches Art History at Colby College, Maine, USA, where her research focuses on seals as markers of administrative practice and/or identity in the Ancient World. Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 19-42 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126140

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In recent years, scholars who study ancient economies have sharpened their focus on both the role of women within these networks and on the use of seals in their administration. The recognition that women were active participants in ancient economies, both on a domestic and on a wider level, has led to a reconsideration of the roles they played in early societies. At the same time, the vital role that seals play in both commerce and identity has led to the increasing centrality of the study of seals and sealing techniques in understanding ancient cultures. Yet, until recently, little attention has been paid to the relationship between sex and seal ownership and/or use. Or rather, because control over resources is associated with social and economic power, it has generally been assumed that men were responsible for the process of administrative sealing while women, who produced many of these resources, remained powerless in their management. The archaeological data, however, tells a different story. Evidence from multiple third- and second-millennium bce cemeteries in Iran and Central Asia shows that women were buried with significant wealth. In these cemeteries, most of the seals and other luxury materials found in tombs where the body could be sexed were found in women’s tombs. This distribution of seals and other prestigious materials in tombs has been taken as evidence that women played a significant social role at these sites and may have shared power and responsibilities with men.4 The fact that women are buried with richer artefacts provides some insight into how men and women may have competed for visible wealth and social status in death. However, burial data provides little insight into the form that social relationships and management of resources took in daily life. For this we have to turn to the evidence provided by the rest of the archaeological record. It is the link between materials found in graves and their use in everyday life that allows us to try to understand the relationships, power dynamics, and divisions of labour between men and women in preliterate Iran and Central Asia. While the vagaries of archaeological excavation mean that it is often difficult to pair artefacts found in burials with their functions in daily life (from which they have been intentionally removed), the fact that seals can leave traces — in the form of impressions — that extend beyond their physical form allows them to exist on two parallel planes. The comparison of seals found in tombs with seal impressions found in settlements can provide insight into the different economic and social roles that women and men played, as well as the situations in which they might have come into competition with each other. This paper combines my previous research on the seals and sealings from Shahr-i Sokhta with evidence from contemporary or slightly later sites to argue that the role of women at these sites was not merely social or ceremonial, but also strongly linked to daily practices of site-wide administration. In other words, while seals placed in burials are removed from circulation and reflect access to material goods (prestige),

4 Luneau, ‘Tombes féminines’.

women, seals, and power in prehistoric iran and central asia

the use of seals for administration reflects control over resources that would have been of interest to a wider community (power). The fact that seals are associated with women in both these contexts compels us to reconsider the roles that they may have played in ancient societies as well as how these roles would have affected their interactions with each other and with men.

Death and Burial: Some Caveats Any discussion of gender and burial, especially in Iran and Central Asia, must begin with the recognition of a number of issues that complicate our understanding. The first and most important, of course, is the fact that gender is a social construct that is often communicated by dress, adornment, or public behaviour5 — all things that are not easily visible in the archaeological record in locations where organic materials tend to degrade and disappear over time. This article addresses this issue by focusing on the biological sex of the deceased rather than their gender. The question of how the biological sex of a skeleton is determined is also a tricky one. The tombs discussed in this article were excavated over the course of the past century by American, Soviet, Russian, Italian, and Iranian archaeologists. This wide range of time, space, and culture means that archaeologists have used a number of different techniques, from highly effective ones like the examination of the pelvic structure of a skeleton, to less dependable ones like cranial measurements, to identify the sex of the deceased. Occasionally the position of the skeleton and the grave goods deposited with it have also been used to determine the sex of a body.6 As this paper depends largely on previously excavated material, I have accepted the most recently published determinations of the sex of the deceased in all cases. Beyond issues of identification, it is also important to note that many tombs in Iran and Central Asia were looted before they could be properly excavated.7 While excavators in Egypt have utilized the evidence of plunder to reconstruct the types of materials that may have been removed from bodies,8 the same process has not taken place, and would probably not be effective, at the sites discussed here. Most of the tombs discussed in this paper appear to have been mostly undisturbed at the time of excavation. However, the possibility that some materials may have been removed should be acknowledged. In spite of these many caveats, tomb data still provide us with an unparalleled amount of information about life in ancient societies, whether we subscribe to



5 Diaz-Andreu and others, The Archaeology of Identity. 6 See Luneau, ‘Tombes féminines’; Luneau, ‘Identifier le prestige’; Pardini, ‘Caratteristiche antropologiche’; Piperno and others, The Shahr-i Sokhta Graveyard. 7 Luneau, ‘Tombes féminines’. 8 Savage, ‘The Status of Women in Predynastic Egypt as Revealed through Mortuary Analysis’.

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Binford’s view that burials provide a place for all of a person’s social identities to be given symbolic expression,9 or Hodder’s view that mortuary behaviour is more a reflection of a desired social order than of the reality of daily life.10 And when it can be paired with evidence for how materials found in burials were used in daily life, tomb data becomes an even more powerful tool for understanding how people behaved, or sought to behave in life.

Overview of Seals and Sealing In any discussion of seals and sealing, there are three basic elements that need to be discussed; the seals themselves, the iconography of the seals as viewed in their impressions, and the sealings that bear these impressions. As objects, seals can be made of stone, metal, bone, or clay and are generally decorated with a design that is either carved in intaglio, in the case of stone, bone, and clay seals, or cast, in the case of metal seals. Many metal and some stone seals are further characterized as compartmented seals, where the design of the seal is created by a series of thin walls that create compartments. The iconography depicted on the face of a seal is most clearly visible in the impression of that seal. The term seal impression is typically used to refer to the positive impression made by the carved or decorated surface of the seal onto a malleable material such as clay. In the periods discussed here, the surface on which a seal impression is made is generally a lump of clay used to secure a door or container. Artefacts of this type are generally referred to as sealings. Studies of sealings have shown that it is possible to identify the types of objects that were secured by studying the side of the sealing that adhered to their surface.11 For example, a sealing that was used to guarantee the integrity of products inside a jar would have the positive impression of the design on the seal that was used to seal it on its obverse, and the negative impression of the neck or mouth of the sealed jar on its reverse.12 Of all the elite materials considered from the tombs, it is the seals that provide the best information as to the actual economic and administrative power of women in ancient Iran and Central Asia, as well as how they may have negotiated the exertion of that power with men in their communities. While seals are distinct in their fine workmanship and use of prestigious materials, like jewellery and metal vessels, and may have served a ritual purpose, like stone and clay figurines, they differ from these in their direct practical use in commerce and administration.

9 Binford, ‘Mortuary Practices’. 10 Hodder, The Meanings of Things. 11 Ferioli, Fiandra, and Tusa, ‘Stamp Seals’, pp. 12-19. 12 For a detailed discussion of the uses and interpretations of seals and sealing in the ancient world, see Ameri and others, Seals and Sealing.

women, seals, and power in prehistoric iran and central asia

Seals and Burial in Central Asia To date, some of the most relevant work examining the placement of seals in women’s tombs has been carried out at Central Asian sites belonging to the Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), also known as the Oxus Civilization.13 Excavators working at these sites, located across Central Asia and into modern-day Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and into Kyrgyzstan, recognized that women were typically buried with more, and seemingly more precious, grave goods than men. These grave goods included everything from jewellery and metal vessels to figurines and seals. While the types and quantities of different materials can offer important insights into the role of women in ancient Central Asia, for the purposes of this short paper I focus solely on the presence of seals.14 The higher concentration of seals in women’s tombs has been recognized in a number of large cemeteries dating from the mid-third to the mid-second millennia bce. At Gonur-Depe in central Turkmenistan, for example, about 75 per cent of the seals found in burials where the sex of the deceased could be identified were found in women’s tombs. These included seals in every material, from gypsum to silver, and which represented a multiplicity of motifs and manufacturing styles.15 Further to the west at Altyn-Depe, many of the women in elite tombs were interred with prestige materials including seals. These were often found at the hip bones, leading excavators to believe that the seals were carried attached to a belt or strap.16 The careful observation of the find-spot is important as it highlights the visibility of the seals on the body of the deceased. The preferential deposition of seals in women’s tombs was also observed at the nearby site of Ulug-Depe.17 At Sapallitepe, excavators also confirmed that twenty-six of the thirty-six wealthiest tombs at the site belonged to women, while only four belonged to men. The women’s tombs contained basically all the prestige (stone and metal objects, jewellery) and administrative objects (seals) found in tombs.18 Further analyses by Raffaele Biscione and Luca Bondioni determined that even though identifiable female burials make up only 38 per cent of the total 13 Biscione and Bondioli, ‘Sapallitepa’; Alekshin and others, ‘Burial Customs as an Archaeological Source [and Comments]’; Luneau, ‘Relations de genre’; Luneau, ‘Tombes féminines’; Luneau, ‘Perspectives’. 14 For a detailed discussion of how these materials can be interpreted in terms of wealth prestige, see Luneau, ‘Relations de genre’; Luneau, ‘Tombes féminines’; Luneau, ‘Identifier le prestige’; Luneau, ‘Perspectives’. 15 Sarianidi, Necropolis of Gonur. 16 Masson, Altyn-Depe, pp. 105–06. While the publication of the tombs in this volume is not systematic, Luneau confirms these findings from Altyn-Depe in her work. Unfortunately, she only provides cumulative tallies for materials found at sites in Central Asia (see for example Luneau, ‘Relations de genre’, p. 29, table 1). 17 Luneau, ‘Tombes féminines’, p. 144 n. 79. 18 Askarov, Drevnezemledel’cheskaia, p. 140.

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number of excavated tombs, they contained 58 per cent of all grave goods. The women were also buried with a greater variety of objects, while men were buried primarily with pottery vessels. The few weapons found in tombs were evenly distributed between men and women.19 While the Soviet excavators posited that the wealth in women’s tombs was a sign of honour and respect for women and that seals found in women’s tombs were not administrative tools, but rather emblems or tokens,20 Biscione and Bondioli remain open to the possibility that women buried with seals could have had a role in the maintenance of family or community wealth.21 This association of seals with women’s tombs, however, is not limited to Central Asia. The earliest evidence for this distribution of materials is found at the fourth- and third-millennium site Shahi-Tump in Pakistani Makran. Here, during period IIIa (late fourth to early third millennia bce), compartmented seals were found in eleven graves, eight of which belonged to women. Two of the three remaining seals were buried with children, while the sex of the last burial could not be determined. Most of the seals have traces of cotton or linen thread in their handles and Roland Besenval, the excavator, suggested they were ‘probably used to fix the “seals” to cloth’, thus making them more visible.22 More early evidence can be found at Tepe Hissar in north-eastern Iran. Here, the quantity of funerary equipment found with men and women in period I (early fourth millennium bce) was about equal, suggesting that there was not a strong hierarchical differentiation between the two. In spite of this, most of the objects that were identified as seals were found in the tombs of women. This discrepancy is further accentuated by the fact that 66 per cent of the excavated burials were of males.23 In later periods, as the seals become more complex, their distribution also changes, with most of the published seals found in particularly well-equipped period III burials coming from male tombs.24 In spite of the well-established relationship between women and seals in tombs, and the fact that the basic function of seals is administrative, archaeologists have been wary of recognizing this correlation as evidence for women’s administrative or economic power. Excavators working at Sapallitepe, for example, argued that seals found in women’s tombs were not administrative tools and did not reflect any sort of hierarchical division. Rather, they interpreted the seals and other prestige items found in women’s tombs as emblems or tokens used to honour and respect influential women

19 Biscione and Bondioli, ‘Sapallitepa’. 20 Askarov, Drevnezemledel’cheskaia, pp. 140–41. 21 Biscione and Bondioli, ‘Sapallitepa’. 22 Besenval, ‘Between East and West’. For more detailed descriptions and colour images of the seals, see Mutin, ‘Of Intercultural Interaction and Innovation’. 23 Schmidt and Kimball, Excavations at Tepe Hissar. 24 It should be noted that only a small number of the graves from Tepe Hissar were published in detail. Gursan-Salzmann, The New Chronology of the Bronze Age Settlement of Tepe Hissar, Iran, pp. 241–48.

women, seals, and power in prehistoric iran and central asia

in a strictly patriarchal society.25 In discussing the seals from Shahi-Tump, Besenval also refers to them as ‘seals’ and focuses on the ways in which they may have been attached to garments (for decoration) rather than carried (for administration).26 Luneau also points out that the large variety of iconographic representations and the deep grooves of compartmented seals found at BMAC sites make them less useful for sealing. She suggests that seals may have served as protective amulets or as symbols of social status or communal identity, comparing their function to that of the lion pins used in this manner at the first-millennium bce site of Hasanlu in north-western Iran.27 In many cases this caution towards attributing an administrative role, or even direct ownership, to seals found in women’s tombs is warranted. Because materials placed in tombs are removed from circulation and may be used to reflect an idealized rather than realistic view of a society, the principal challenge remains connecting the materials found in tombs to the evidence of everyday life in the town or settlement associated with the burials. In this article, I address some of the questions raised by the studies of Central Asian tombs by adding the seals and sealings from the south-eastern Iranian site of Shahr-i Sokhta to the discussion. The analysis of the sealings found in the settlement of Shahr-i Sokhta provides additional data about how specific seal types were used over the life of the settlement and allows us to create a stronger connection between objects found in tombs and their use in life.

Seals and Burial at Shahr-i Sokhta The site of Shahr-i Sokhta was excavated from 1967–78 by the Italian Archaeological Mission in Iran28 and again by an Iranian team led by Seyyed Mansur Sajjadi beginning in 1997.29 The site is one of the largest ancient cities in south-eastern Iran, extending over an area of about 150 ha and reaching a maximum height of twelve metres above the plain (Fig. 1.1). While the absolute chronology of the site remains a topic of much debate30 and will not be discussed at great length here, it is possible to divide the excavated material according to an internal periodization 25 Askarov, Drevnezemledel’cheskaia, pp. 140–41. 26 Besenval, ‘Between East and West’, p. 50. 27 Luneau, ‘Tombes féminines’, p. 142. 28 Tucci, Città Bruciata; Piperno and others, The Shahr-i Sokhta Graveyard; Salvatori and Tosi, ‘Shahr-i Sokhta Revised Sequence’; Salvatori and Vidale, Central Quarters Excavations; Mariani, ‘Eastern Residential Area’; Tosi, ‘Shahr-i Sokhta 1967’; Tosi, ‘Shahr-i-Sokhta 1968’; Tosi, ‘Shahr-i Sokhta 1969–1970’. 29 Sajjadi, ‘Some Preliminary Observations’; Sajjadi, ‘Sistan and Baluchestan Project 2005’; Sajjadi, ‘Sistan and Baluchestan Project 2004’; Sajjadi and others, ‘The Graveyard, 1997–2000’; Sajjadi and Casanova, ‘Sistan and Baluchistan Project 2005/2006’. 30 For the most recent debate on the dating of Shahr-i Sokhta, see Pittman, ‘Eastern Iran’; Jarrige, Didier, and Quivron, ‘Shahr-i Sokhta and the Chronology’; Cortesi and others, ‘Cultural Relationships’; Salvatori and Tosi, ‘Shahr-i Sokhta Revised Sequence’.

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Figure 1.1. Plan of Shahr‐i Sokhta. After Mariani, ‘The Monumental Area’ courtesy IsMEO Italian Archeological Mission in Iran.

women, seals, and power in prehistoric iran and central asia

system that attributes eleven stratigraphic phases (Phases 0–10) to four periods of occupation (Periods I–IV). The eleven phases span the period from the end of the fourth millennium bce to the end of the third millennium bce and encompass the development, flourishing, and decline of this major urban site. Excavators working at Shahr-i Sokhta have uncovered a well-preserved main town, suburban crafts areas, and an extensive graveyard, all of which were in use for much of the third millennium bce. The principal structural remains of the town, which included well-preserved domestic and monumental architecture, were located on the northern and eastern edges of the mound, and covered an area of about 100 ha at their largest extent. The Italian excavations focused on two main areas of habitation; the Eastern Residential Area (ERA), and the Central Quarters, but also carried out extensive soundings in the Graveyard.31 The Monumental, or North-Eastern, Area constitutes a third extensive residential area. Excavations in this area, as well as continued work in the graveyard, have been undertaken by Iranian teams over the past twenty years.32 The administrative materials (seals and sealings) found at Shahr-i Sokhta are unique because of their chronological and functional breadth. The seals from the site demonstrate significant morphological, material, and iconographic change over time while the sealings enable us to see which seals were used for sealing, as well as where and how they were utilized.33 The Shahr-i Sokhta graveyard covers an area of 20–25 ha on the southernmost part of the mound and existed for the majority of the life of the settlement. It contains a number of different tomb types, from simple pit burials to catacomb tombs that were likely used to bury multiple members of the same family.34 The seals found in burials allow us to see who was buried with seals and how these seals were carried or worn (Fig. 1.2). To date, a total of thirty-eight seals, including eight cylinders and thirty stamps, were found in burials.35 These seals were made of bone, bronze, and stone. The cylinder seals were pierced through the middle while the bronze seals generally had a small loop handle on the back. The stone and bone stamp seals, on the other hand, were typically pierced by two holes though which a cord could be passed. Seals were usually worn on the right wrist, though occasionally on left. In several cases excavators recorded that a seal was found near the deceased’s pelvis, suggesting that, as in Central Asia, they may have been worn on belts.36 The

31 Tucci, Città Bruciata. 32 Sajjadi, Costantini, and Steiner, ‘Riflessi in un occhio d’oro’; Sajjadi, ‘Sistan and Baluchestan Project 2005’; Sajjadi and others, ‘The Graveyard, 1997–2000’. 33 Amiet, ‘Les Sceaux de Shahr-i Sokhta’; Ferioli, Fiandra, and Tusa, ‘Stamp Seals’. 34 Sajjadi and others, ‘The Graveyard, 1997–2000’. 35 These numbers do not take into consideration material published in the most recent Persian publications of the cemetery. 36 Piperno, ‘La Necropoli’; Piperno and others, The Shahr-i Sokhta Graveyard; Sajjadi and others, ‘The Graveyard, 1997–2000’. Graves with seals found near the pelvis include G.003 (MAI 6104), G.018 (MAI 6512), G.029 (MAI 6453), G.101 (MAI 8593), G.311 (MAI 7685), and G.901 (MAI 8163).

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Figure 1.2. Grave 132inf showing the location of seal MAI 7152 (13) at the wrist of the deceased. Piperno and others, The Shahr-i Sohkta Graveyard, figs 385, 386. Drawing Luca Mariani, courtesy IsMEO Italian Archeological Mission in Iran.

positioning of the seals at the deceased’s wrist and the wear marks around the piercings of many chlorite seals37 highlight the fact that seals at Shahr-i Sokhta were carried in a manner that would allow them to be easily used for sealing. While there seems to have been no particular relationship between the wealth of a tomb and presence of seals, seals are found most often in larger tombs of the catacomb and ‘bipartite shaft’ type. Based on the material published to date, twenty-three (70 per cent) of the thirty-three bodies with seals that could be sexed are female, while only ten are male (Fig. 1.3). This gendered breakdown of seal ownership is consistent throughout the life of the cemetery. For example, of the eight cylinder seals, a type associated with the earliest occupation of the site, six were found in female burials, while only one comes from a male burial. This implies that even during the earliest periods at the site, when the glyptic of the Shahr-i Sokhta shows clear links with western Iran rather than embodying a local paradigm, it was women who owned (or at least were buried with) most of the seals. In addition to the overall gender breakdown discussed above, the seals found in burials at Shahr-i Sokhta demonstrate several interesting patterns. For example, all the bone seals were associated with female burials. Stone seals are found in tombs of both women and men, though numerically they are more common in women’s tombs. On the other hand, twice as many copper/bronze seals were found with men as with women. Bone seals, then,

37 Tusa, ‘I sigilli e l’impronte’, p. 256; Ferioli, Fiandra, and Tusa, ‘Stamp Seals’, p. 9.

women, seals, and power in prehistoric iran and central asia

Figure 1.3. Distribution of seals in tombs at Shahr-i Sokhta by sex of tomb owner. Figure by author.

can be decisively associated with women, while bronze seals seem to belong primarily to men. Thus, it appears that at Shahr-i Sokhta seal material is a clear distinguishing factor related to the sex of the seal owner (Fig. 1.4). The iconography of the seals may also be significant. In my previous work,38 I divided the iconographic motifs found on the Shahr-i Sokhta seals into seven general categories: figural, geometric, cross, stepped cross/stepped design, linear, concentric circle, and rosette/corolla. An examination of the iconography of the seals found in burials shows that certain designs are more clearly linked with seals of certain materials and thus more likely to be owned by men or women (Fig. 1.5). For example, stepped cross and stepped line designs are found primarily on bone seals, while bronze seals seem to have a large percentage of the rosette/corolla designs, as well as most of the figural designs. If we look at iconographic distinctions by the sex of the seal owner (Fig. 1.6), some of these differences become even starker. While seals with figural, geometric, and cross motifs are evenly distributed between male and female burials, seals with linear and concentric circle designs are found exclusively in the tombs of women.39 Linear seals are among the most commonly used seals at Shahr-i Sokhta and may in fact be indigenous to the site, suggesting that their association with women might be especially significant.40 The stepped cross/stepped design seals provide an even clearer picture; seven of the eight seals with this motif were found in the tombs of

38 Ameri, ‘Who Holds the Keys?’. 39 In these two cases, the sample size is small and the correlation with female ownership may be coincidental. For the purposes of this study, however, I consider the linear and concentric circle motifs as motifs that can be associated with women. 40 Similar seals are known from Mundigak (Cortesi and others, ‘Cultural Relationships’) and have been found in recent excavations in north-eastern Iran (Bayani, personal communication), but are not known from other sites in the area.

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Figure 1.4. Materials of the stamp seals found in the Shahr-i Sokhta cemetery. Figure by author.

women. Of the seven stepped seals found with women, six are bone and one is stone. The stepped cross seal found in a male burial, on the other hand, is a bronze seal. There are also differences in the way the design is laid out. All the stepped seals associated with women, for example, contain the stepped design within a rectangular, square, or circular frame, while the stepped cross seal found in the male burial was in the shape of a stepped cross itself.41 Finally, as with the bronze seals themselves, seals with rosette/corolla designs are found overwhelmingly in the tombs of men. The careful analysis of the distribution of seals in the graves of Shahr-i Sokhta, then, allows us to posit that bone seals belonged exclusively to women, while copper/bronze seals belonged primarily to men. We can further hypothesize that seals with stepped motifs, linear designs, and concentric circle motifs belonged predominantly to women. Men, on the other hand, can be associated with rosette/corolla motifs. Seals with figural, geometric, and cross designs likely belonged to both men and women. This analysis of the distribution pattern provides us with an important tool with which to identify the people responsible for administrative sealing in different contexts at Shahr-i Sokhta.

41 This distinction may also be a function of the material, as it is easier to mould bronze into more complex forms.

women, seals, and power in prehistoric iran and central asia

Figure 1.5. Distribution of motifs by material on Shahr-i Sokhta seals. Figure by author.

Figure 1.6. Distribution of motifs on seals (stamp and cylinder) by sex. Figure by author.

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Sealing in Context at Shahr-i Sokhta The sealings excavated at Shahr-i Sokhta enable us to see which types of seals were used for sealing as well as where and how they were utilized. To date, no evidence of a central storage area has been found, though Luca Mariani has pointed out that the small size of most of the domestic storage in the Eastern Residential Area (ERA) implies that there may be larger scale storage facilities that remain undiscovered.42 The widely dispersed find-spots of the sealings also suggest a focus on small-scale local administration centred around neighbourhood production, with sealings stored in what Fiandra and Pepe called ‘mini-archives’.43 Mariani and Tosi further point out that, at least for Period II, craft production was located primarily in homes. They envision Shahr-i Sokhta as a redistributive and manufacturing centre linked to a large rural hinterland that provided agricultural products.44 The types of sealings found at Shahr-i Sokhta support the idea that at this site, sealing was used primarily for local storage and commerce. Of the 516 sealings analysed by Fiandra and Pepe, 422 were clearly used to secure doors or containers. Of these, 42 per cent were placed on doors or knobs, while 59 per cent sealed vases or other containers.45 Ferioli et al. note that, in keeping with the small-scale administration of the site, most of the door sealings were made on simple wooden pegs.46 The discovery of holes for pegs in walls near doorways at Shahr-i Sokhta offers further documentation for the local nature of the administrative system.47 While the correlation of female burials with seal ownership seen in the graveyard already challenges many preconceived notions of administrative practice in prehistoric Western Asia, it is the distinct differences in seal material and iconography of these seals that allow us to explore how seals were used at the site and by whom. My prior work has shown that we can utilize the differentiation between seal materials and designs found in male and female burials to pinpoint the individual groups responsible for administrative sealing at Shahr-i Sokhta.48 The following discussion reviews the results from one area of the site where significant concentrations of seals and sealings were uncovered in a good archaeological context and presents some conclusions

42 Mariani, ‘Eastern Residential Area’. In an interesting ethnographic parallel, Edward Ochsenschlager, Iraq’s Marsh Arabs in the Garden of Eden, noted that the size of household storage containers in villages in southern Iraq decreased as transport to the larger neighbouring towns, and the resources available there, became easier with the draining of the marshes under Saddam Hussein. 43 Fiandra and Pepe, ‘Typology and Distribution’. 44 Mariani and Tosi, ‘L’universo familiare’. 45 Pepe, ‘Le Cretule di Shahr-i Sokhta’. 46 Ferioli, Fiandra, and Tusa, ‘Stamp Seals’, pp. 15–19. 47 Mariani and Tosi, ‘L’universo familiare’, pp. 15–16. 48 Ameri, ‘Who Holds the Keys?’.

women, seals, and power in prehistoric iran and central asia

Figure 1.7. Plan of the House of the Stairs showing find-spots of sealings. Drawing after Cattini, ‘Administrative Indicators in the Shahr-i Sokhta Eastern Residential Area’.

regarding how different members of the Shahr-i Sokhta community participated in local administration.49 The structure considered in this analysis, known as the House of the Stairs (Fig. 1.7), is dated primarily to Period II (2750–2500 bce). The building had four major building phases, each defined by the raising of the floors, doors, and walls. Over the long life of this structure, the rooms seem to have functioned as both workshops and habitation areas, with many of them containing both hearths and remnants of production activities such as leather and textile production. The expansion of the building in its third construction phase added storage areas on the south side of the house and rooms for additional family members in the east side.50 Of the forty-six sealings with recognizable impressions found within the House of the Stairs (Table 1.1), twenty-five (54 per cent) had designs (concentric circles, linear designs, and stepped designs) that can be associated with women (Fig. 1.8). Only three sealings (6 per cent) were impressed with rosettes, a design that can be associated primarily with men. The remaining sealings were impressed by seals with motifs, crosses, and figural (zoomorphic) designs, which can be ascribed to either men or women. In terms of seal material, it is difficult to recognize the difference between impressions made by bone seals and those made by stone seals. Impressions made by metal seals, however, are easier to identify based on the fine lines made by the thinner walls of

49 For a full discussion of the findings from Shahr-i Sokhta, see Ameri, ‘Who Holds the Keys?’. 50 Tosi, ‘Shahr-i-Sokhta 1968’, pp. 293–300.

33

  2   3

 

  3 4 22 + 3M

1

   

   

XLIX XCVII XCIX Totals for all of house Seals

  1       1

4 + 1M 7 + 2M 2 1 1 15 + 3M

XX XXI/XXII XIX XVII XVIII Totals for core of house (Rooms XX, XXI/XXII, XIX, XVII, and XVIII) XXIV XXV

 

    1 4

1  

1       1 2

Unrecognizable Rosette Concentric motif Motif Circle Motif

Room

3

  2 (diff seals on same sealing)   1 2 10

  1 3   1 5

Linear Motif

3 + 1M

2 6   11 + 1M

1M  

1 1     1 3

Stepped Motif

 

      6

   

    4   2 6

Cross Motif

3(Z)

      2 (Z) + 2

   

2(Z) 1 1 (cartwheel)     2 (Z) + 2

Geometric Motif: Lozenge (L), Triangle (T), Zig Zag (Z)

 

      7

   

  7       7

 

2 3 1 18

   

4 4 4     12

 

2     11

  1

5 1 1   1 8

Figural No Seals Motif impression

Table 1.1. Room by room breakdown of motifs on seals and seal impressions found in the House of the Stairs (M = metal seal).

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Figure 1.8. Examples of impressed sealings from the House of the Stairs. Photos courtesy IsMEO Italian Archeological Mission in Iran.

these seals. Baghestani observed that there were six or eight impressions made by compartmented metal stamp seals in the material from the House of the Stairs,51 but I was only able to confirm four in my own review of the material. Of these, one is an impression of a seal in the shape of a caprid52 found on a pottery sherd that Baghestani also believes belongs to Period III, while another one is an impression of a metal seal in the shape of a stepped cross53 similar to that found in grave 721.54 In addition to the sealings, eleven seals were found in the House of the Stairs. Of these, the majority (seven) had stepped or zig-zag designs, while three more had linear designs (Fig. 1.9). The design of the last seal was not described, though like most of the others it was made of chlorite. Only one fragmentary copper/bronze stamp seal with a stepped design (MAI 1365) was found in the building. Both the seals and sealings from the House of the Stairs demonstrate that women, or at least seals of the materials and iconographic types typically associated with women, were responsible for most of the

51 Baghestani, Metallene Compartimentsiegel, pp. 21, 151. 52 Baghestani, Metallene Compartimentsiegel, fig. 25.57. 53 Tosi, ‘Shahr-i-Sokhta 1968’, fig. 278. 54 Piperno and others, The Shahr-i Sokhta Graveyard, pp. 251–54, fig. 582.

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Figure 1.9. Examples of seals from the House of the Stairs. Photos courtesy IsMEO Italian Archeological Mission in Iran.

administrative sealing in this structure.55 Similar patterns were identified in other Period II structures, including a second house (the House of the Jars), and a room (Room LVIII) that may have been used for the production and storage of leather goods.56

Seals as Reflections of Female Administrative Power at Shahr-i Sokhta The overview of the Period II contexts at Shahr-i Sokhta suggests that not only were women primarily responsible for administrative work in domestic contexts such as the House of the Jars and the House of the Stairs, but that they also had a significant role in administrative activities in areas that may have served specialized purposes such as the production and storage of leather goods (Room LVIII). It should however be noted that the dichotomy between domestic and workshop spaces is a misleading one. Excavations have shown that homes in the ERA were also the locus of much craft production, especially

55 It was not possible to match iconography to sealing types for this paper, but a preliminary overview of the material confirms that most of the sealings from Shahr-i Sokhta were used to lock doors or close containers (Baghestani, Metallene Compartimentsiegel, p. 26). 56 Fiandra and Pepe, ‘Typology and Distribution’, p. 477.

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in the earlier parts of Period II.57 Considering the flexibility of residential space in the ERA, it seems likely women were not limited to administrative activities in the domestic sphere (i.e. household food production and storage) but were in fact involved in all aspects of economic activity in this area of the site. The evidence for women’s seal use at Shahr-i Sokhta can counter some of the narratives regarding the non-functionality of seals found in burials in Central Asia, but also provides an important model for further research at these sites. While seals found in burials by themselves are not enough to confirm women’s administrative roles, when it is possible to pair them with the evidence of seal use in the form of sealings, we see that women do seem to exert significant control over that management of resources. The fact that more women than men at Shahr-i Sokhta owned and used seals suggests that women held power within the economic frameworks of the site, controlling access to and distribution of resources on a household and possibly commercial level. Current research on gender and power emphasizes the importance of moving away from our Western, and Victorian, notions of gender relations as well as our assumption that societies hold an idea of distinct public and domestic realms where men or women operate independently of each other and with differing levels of power and/or autonomy.58 In her studies of the relationship between sex and status or prestige in Oxus tombs, Elise Luneau concludes that, although women’s tombs generally have more gifts, of types that may be considered richer (metal vessels and jewellery, female figurines, seals), men were also buried with artefacts that could be considered prestige objects, in particular prestige objects that could be associated with military or political authority (weapons, axe heads, carts). She suggests that this division of material classes likely reflects a society in which men and women collaborate or act in different spheres, rather than one where either sex holds all the social power and status.59 Unfortunately, the data on seal ownership from Shahr-i Sokhta does not give us as much access to the possible economic or social roles of men at the site, except to say that while they may have had access to greater material wealth in the form of copper/ bronze seals, they don’t seem to have used these seals to control access to or distribution of resources. A quick overview of the published burial data from Shahr-i Sokhta does not seem to indicate any particular discrepancies in the number of objects found in men’s and women’s tombs. Bodies of both sexes can be buried with large or small numbers of grave goods. While a more in-depth study of other materials found in men’s and women’s tombs at this site is necessary to develop a better understanding of how other differences in burial gifts may reflect the social and economic positions of the sexes, the fact that most of the seals were found in women’s tombs, in positions where

57 Mariani, ‘Eastern Residential Area’; Mariani and Tosi, ‘L’universo familiare’. 58 Sweely, Manifesting Power. 59 Luneau, ‘Identifier le prestige’.

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they would have been clearly visible, suggests that they would have played an important role in projecting the status of the deceased, both in life and in death.

Seals as Status Markers: Visibility and Performance Seals, especially those made from prestigious materials, were often carried or worn as luxury objects or markers of identity. In Iran and Central Asia, as we have seen, seals that are found close to the body in burials are generally located at the waist, as if attached to a belt, or at the wrist, where a simple flick of the hand would have allowed the owner to quickly lay their impression on a jar or door. In Mesopotamia, evidence from the mid-third-millennium bce Royal Cemetery at Ur and contemporary representations on stone and shell plaques suggests that seals could also have been pinned to women’s garments at the shoulder.60 In all these cases, a seal would have been easily visible to an observer and would have served to telegraph the wealth and/or status of its owner, regardless of whether it was used or not. For third-millennium Mesopotamia, Pollock has suggested that the positioning of seals at women’s shoulders implied that the seals were more important as markers of status than as administrative objects.61 This argument is supported by the fact that most of the seals found in women’s graves in the Royal Cemetery of Ur were made of lapis lazuli, a rare stone imported from Afghanistan. In addition, almost no impressions of the seals typically associated with women in the Royal Cemetery (banquet seals) were found among the many seal impressions found in the Seal Impression Strata62 or in the Archaic I levels63 at Ur. Yet, in the few instances where we can definitively identify seals represented in art in third-millennium Mesopotamia and/or Iran, they are worn by women.64 In all cases then, we can conclude that the visibility of seals played an important part in clarifying the social position or role of the women who owned them. Even in ancient Rome, when sumptuary laws limited the amount of gold that women could own or display, women may have met those limits by continuing to wear the gold signet rings with incised gems that they would have used to seal documents, containers, and rooms.65 Beyond the question of visibility, however, seals remain practical objects used in the administration of public or private goods. The fact that seals were found — in positions in which they would have been prominently visible — even in tombs with relatively few grave goods implies that the ownership and use of seals would

60 61 62 63 64 65

Collon, ‘How Seals Were Worn’; Pollock, ‘Of Priestesses, Princes and Poor Relations’. Pollock, ‘Of Priestesses, Princes and Poor Relations’. Pollock, ‘Of Priestesses, Princes and Poor Relations’. Benati, ‘Archaic I’. Collon, ‘How Seals Were Worn’. See Webb, ‘Exaequatio and aemulatio’, this volume.

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have been seen as a measure of status in and of itself, and strongly suggests that this status was directly linked to the ability to exert control over resources. As in Central Asia then, the excavated material from Shahr-i Sokhta suggests that men and women had different roles and responsibilities in the life of the settlement. Women used seals to control resources during their lifetimes and were buried with these seals in a prominently visible position when they died. Men, on the other hand, seem to have played a lesser role in the local administration of resources, but were buried more often with seals made of copper or bronze, also placed in prominently visible positions. This differentiation may suggest that while women were primarily responsible for local administration, men’s ownership of metal seals, which may have been considered more prestigious, allowed them to compete with women by projecting the appearance of administrative power. The places where men’s and women’s responsibilities came directly into conflict with each other are not yet evident from the excavation data. What is clear however, is that women were actively involved in the economic and administrative life of the settlement, competing perhaps not only with their contemporaries, but with the interpretive frameworks built up by archaeologists projecting a view of the past based on Victorian models onto evidence that does not necessarily support it.

Works Cited Secondary Studies Alekshin, V. A., and others, ‘Burial Customs as an Archaeological Source [and Comments]’, Current Anthropology, 24 (1983), 137–49 Ameri, Marta, ‘Who Holds the Keys? Identifying Female Administrators at Shahr-i Sokhta’, Iran Ameri, Marta, and others, Seals and Sealing in the Ancient World: Case Studies from the Ancient Near East, Egypt, the Indus and the Aegean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Amiet, Pierre, ‘Les Sceaux de Shahr-i Sokhta’, in South Asian Archaeology 1975: Papers from the Third International Conference of the Association of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe Held at Paris, ed. by Johanna E. Van Lohuizende Leeuw (Leiden: Brill, 1979), pp. 3–6 Askarov, Akhmadali A., Drevnezemledel’cheskaia Kul’tura Epokhi Bronzy Iuga Uzbekistana (Tashkent: FAN, 1977) Baghestani, Susanne, Metallene Compartimentsiegel aus Ost-Iran, Zentralasien und Nord-China, Archäologie in Iran und Turan (Rahden: Leidorf, 1997) Benati, Giacomo, ‘The “Archaic I” Phase of the Ziqqurat Terrace at Ur: A Contextual Reassessment’, Mesopotamia, 48 (2013), 197–220 Besenval, Roland, ‘Between East and West: Kech-Makran (Pakistan) during Protohistory’, in Cultural Relations between the Indus and the Iranian Plateau

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during the Third Millennium bce, ed. by Toshiki Osada and Michael Witzel (Cambridge, MA: Department of South Asian Studies, Harvard University, 2011), pp. 41–164 Binford, Lewis Roberts, ‘Mortuary Practices: Their Study and Potential’, Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology, 25 (1971), 6–29 Biscione, Raffaele, and Luca Bondioli, ‘Sapallitepa. Analisi del rituale funerario in una necropoli del III millennio A.C.’, in Istituto per gli studi Micenei ed EgoeAnatolici: seminari anno 1988 (Rome: Istituto per gli Studi Micenei ed EgeoAnatolici, 1989), pp. 53–70 Cattini, Giuliana, ‘Administrative Indicators in the Shahr-i Sokhta Eastern Residential Area of Period II (2800–2600 bc)’, in South Asian Archaeology 1997, ed. by Maurizio Taddei and Giuseppe De Marco (Rome: Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2000), pp. 485–94 Collon, Dominique, ‘How Seals Were Worn and Carried: The Archaeological and Iconographic Evidence’, in Seals and Seal Impressions: Proceedings of the XLVe Rencontre assyriologique internationale, ed. by William W. Hallo and Irene J. Winter (Bethesda: CDL Press, 2001), pp. 15–30 Cortesi, Elisa, and others, ‘Cultural Relationships beyond the Iranian Plateau: The Helmand Civilization, Baluchistan, and the Indus Valley in the 3rd Millennium bce’, Paléorient, 34 (2008), 5–36 Diaz-Andreu, Margarita, and others, The Archaeology of Identity: Approaches to Gender, Age, Status, Ethnicity and Religion (London: Routledge, 2005) Ferioli, Piera, Enrica Fiandra, and Sebastiano Tusa, ‘Stamp Seals and the Functional Analysis of their Sealings at Shahr-i Sokhta II–III (2700–2200 b.c.)’, in South Asian Archaeology 1975, ed. by Johanna E. Lohuizen-de Leeuw (Leiden: Brill, 1979), pp. 7–26 Fiandra, Enrica, and Carla Pepe, ‘Typology and Distribution of the Administrative Indicators in the Eastern Residential Area of Shahr-i Sokhta during Period II (2800–2600 b.c.)’, in South Asian Archaeology 1997, ed. by Maurizio Taddei and Giuseppe de Marco (Rome: Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2000), pp. 467–83 Gursan-Salzmann, Ayse, The New Chronology of the Bronze Age Settlement of Tepe Hissar, Iran (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Hodder, Ian, The Meanings of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression, One World Archaeology (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989) Jarrige, Jean-Francois, Aurore Didier, and Gonzague Quivron, ‘Shahr-i Sokhta and the Chronology of the Indo-Iranian Regions’, Paléorient, 37 (2011), 7–34 Luneau, Élise, ‘Tombes féminines et pratiques funéraires en Asie Centrale protohistorique: quelques réflexions sur le “statut social”’, Paléorient, 34 (2008), 131–57 ———, ‘Identifier le prestige: éléments de controverse à propos de quelques objets singuliers de la civilisation de l’Oxus (Asie Centrale, Âge du Bronze)’, in Le prestige: autour des formes de la différenciation sociale, ed. by Frédéric Hurlet, Isabelle Rivoal, and Isabelle Sidéra (Paris: De Boccard, 2014), pp. 147–60

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———, ‘Les relations de genre en Asie Centrale protohistorique: redéfinition et discussion’, Les nouvelles de l’archéologie, 140 (2015), 28–34 ———, ‘Perspectives on Sex and Gender through Burial in Southern Central Asia during the Bronze Age’, in Framing Archaeology in the Near East: The Application of Social Theory to Fieldwork, ed. by Ianir Milevski and Thomas Evan Levy (Sheffield: Equinox, 2016), pp. 31–49 Mariani, Luca, ‘The Monumental Area of Shahr-i Sokhta: Notes from a Surface Reconnaissance’, in South Asian Archeology, 1985, ed. by Karen Frifelt and Per Sorensen (London: Curzon, 1989), pp. 114–36 ———, ‘The Eastern Residential Area at Shahr-i Sokhta’, in South Asian Archaeology, 1989, ed. by Catherine Jarrige (Madison: Prehistory Press, 1992), pp. 181–94 Mariani, Luca, and Maurizio Tosi, ‘L’universo familiare a Shahr-i Sokhta’, in Orientalia Josephi Tucci memoriae dicata, ed. by Gherardo Gnoli and Lionello Lanciotti (Rome: IsMEO, 1987), pp. 853–79 Masson, Vadim M., Altyn-Depe, trans. by Henry N. Michael (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1988) Moule, Arthur C., Christians in China before the Year 1550 (New York: Macmillan, 1930; repr. New York: Octagon, 1972) Mutin, Benjamin, ‘Of Intercultural Interaction and Innovation: A Case-Study Based on Late Chalcolithic Copper Objects from Pakistan and their Parallels in Iran and Central Asia’, Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan, 49 (2020), 101–21 Ochsenschlager, Edward L., Iraq’s Marsh Arabs in the Garden of Eden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2004) Pardini, Edoardo, ‘Caratteristiche antropologiche degli abitanti di Shahr-i Sokhta’, in La Città Bruciata del Deserto Salato, ed. by Giuseppe Tucci (Venice: Erizzo, 1977), pp. 149–56 Pepe, Carla, ‘Le Cretule di Shahr-i Sokhta (Sistan, Iran). Lo Stato delle ricerche’, in Studi in onore di Enrica Fiandra: contributi di archeologia Egea e Vicinorientale, ed. by Massimo Perna (Naples: De Boccard, 2005), pp. 301–11 Piperno, Marcello, ‘La Necropoli’, in La Città Bruciata del Deserto Salato, ed. by Giuseppe Tucci (Venice: Erizzo, 1977), pp. 115–48 Piperno, Marcello, and others, The Shahr-I Sokhta Graveyard (Sistan, Iran) Excavation Campaigns 1972–1978 (Rome: IsIAO, 2007) Pittman, Holly, ‘Eastern Iran in the Early Bronze Age’, in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran, ed. by Daniel T. Potts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 304–24 Pollock, Susan, ‘Of Priestesses, Princes, and Poor Relations: The Dead in the Royal Cemetery of Ur’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1 (1991), 171–89 Saeki, Yoshirō, The Nestorian Documents and Relics in China (Tokyo: Toho Bunkwa Gakuin: Academy of Oriental Culture, Tokyo Institute, 1951)

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Sajjadi, Mansour, ‘Some Preliminary Observations from the New Excavations at the Graveyard of Shahr-i Sokhta’, in ‘My Life Is Like the Summer Rose’: Maurizio Tosi e l’archeologia come modo di vivere: Papers in Honour of Maurizio Tosi for his 70th Birthday, ed. by Carl Clifford Lamberg-Karlovsky, Bruno Genito, and Barbara Cerasetti (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2014), pp. 665–76 Sajjadi, Mansour, Lorenzo Costantini, and Andreas M. Steiner, ‘Riflessi in un occhio d’oro’, Archeo: Attualita’ del passato, 277 (2008), 42–57 Sajjadi, Sayyed Mansour, ‘Sistan and Baluchestan Project’, Iran, 42 (2004), 247–50 ———, ‘Sistan and Baluchistan Project’, Iran, 43 (2005), 87–91 Sajjadi, Sayyed Mansour, and Michèle Casanova, ‘Sistan and Baluchistan Project 2005/2006’, Iran, 44 (2006), 347–57 Sajjadi, Sayyed Mansour, and others, ‘Excavations at Shahr-I Sokhta: First Preliminary Report on the Excavations of the Graveyard, 1997–2000’, Iran, 41 (2003), 21–97 Salvatori, Sandro, and Maurizio Tosi, ‘Shahr-i Sokhta Revised Sequence’, in South Asian Archaeology, 2001, ed. by Catherine Jarrige and Vincent Lefèvre (Paris: Éditions Recherches sur les civilisations, 2006), pp. 281–93 Salvatori, Sandro, and Massimo Vidale, Shahr-i Sokhta, 1975–1978: Central Quarters Excavations; Preliminary Report (Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 1997) Sarianidi, Viktor I., Necropolis of Gonur (Athens: Kapon, 2007) Savage, Stephen H., ‘The Status of Women in Predynastic Egypt as Revealed through Mortuary Analysis’, in Reading the Body: Representations and Remains in the Archaeological Record, ed. by Alison E. Rautman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 77–92 Schmidt, Erich Friedrich, and Fiske Kimball, Excavations at Tepe Hissar, Damghan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937) Sweely, Tracy L., Manifesting Power: Gender and the Interpretation of Power in Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1999) Tosi, Maurizio, ‘Excavations at Shahr-i Sokhta, a Chalcolithic Settlement in the Iranian Sistan. Preliminary Report on the First Campaign, OctoberDecember 1967’, East and West, 18 (1968), 1–66 ———, ‘Excavations at Shahr-i-Sokhta. Preliminary Report on the Second Campaign: September-December 1968’, East and West, 19 (1969), 283–386 ———, ‘Excavations at Shahr-i Sokhta 1969–1970’, in Prehistoric Sistan, i, ed. by Maurizio Tosi (Rome: Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1983), pp. 73–125 Tucci, Giuseppe, ed., La Città Bruciata del Deserto Salato (Venice: Erizzo, 1977) Tusa, Sebastiano, ‘I sigilli e l’impronte’, in La Città Bruciata del Deserto Salato, ed. by Giuseppe Tucci (Venice: Erizzo, 1977), pp. 253–61

Lewis Webb

Exaequatio and aemulatio Regulation of Elite Female Status Competition in Mid-Republican Rome*

Introduction Status competition — struggles for superiority in personal and familial status — suffused elite society in mid-republican Rome (264–133 bce), stimulating social growth and conflict.1 The practice of this status competition included conspicuous displays of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital (resources) in various interacting and overlapping domains, that is, displays of wealth, relationships, knowledge, and status (symbols). These resources and domains supplied the means and opportunities for status comparison





* All translations are my own. RE numbers are provided for individuals where possible. RE = Pauly, Wissowa, and Kroll, eds, Realencyclopädie. Magistracies are also provided: Broughton, The Magistrates, i; ii. Legislative nomenclature (names of laws): Elster, Gesetze. Many thanks are due to Martha Bayless, Anna Blennow, Lovisa Brännstedt, Hannah Čulik-Baird, Caillan Davenport, Tom Hillard, Bronwyn Hopwood, Evan Jewell, Kyle Conrau-Lewis, Kit Morrell, Ida Östenberg, Kimberley Webb, and Kathryn Welch for their feedback on earlier iterations of this chapter. Additional thanks to Caillan Davenport and Martin Jehne for providing me with copies of forthcoming works. All remaining errors are my own. 1 All dates henceforth bce unless otherwise stated. By ‘status’, I mean the importance, prestige, renown, or standing of a person or family in a community, that is, their social status. I do not here mean formal or juridical rank or social position (although ‘status’ can bear that sense in English). I treat rank and social position synonymously in this chapter. By ‘status competition’, I mean a struggle for superiority in personal or familial status. See: OED3 s.v. competition, n. (1); importance, n. (1); prestige, n. (2); rank, n. (6); renown, n. (1, 2); social status, n.; standing, n. (9); status, n. (3); status, adj. (1); struggle, n. (1). Status competition: Harris, War, pp. 18–19, 31–34; Rosenstein, ‘Competition’; Hölkeskamp, ‘Conquest’; Reconstructing, esp. pp. 98–124; Flower, Ancestor, pp. 10–11, 72–73, 107, 136–42; ‘Spectacle’; Jehne, ‘The Rise of the Consular’, pp. 213, 215, 227; Nebelin, ‘Konkurrenz’; Beck, ‘Wealth’; Bernard, ‘Political Competition’. Cf. Fisher, ‘Competitive Delights’, p. 178; Van Wees, ‘Rivalry’, pp. 2–5. Lewis Webb    is a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Oxford. Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 43-78 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126141

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and differentiation.2 Status competition was mediated by a rich culture of visibility, where public recognition and visibility constituted and defined elite identities, and conspicuous displays expressed and reproduced elite roles, values, and hierarchies.3 By elite, I mean senatorial men and women, the top tier of the two-tier equestrian aristocracy in mid-republican Rome.4 Previous scholarship has uncovered the numerous ways in which status competition among elite men was regulated by Roman legislation and actions by the censors, particularly during the second century.5 The purpose of this regulation was not to prohibit status competition, but to constrain such competition to







2 Conspicuous displays: Flaig, Ritualisierte Politik; Flower, ‘Spectacle’; Hölkeskamp, Reconstructing, pp. 107–24; Beck, ‘Wealth’. On Bourdieu, capital, and the Roman elite: e.g., Flaig, Ritualisierte Politik, pp. 43–68; Flower, ‘Spectacle’, esp. p. 335; Hölkeskamp, Reconstructing, pp. 107–24; Nebelin, ‘Konkurrenz’, esp. pp. 144, 146, 154, 156. On the forms of capital: Bourdieu, ‘The Social Space’; Outline, esp. p. 180. By ‘domains’, I mean arenas, fields, or spaces of competition, which supplied opportunities for status comparison and differentiation. By ‘resources’, I mean capital, which supplied the means for status comparison and differentiation. By status symbols, I mean formal, informal, and often tangible resources of status and social position (rank). Status comparison and differentiation: Hölkeskamp, Reconstructing, esp. pp. 104, 106, 123; ‘Konkurrenz’, esp. pp. 34, 37–38; Davenport, Equestrian, pp. 42–50. Roman status symbols: Kolb, ‘Zur Statussymbolik’, esp. p. 240; Davenport, Equestrian, pp. 42–50. 3 Conspicuous displays and the elite: Flower, ‘Spectacle’, esp. p. 338. 4 In mid-republican Rome, this equestrian aristocracy comprised a small, top tier of senatorial equestrians and a much larger, lower tier of non-senatorial equestrians, and included both patricians and plebeians. It encompassed the c. 300 senators admitted into the Senate, the privileged 1800 equestrians with a public horse (equites equo publico) officially enrolled by the censors in the eighteen equestrian centuries, a larger, less-privileged group of supernumerary equestrians with their own horse (equites equo suo), and all of their wives and children. The 1800 equestrians on a public horse included the 300 senators and their sons. To be an equestrian, a male citizen (or his male declarant) had to be wealthy and meet the property qualification of the equestrian census (census equester), which was by the late third century equal to or perhaps above 100,000 asses (10,000 denarii), itself the highest property qualification in the Roman census, the first property class (prima classis). Entrance into the senatorial elite was predicated on male election to annual magisterial public offices and admission into the Senate. The identity, social position (rank), and power of this senatorial elite were linked with hierarchical public offices, such that this senatorial elite were, essentially, an aristocracy of office. Equestrian aristocracy: Nicolet, L’ordre; Davenport, Equestrian, esp. pp. 29–69. Membership of the Senate and the c. 300 senators: Ryan, Rank, esp. pp. 13–51, 137; Lintott, Constitution, pp. 68–72. Aristocracy of office: Hölkeskamp ‘Conquest’; Reconstructing, esp. pp. 107–24; Flower, Ancestor; Jehne, ‘The Rise of the Consular’. 5 Roman legislators and censors repeatedly attempted to constrain this competition with, inter alia, financial, sumptuary (expenditure), and electoral legislation and punitive censorial actions. Some of this regulation aimed at restricting and/or punishing senatorial commercial activities, conspicuous displays of wealth during banquets (as sites of political influence), and overt electoral bribery: Baltrusch, Regimen morum; Lintott, ‘Electoral Bribery’; Rosivach, ‘The lex Fannia’; Tamer, ‘Lex Oppia’; Hölkeskamp, Reconstructing, pp. 21–22; Zanda, Luxury, esp. pp. 13–14, 18, 25, 33, 36, 53–54, 57, 59, 65; Nebelin, ‘Konkurrenz’, esp. pp. 153–55; Beck, ‘Wealth’; Walter, ‘Legislation’, p. 539; Jehne, ‘Performing’.

Ex a equat io and a e mul at io

collectively agreed upon domains, norms, and rules, to aim for meritocratic competition, to ensure the ostensible equality of competitors and chances for success, and to affirm the comparability of competitors’ successes.6 This regulation was not always effective and the repeated regulatory attempts of the second century suggest that many elite men disregarded, evaded, or abused the norms and rules.7 Elite male status competition was highly — if not effectively — regulated. Rather than retreading this well-trodden ground, in this chapter I focus on the regulation of elite female status competition in mid-republican Rome. Elite women also competed with each other via conspicuous displays of capital (resources) in various domains.8 The Greek historian Polybius provides rich evidence for such displays in his account of the senatorial woman Tertia Aemilia L.f. (RE 179, m. before 213, d. c. 163–162) (Polybius, Historiae, xxxi.26.3–5):9 συνέβαινε δὲ τὴν Αἰμιλίαν, τοῦτο γὰρ ἦν ὄνομα τῇ προειρημένῃ γυναικί, μεγαλομερῆ τὴν περίστασιν ἔχειν ἐν ταῖς γυναικείαις ἐξόδοις, ἅτε συνηκμακυῖαν τῷ βίῳ καὶ τῇ τύχῃ τῇ Σκιπίωνος· χωρὶς γὰρ τοῦ περὶ τὸ σῶμα καὶ τὴν ἀπήνην κόσμου καὶ τὰ κανᾶ καὶ τὰ ποτήρια καὶ τἄλλα τὰ πρὸς τὴν θυσίαν, ποτὲ μὲν ἀργυρᾶ, ποτὲ δὲ χρυσᾶ, πάντα συνεξηκολούθει κατὰ τὰς ἐπιφανεῖς ἐξόδους αὐτῇ, τό τε τῶν παιδισκῶν καὶ τὸ τῶν οἰκετῶν τῶν παρεπομένων πλῆθος ἀκόλουθον ἦν τούτοις. (Aemilia, for that was this woman’s name, used to display magnificent circumstances in the women’s processions, since she had flourished in the life and good fortune of [Publius Cornelius] Scipio [Africanus]. For apart from the decorations of her body and of her four-wheeled carriage, all the baskets, cups, and instruments for the sacrifice — some of silver, some of gold — were brought along on the conspicuous processions with her, and the crowd of enslaved women [παιδίσκαι] and household enslaved persons [οἰκέται] following along was correspondingly large.)10 Elite female status competition was public and spectacular. But why did elite women compete? Elite women could not attain the annual magisterial

6 Purpose of regulation: Hölkeskamp, Reconstructing, pp. 21–22; 103–04, 106; Nebelin, ‘Konkurrenz’, pp. 153–55. 7 Repeated regulation: n. 5. 8 Elite female status competition: Webb, ‘Mihi’. Cf. brief mentions in Culham, ‘Again’, pp. 239–40; Hemelrijk, ‘Women’s’, pp. 223–24; Matrona docta, pp. 12, 202. 9 Tertia Aemilia: Webb, ‘Mihi’. On female nomenclature: Kajava, Roman Female. 10 Commentary: Walbank, A Historical Commentary, iii, 503, 505. Note that I use the adjective ‘enslaved’ and a relevant noun instead of the noun ‘slave’ to translate various ancient Greek and Latin terms for enslaved persons, as the former acknowledges their identity and personhood rather than reducing them to their condition or position in society. Such a change in language ‘carries them forward as people, not the property that they were in that time’: Cumbo-Floyd, ‘Slaves vs Enslaved People’.

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public offices and their attendant rewards, which were a primary impetus for elite male status competition, especially the limited offices with the power of military command (imperium), that is, the offices of praetor (one to six during 264–133) and consul (two). The praetorships and consulships conferred the highest social position (rank), power, and status on elite men and their families, and alone offered the potential rewards of commanding armies, namely additional status and wealth.11 Despite their ineligibility for these offices, elite women were linked by birth and marriage to the men who were eligible, and they shared their lives and competitive milieu. Women like Tertia Aemilia stood to gain or lose much from their male relatives’ competitive successes or failures. It stands to reason that they were invested in elite male status competition. Unfortunately, we lack accounts from the women as to why they might have competed among themselves. However, Polybius’s account of Tertia Aemilia, as well as his accounts of her female relatives, suggest elite women did so. Based on these and other accounts, I have argued elsewhere that elite women competed to enhance familial status and support their male relatives’ public lives and careers, and also to enhance their personal status.12 Furthermore, elite women may have felt socially compelled to compete to maintain their elite identities.13 Beyond their own reasons, elite women may have been encouraged or obligated to compete by their male relatives, as a means to advertise the collective capital of their families and enhance familial status: elite male and female status competition were integrated and mutually supportive.14 Whatever their reasons, elite women competed. Was such elite female status competition regulated by legislation and/or by the censors? While previous studies have identified the numerous laws affecting Roman women, no study has focused exclusively on how such regulation inhibited elite female status competition.15 This chapter aims to do so. Firstly, I define legislation and censorial actions. Subsequently, I provide a profile of elite women, some of their resources (status symbols, a social network, wealth), and their domains of status competition in mid-republican Rome. Then, I will establish that one law, the lex Oppia de mulieribus (215–195), and a censorial action of 184 directly affected conspicuous displays of wealth and status symbols by women. I will argue that both the law and censorial

11 Public office and competition: Hölkeskamp, ‘Conquest’; Reconstructing, pp. 107–24; Jehne, ‘The Rise of the Consular’; Beck, ‘Wealth’; Bernard, ‘Political Competition’. 12 Polybius, Historiae, xxxi.26.3–8, 28.8–9 with Walbank, A Historical Commentary, iii, 503, 505, 510–11; Webb, ‘Mihi’. 13 Social compulsion: Polybius, Historiae, xxxi.26.6–8 with Walbank, A Historical Commentary, iii, 505; Webb, ‘Mihi’. 14 Familial encouragement and collective capital: Polybius, Historiae, xxxi.26.3–8; xxviii.8–9 with Flower, ‘Spectacle’, pp. 342–43; Webb, ‘Mihi’. 15 Women and Roman law: Culham ‘The Lex Oppia’; ‘Again’; Dixon, ‘Polybius’; Gardner, Women; Hopwood, ‘Livy’; Evans Grubbs, Women; Cantarella, ‘Women’. Censors: Suolahti, The Roman Censors, pp. 20–70; Astin, ‘Regimen morum’.

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action regulated the practice of elite female status competition by inhibiting or punishing conspicuous displays of status symbols and wealth (resources) in the domains of adornment and transport and, in so doing, rendered elite married women invisible. Thereafter, I turn to the female response to the lex Oppia in 195 and I argue that when elite (and other) women successfully lobbied for the abrogation (repeal) of this law, they revealed their deep investment in conspicuous display and their status symbols, and, ipso facto, status competition. In so doing, I intend to shed light on some of the dynamics of status competition among elite women in mid-republican Rome.

Legislation and Censorial Actions In mid-republican Rome, new legislation and censorial actions affected men and women, elite and non-elite, but they were enacted by men. Below I outline some aspects of such legislation and censorial actions. Legislation

All newly enacted Roman laws (leges and plebiscita) in mid-republican Rome were bills (rogationes) proposed by a male magistrate that were subsequently ratified in a public assembly (of males) by vote.16 If ratified, a bill (rogatio) became law, taking the name of its proposer (rogator), and was binding on the Roman people, elite and non-elite, male and female.17 Depending on the sanction clauses and the discretion of the responsible magistrate, a penalty could range from a capital penalty (execution) to sub-capital penalties, including civil disabilities, a fine of up to half an estate, and temporary exile.18 Examples 16 Legislative procedure and magistrates: Crawford, Roman Statutes, pp. 7–34; Sandberg, ‘Tribunician’; ‘Consular’; Williamson, Laws; Vervaet, ‘Magistrates’, pp. 220–22; Walter, ‘Legislation’. Consular or praetorian laws were technically leges, while tribunician laws were technically plebiscita: Mousourakis, Fundamentals, p. 37. Here I do not feel the need to treat public and civil/private law as separate categories following Crawford, Roman Statutes, p. 6. 17 Most Roman laws comprised three parts. Firstly, a law included opening formulae, the prescript of the law (praescriptio legis), including the name of the proposer(s), an indication of the content, and details about its enactment. Secondly, a law included the text of the law (rogatio), usually in several sections. Thirdly, a law included closing formulae, the sanction (sanctio) clause(s), including provisions related to either the invalidity of violations of the law or a penalty (poena) for such violations, as well as the relation between the law and previous and future legislation, although some laws had no sanction. Form of Roman law: Schiller, Roman Law, pp. 243–51; Crawford, Roman Statutes, pp. 15–24. 18 Contemporary laws with such fines: Cato, fr. 167, Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta4 (fines are a maximum of half an estate); Festus, Glossaria Latina, 288L (lex Silia de mensuris et ponderibus of before c. 220, fine of up to half an estate) with Elster, Gesetze, pp. 460–62; Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum, I2 582 (lex Latina Tabulae Bantinae of c. 133–103, fine of up to half an estate) with Crawford, Roman Statutes, pp. 193–208. On other penalties: Nippel, Public Order, pp. 4–46; Bauman, Crime, pp. 9–34.

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of penalties imposed on women in the third and second centuries include a heavy fine for some married women for alleged sexual misconduct in 295, a fine of 25,000 asses for the elite woman Claudia Ap.f. (RE 32) for improper public speech to a crowd in 246, exile for some married women for alleged sexual misconduct in 213, and capital penalties for the elite and non-elite female members of the cult of Bacchus in 186.19 Many of our surviving ancient sources for laws contain a very small fraction of the original content, omit the sanction clauses (and thus the penalties), and are far later than the laws themselves and open to anachronism, including the sources for the lex Oppia that I examine in this chapter. We often cannot be certain of the purpose or intention behind a particular law; usually, we must infer it from either the wording of the law, where known, or the occasion of its enactment.20 Laws could have more than just deterrent or legitimacy purpose, they could also have an expressive purpose, that is, they could reinforce or shape social norms.21 As such, Roman laws, while primarily reactive to particular historical events, contexts, or persons, could also be proactive (e.g. by shaping social norms).22 Censorial Actions

Censorial actions constituted all those actions taken by the Roman censors during their term of public office. The censors were two senior ex-magistrates elected quinquennially typically for a period of eighteen months to conduct the census and other matters.23 Freeborn Roman women were citizens and both they and their attendant property were registered in this census, either as dependents of legally independent (sui iuris) adult male citizens (male declarants), or independently and separately if they were legally independent 19 295: Livy, Ab urbe condita, x.31.9 with Oakley, Commentary, iv, 341–43. 246: Livy, Periochae, 19; Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, viii.1.damn.4; Suetonius, Tiberius, ii.3; Gellius, Noctes Atticae, x.6.2 with Suolahti, ‘Claudia’. 213: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxv.2.9 with Weissenborn, Titi Livi Ab urbe condita libri, v, 109. 186: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxix.8–19 with other ancient sources and bibliography in Briscoe, Commentary: 38–40, pp. 230–90. 20 Interpretation: Grueber, Damage, pp. xvi–xvii; Williamson, Laws, pp. 62–97, esp. 71, 83, 87; Walter, ‘Legislation’, esp. pp. 536–39. 21 Expressive function: McGinn, ‘Expressive’; Walter, ‘Legislation’. 22 Reactive and proactive: Robinson, Sources, p. 23; McGinn, ‘Expressive’; Walter, ‘Legislation’, p. 536. 23 The remit and scope of the censors’ actions was vast, but the most relevant, for present purposes, were: censorial edicts (edicta censoria) on diverse matters; the registering of Roman citizens and their property in the census; the selection of senators for the Senate; the review of the equestrians; the guidance of public and private conduct and morals; and the assessment, setting, and management of taxes and rents (e.g. the property tax, tributum ex censu, and the many other forms of state revenue, vectigalia): Suolahti, The Roman Censors, pp. 20–70; Astin, ‘Regimen morum’; Lintott, Constitution, pp. 117–20; Welbourn, ‘Censors and Society’; Clemente, ‘When the Senators’.

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widows or orphans.24 The censors had broad discretion to punish citizens. If a censor judged that a man had breached standards of public or private conduct and morals, that man could face punitive censorial actions including, for example, a public reproof, a public censorial mark (nota censoria) against a man’s name on the census, expulsion of a senator from the Senate, removal of the public horse from one of the 1800 equestrians with a public horse (equites equo publico), and reduction in property class and attendant voting rights.25 In contrast, surviving evidence suggests the censors did not tend to directly target women with their actions in mid-republican Rome, although they did publicly address issues of marriage, divorce, and spousal relations, and, in one instance in 184, they directly targeted female adornment and vehicles, an instance I will examine below.26 As with the laws, surviving ancient sources for censorial actions are late and lacunose.

Elite Women Who were the elite women of mid-republican Rome? I define elite women as senatorial women, that is, the daughters and wives of the c. 300 senators in the Senate, who were themselves members by birth or marriage of the senatorial elite.27 These women can be contradistinguished with non-senatorial equestrian women, freeborn women, freedwomen, and enslaved women.28 Elite women derived social position (rank) from their natal and marital families: some elite women were praetorian or consular senatorial women, etc., reflecting 24 Women and the census: Cicero, De legibus, iii.7 (familiae); Livy, Ab urbe condita, iii.3.9 (orbae); Periochae 59 (pupillae, viduae); Dionysius Halicarnassensis, Antiquitates Romanae, iv.15.6 (γυναῖκες); v.75.3; ix.25.2 with Hin, ‘Counting’, pp. 201–04; Northwood, ‘Census’, pp. 258–59, esp. n. 5. 25 Punitive censorial actions: Suolahti, The Roman Censors, pp. 49–52; Astin, ‘Regimen morum’, pp. 15–19; Zanda, Luxury, pp. 36–48; Welbourn, ‘Censors and Society’, esp. 155–78; Clemente, ‘When the Senators’, esp. pp. 213–14. 26 Censors and women: Suolahti, The Roman Censors, p. 49. Censors and marriage: Suolahti, The Roman Censors, p. 52; Astin, ‘Regimen morum’, pp. 25–26. 27 Elite women as senatorial women: Hemelrijk, Matrona docta, pp. 10–13, 202; Valentini, Matronae; Webb, ‘Gendering’, pp. 147–48; ‘Mihi’. 28 Senatorial and non-senatorial equestrians were de iure divided into two distinct orders (ordines) by the plebiscitum reddendorum equorum of c. 129, but they had long been de facto divided socio-politically, financially, and visually: Nicolet, L’ordre, pp. 103–11; Wiseman, ‘The Definition’; Rosenstein, ‘Aristocrats’, p. 6 n. 31; Davenport, Equestrian, esp. pp. 42–50. For example, senators and their sons were treated as a distinct group in the provisions of the lex Claudia de nave senatorum of 218: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxi.63.3 with Elster, Gesetze, pp. 187– 90; Rosenstein, ‘Aristocrats’, pp. 16, 19–20. The division between senatorial and non-senatorial equestrian women is less clear in mid-republican Rome, but, in the tributum temerarium of 210, senators’ daughters and wives received special dispensation to retain gold rings and an ounce of gold: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxvi.36, esp. xxvi.36.5, 8, 12 with Weissenborn, Titi Livi Ab urbe condita libri, v, 287–88; Davenport, Equestrian, p. 49 n. 155. This account suggests that by 210 senatorial women were socially and visually distinct from other women, due to the senatorial social position (rank) of their fathers or husbands and their rings.

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the senatorial membership and highest attained magisterial public office of their father or husband(s).29 These elite women had particular resources — including status symbols, a social network, and wealth — and domains of status competition as I detail below. Elite Women and Senatorial Status Symbols

Elite women wore status symbols that signalled their senatorial social position (rank): gold rings (anuli aurei). Senators and their wives, sons, and daughters had the privilege of publicly wearing gold rings — although some did not do so — and this privilege grew to encompass non-senatorial equestrians by the late republic.30 Such rings were probably signet rings (with engraved gems), used, inter alia, to seal documents, containers, and rooms.31 The Roman historian Livy ties these gold rings to symbolic actions by senators in 304, 210, and 169, suggesting they were an important public and visible status symbol of senatorial social position (rank) in mid-republican Rome.32 The Roman politician Cicero’s account in his In Verrem of the creation of a gold signet ring in 112 for the praetor Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi (RE 88, praetor 112) indicates that such a ring typically included a semuncia of gold.33 Gold rings clearly demarcated a woman’s social position (rank) as a senatorial woman. The ordo matronarum and its Status Symbols

Senatorial and perhaps non-senatorial equestrian married women were members of an organized and hierarchical social network, the order of married women (ordo matronarum), whose criteria for entry included marriage, senatorial or

29 Elite female social position (rank): Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum, ii.1.5; Orationes Philippicae, iii.16; Pro Caelio, 33–34; Pro Plancio, 18; Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino, 147 with Webb, ‘Gendering’; ‘Mihi’. 30 Senatorial privilege: Cicero, In Verrem, ii.4.56–57; Livy, Ab urbe condita, ix.46.10–14; xxiii.12.1– 2; xxvi.36.5; xliii.16.14; Pliny, Naturalis historia, xxxiii.17–21; L. Annaeus Florus, Epitome de T. Livio Bellorum omnium annorum DCC Libri duo, i.22.96–98 with Nicolet, L’ordre, pp. 139–43; Berg, ‘Wearing Wealth’, pp. 44–45; Olson, Masculinity, pp. 65–67; Bernard, ‘Political Competition’; Davenport, Equestrian, esp. pp. 49–50. That women of the gens Quin(c)tia did not wear gold rings by custom does not suggest that all other senatorial women did not do so: Pliny, Naturalis historia, xxxiii.21. Instead, it suggests this was a particular and unusual custom for that gens. Equestrians and gold rings in the late republic: Cicero, In Verrem, ii.3.185–87; Pliny, Naturalis historia, xxxiii.29–34, esp. 32–33; Suetonius, Divus Iulius, 33; Macrobius, Saturnalia, iii.14.13 with Nicolet, L’ordre, pp. 139–43; Davenport, Equestrian, esp. pp. 49–50. 31 Signet rings: Plautus, Bacchides, 327–30; Curculio, 345–48; Menaechmi, 1035–37; Trinummus, 786–90; Pliny, Naturalis historia, xxxiii.22–28; Digesta, l.16.74 with Berg, ‘Wearing Wealth’, pp. 18, 22, 27, 44–45; Olson, Masculinity, p. 119. Signet rings and women: Plautus, Asinaria, 778; Casina, 144; Digesta, xxxiv.2.25; xl.10.4 with Berg, ‘Wearing Wealth’, pp. 18, 44–45. 32 Livy, Ab urbe condita, ix.46.10–14; xxvi.36.5; xliii.16.14 with Oakley, Commentary, iii, 636–39; Davenport, Equestrian, esp. pp. 49–50. 33 Cicero, In Verrem, ii.4.56–57.

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equestrian social position (rank), and wealth. This order comprised at least 1400 members by the year 42 in the late republic, but its size is unknown in the middle republic, although it could have included the wives of the c. 300 senators or perhaps all the wives of the privileged 1800 senatorial and non-senatorial equestrians with a public horse (equites equo publico).34 Members of the ordo and/or wealthy married women had particular privileges and status symbols, including unrestricted movement in Rome, the use of the two-wheeled carriage (carpentum) and the four-wheeled carriage (pilentum) for religious and secular purposes in Rome, the use of the insignia of ears/earrings (aurium insignia), the distinction of the fillet (vittae discrimen), gold trimmings/borders (aurea segmenta), purple clothing (purpurea vestis), and possibly funerary orations (laudationes).35 According to the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, Livy, the Roman author Valerius Maximus, and the Greek biographer Plutarch, many of these were honours granted by senatorial decree to married women and/or the ordo for services they rendered to Rome in the early republic, including intercession with enemies and financial contributions.36 Whether or not this is mere aetiological speculation, these authors projected these back into their distant past, suggesting their antiquity. These were honours, status symbols of the ordo, and some of the means by which married women competed for, compared, and differentiated their status, as we will see.37 Elite Female Wealth

Elite married women were wealthy, for they had access to their male relatives’ property and the property in their dowries, inheritances, personal effects,

34 Ordo matronarum: Plautus, Cistellaria, 22–26; Livy, Ab urbe condita, x.23.10; xxxiv.7.1; Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, v.2.1; viii.3.3; [Seneca], de Remediis Fortuitorum, xvi.3; Appian, Bella civilia, iv.32–34 with Purcell, ‘Livia’, pp. 170, 179; Hemelrijk, Matrona docta, pp. 11–12, 202; Fantham, Roman Readings, pp. 171–74; Valentini, Matronae, pp. 44–81; Webb, ‘Mihi’, pp. 257–58; Rohr Vio, Le custodi, pp. 142, 171, 222. For at least 1400 members of the ordo by 42 in the late republic: Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, viii.3.3; Appian, Bella civilia, iv.32–34 with Webb, ‘Mihi’. The number of members of the ordo (1400) in 42 is remarkably close to the number of equites equo publico (1800), suggesting to me that they may have been the wives thereof. Speculation about its composition is my own: Webb, ‘Mihi’. On the equestrians with a public horse: n. 4. 35 Status symbols: Cicero, De oratore, ii.44; Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, xiv.116.9; Livy, Ab urbe condita, v.25.9; v.50.7; Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, v.2.1; Plutarch, Moralia, 242.E–F (De mulierum virtutibus, 1); Vitae parallelae, Camillus, viii.3–4; Festus, Glossaria Latina, 142L, 225L, 282L; Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum, VI 31075 with Hemelrijk, ‘Women’s’, pp. 222–23, 229–30; Matrona docta, p. 11; Hillard, ‘Popilia’; Berg, ‘Wearing Wealth’, p. 43; Hudson, ‘Carpento certe’; Östenberg, ‘Gendering’. 36 Senatorial grants: Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica, xiv.116.9; Livy, Ab urbe condita, v.25.9; v.50.7; Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, v.2.1; Plutarch, Vitae parallelae, Camillus, viii.3–4 with some scepticism from Ogilvie, Livy, pp. 684, 741. 37 Status symbols: Berg, ‘Wearing Wealth’, esp. pp. 18, 42–43; Olson, Dress, pp. 98, 102.

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and peculium.38 Moreover, if an elite woman became a legally independent widow, her financial independence could increase.39 While evidence for the exact nature and quantity of their wealth is scant, a few examples exist. The aforementioned Tertia Aemilia, wife of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus (RE 336, consul 205, 194), had elaborate personal property (dress, religious accoutrement, vehicles, enslaved persons) and access to (at least) 50 talents (300,000 denarii, 3 million asses) of Africanus’s fortune as usufruct after his death, that is, she had the right to use and profit from the 50 talents without diminishing it.40 Her two daughters, the elder Cornelia P.f. (RE 406) and the younger Cornelia P.f. ‘mater Gracchorum’ (RE 407), received dowries totalling 50 talents each.41 The second wife (name unknown) of Tertia Aemilia’s brother Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus (RE 114, consul 182, 168) had a dowry of 25 talents (150,000 denarii, 1.5 million asses), while Cornelia Cn.f. (RE 405), daughter of Cnaeus Cornelius Scipio Calvus (RE 345, consul 222), had a far more modest dowry ex aerario of 40,000 asses.42 Moreover, wealthy legally independent women provided the annual maintenance (aes hordearium) of around 2000 asses for the public horses of the equestrians with a public horse.43 To put this wealth in perspective, a basic daily wage in Rome in the 38 Women, dowry sizes, and access: Polybius, Historiae, xviii.35.6; xxxi.22.4 (160 bce); xxxi.27 (c. 163 bce) with Evans, War, pp. 53–71; Saller, Patriarchy, pp. 204–24; Treggiari, Roman Marriage, pp. 325, 350–56. Women and inherited property: Cato, fr. 158, Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta4 (169 bce); Polybius, Historiae, xxxi.27.5 (c. 163 bce); Lucilius, fr. 519–20, 1350M; Cicero, In Verrem, ii.1.107 (prior to 169 bce); Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxix.9.7 (186 bce) with Champlin, Judgments, pp. 121–24; Evans, War, pp. 71–88. Female personal effects (res, probably dress, jewellery, and toiletries, sc. vestis, ornamenta, and mundus muliebris): Plautus, Amphitruo, 928; Menaechmi, 801–04; Trinummus, 267; Polybius, Historiae, xxxi.26 (c. 163 bce); Lucilius, fr. 519–20M with Champlin, Judgments, p. 123; Berg, ‘Wearing Wealth’; Treggiari, Roman Marriage, p. 447. Women and peculium: Plautus, Casina, 193–202 (matronae); Mostellaria, 253 (adulescens giving peculium to meretrix) with Treggiari, Roman Marriage, pp. 363, 381, 445–46. 39 Widowhood and independence: Champlin, Judgments, pp. 122–24; Hemelrijk, Matrona docta, pp. 9–13; Treggiari, Roman Marriage, p. 353; Valentini, ‘From Mother’. 40 Africanus feasibly assigned this 50 talents to Tertia Aemilia as usufruct in a legacy, to maintain her during her widowhood: Polybius, Historiae, xxxi.26–27 with Walbank, A Historical Commentary, iii, 235–39, 503–09; Dixon, ‘Polybius’, pp. 151–56; Champlin, Judgments, p. 123; Valentini, ‘From Mother’, pp. 133–35; Webb, ‘Mihi’. I am indebted to B. Hopwood for the clarification regarding usufruct. Here 1 talent = 6000 drachmas/ denarii = 60,000 asses, following Walbank, A Historical Commentary, iii, 506; Kay, Economic, pp. 22–23, 37–38. 41 Dowries: Polybius, Historiae, xxxi.27 with Walbank, A Historical Commentary, iii, 505–09; Dixon, ‘Polybius’, pp. 152–56; Champlin, Judgments, p. 123; Valentini, ‘From Mother’, p. 134. 42 Second wife of Macedonicus: Polybius, Historiae, xviii.35.6; xxxi.22.4; Livy, Periochae, 46; Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, iv.4.9 with Walbank, A Historical Commentary, ii, 594–97. Cornelia Cn.f.: Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, iv.4.10; Seneca, Dialogi, xii.12.5–7; Quaestiones naturales, i.17.8–9; Frontinus, Strategemata, iv.3.4; Apuleius, Apologia, xviii.20–19.1; Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae, xiv.6.11. 43 Aes hordearium: Cicero, De republica, ii.36; Livy, Ab urbe condita, i.43.9; Gaius, Institutiones, iv.27.

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early second century was about 3 asses (one third of a denarius), while the wealthiest Greek in the early second century, Alexander the Isian (RE 32), possessed a private fortune of just over 200 talents (1.2 million denarii, 12 million asses).44 Elite women also had elaborate houses and villas, such as Tertia Aemilia’s younger daughter Cornelia’s villa at Misenum and Sulpicia’s (RE 107 and/or 108) palatial home near the Palatine in Rome.45 These senatorial women had significant wealth at their disposal.46 Other women were wealthy as well, especially non-senatorial equestrian women and other women in the first property class (prima classis) in the census, that is, those whose male declarant (or independently if sui iuris) met the property qualification of 100,000 asses (10,000 denarii), but here I focus on senatorial women.47 Domains of Elite Female Status Competition

Previous scholarship has uncovered the many overlapping domains of elite male status competition, including but not limited to magisterial and sacerdotal public office, public religious rites (sacra publica) and public games (ludi), adornment (in its totality), retinue, family, building projects, houses and villas, banquets, patronage, oratory, jurisprudence, public funerals, and warfare.48 I have elsewhere argued that elite women competed through similar interacting and overlapping domains, including sacerdotal public office, public religious rites, transport, adornment (in its totality), religious instruments, retinues, family, patronage, houses and villas, banquets, and public funerals.49 In many of these domains, visibility and wealth were of utmost importance, with the caveat that public conspicuous display was socially acceptable, but some forms of private display condemned, e.g. extravagant private banqueting was condemned and highly regulated.50 Through such conspicuous display, elite men and women strove to attain, enhance, retain, and reproduce their status in mid-republican Rome. I turn now to the regulation of female status competition.

44 Basic daily wage: Plautus, Mostellaria, 357; Polybius, Historiae, vi.39.12 with Walbank, A Historical Commentary, i, 722; Crawford, Coinage, pp. 147–49. Alexander the Isian’s fortune: Polybius, Historiae, xxi.26.9–14 with Walbank, A Historical Commentary, ii, 597; iii, 123. 45 Cornelia’s villa at Misenum: Plutarch, Vitae parallelae, Caius Gracchus, xix.1–2 with Dixon, Cornelia, pp. 43–48. On identification problems with Sulpicia: Schultz, Women’s, p. 144 n. 24; Briscoe, Commentary: 38–40, p. 236. Sulpicia’s home: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxix.11–14 with Briscoe, Commentary: 38–40, pp. 236, 267–68. 46 Senatorial wealth: Shatzman, Senatorial. 47 Equestrian wealth: Nicolet, L’ordre, pp. 285–346. Wealth of the prima classis: Yakobson, Elections, pp. 43–48. 48 See: n. 1. 49 Webb, ‘Mihi’. 50 Public versus private conspicuous display: Cicero, Pro Flacco, 28; Pro Murena, 76; Sallust, Bellum Catilinae, ix.2; Vitruvius, De architectura, vi.5.2 with Zanda, Luxury, pp. 10–26.

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Regulation of Female Status Competition in MidRepublican Rome In mid-republican Rome, one law and one censorial action directly affected female conspicuous display: the lex Oppia de mulieribus of 215 and the censorial action targeting female adornment and transport in 184. I will argue that these regulated the practice of elite (and other) female status competition by inhibiting or punishing conspicuous displays of wealth and status symbols in the domains of adornment and transport, and thereby some of the means and opportunities for status comparison and differentiation. I will then address the longevity, efficacy, and significance of this regulation. These regulations also impacted other women, but here I focus primarily on the implications for elite women. Lex Oppia de mulieribus of 215

In 215, amid the tribulations of the Second Punic War (218–201) and following a financial crisis in 216, the plebeian tribune Caius Oppius (RE 8) proposed the lex Oppia de mulieribus, a law that directly targeted female adornment and transport.51 An abbreviated summary of the law survives in Livy’s Ab urbe condita and in later sources, but no sanction clauses survive, meaning that we do not know if there were penalties for violations thereof. In what follows, I address Livy’s summary of the law, its effect, purpose, occasion, and possible penalties. Livy indicates the lex Oppia provided that no Roman woman was to have (habere) more than a semuncia of gold (semuncia auri), or wear particolored clothing (vestimentum versicolor), or be conveyed in a yoked vehicle (iunctum vehiculum) within one mile of the city or town except during public religious rites (Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.1.3): Tulerat eam C. Oppius tribunus plebis Q. Fabio Ti. Sempronio consulibus in medio ardore Punici belli, ne qua mulier plus semunciam auri haberet neu vestimento versicolori uteretur neu iuncto vehiculo in

51 Financial crisis of 216: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxiii.21.6; xxiv.18.12–14; xxvi.36 with Vishnia, State, pp. 99–113; Andreau, Banking, pp. 114–15; Elster, Gesetze, pp. 209–10; Niczyporuk, ‘Mensarii’, pp. 110–13. Ancient sources on the lex Oppia: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.1.3; Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, ix.1.3; Tacitus, Annales, iii.33–34; [Aurelius Victor], De viris illustribus, 47; Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII, iv.20.14; Zonaras, Epitome historiarum, ix.17.1. Modern discussion: Rotondi, Leges, pp. 254, 267–68; Pomeroy, Goddesses, pp. 178–81; Culham ‘The Lex Oppia’; ‘Again’; Hemelrijk, ‘Women’s’; Baltrusch, Regimen morum, pp. 52–59; García Jurado, ‘La critica’; Evans, War, pp. 61–65; Bauman, Women, pp. 25–27, 31–34; Hopwood, ‘Livy’; Perl and El-Qalqili, ‘Problematik’; Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 39–63; Elster, Gesetze, pp. 217–20; Zanda, Luxury, pp. 51, 69, 79, 114–17; Tamer, Lex Oppia; Hudson, ‘Carpento certe’, pp. 232–45; Ehrman, ‘Is All that Glitters’.

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urbe oppidove aut propius inde mille passus nisi sacrorum publicorum causa veheretur. (It [the lex Oppia] had been enacted by the plebeian tribune C. Oppius in the consulship of Q. Fabius and Ti. Sempronius amidst the fervour of the Punic War, [and its provisions were] that no woman could have more than a half-ounce of gold, or wear particoloured clothing, or be conveyed in a city or town by yoked vehicle, or within a thousand paces (mile) [of a city or town], except for the sake of public religious rites.)52 I interpret habere here as to wear, not as to have, given the retention of gold by women after 215, as I will discuss subsequently; I interpret vestimentum versicolor as purple clothing (purpura) and iunctum vehiculum as two-wheeled carriage (carpentum), as Livy clarifies later within the same account.53 These provisions directly affected two domains of elite female status competition, adornment and transport, and inhibited the conspicuous display of wealth and some of the status symbols of the ordo matronarum, namely, gold adornment heavier than a semuncia, purple clothes, and the use of the carpentum for secular activities.54 The weight maximum for gold, a semuncia, is particularly suggestive. As mentioned previously, Cicero links this weight with the creation of a gold signet ring for the praetor Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi in 112.55 Perhaps, then, the semuncia weight maximum allowed senatorial women to retain their gold signet rings, that is, their senatorial status symbols. If this was indeed the case, the effect of the lex Oppia was to prohibit senatorial and non-senatorial equestrian women from displaying some of their wealth and status symbols of the ordo, while allowing senatorial women to retain a senatorial status symbol. Scholars are divided over the purpose and effect of the law, particularly over whether this law was confiscatory (interpreting Livy’s habere as have) or sumptuary (interpreting Livy’s habere as wear), although legal scholars

52 Commentary: Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 44–45. 53 For retention of gold, see discussion below and for a similar interpretation: Culham, ‘The Lex Oppia’, p. 787; ‘Again’, pp. 236–37; Baltrusch, Regimen morum, p. 53; Hopwood, ‘Livy’, pp. 129–30; Berg, ‘Wearing Wealth’, p. 43; Elster, Gesetze, pp. 218–19; Kunst, ‘Ornamenta uxoria’, p. 133; Zanda, Luxury, p. 115. For vestimentum versicolor as purpura, see Livy’s clarification at xxxiv.3.9, xxxiv.4.10, 14, and xxxiv.7.3–4, 10. Similar interpretation: Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 44–45; Culham, ‘The Lex Oppia’, p. 787; ‘Again’, p. 236; Baltrusch, Regimen morum, p. 53; Hopwood, ‘Livy’, p. 130; Berg, ‘Wearing Wealth’, p. 43; Elster, Gesetze, p. 219; Ehrman, ‘Is All that Glitters’, pp. 810–11. Contra: Olson, Dress, p. 148. For iunctum vehiculum as carpentum, see Livy’s clarification at xxxiv.3.9. Similar interpretation: Hudson, ‘Carpento certe’, pp. 232–45. 54 Domains: Berg, ‘Wearing Wealth’, p. 43; Hudson, ‘Carpento certe’, pp. 232–45; Webb, ‘Mihi’. Status symbols of the ordo: n. 35. 55 Cicero, In Verrem, ii.4.56–57.

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tend towards sumptuary.56 The occasion of the law provides context: the lex Oppia was enacted after Rome suffered a devastating defeat and the death of numerous male citizens at the hands of the Carthaginians at Cannae (216), and after the aforementioned financial crisis of 216.57 It is possible, then, that after this defeat and earlier male deaths during the Second Punic War, significant wealth had devolved from Roman men to women via inheritance.58 Given the occasion of the law, it is conceivable that magistrates would attempt to confiscate wealth from women through legal or extra-legal mechanisms; in this case, however, subsequent historical evidence suggests that the law was sumptuary. Firstly, in 214, in an act of civic patronage during the financial crisis, widows and orphans deposited their wealth (pecunia) in the public treasury (aerarium), which indicates widows still had access to their wealth up to that point.59 Secondly, in 210, the senatorial elite, encouraged by the consul Marcus Valerius Laevinus (RE 211, consul 210), deposited a majority of their gold, silver, and stamped bronze (aurum, argentum, aes signatum) into the same public treasury to fund the navy, as a kind of emergency property tax (tributum temerarium).60 In this latter act, senatorial wives and daughters were able to retain their gold rings (anuli) and an ounce by weight of gold (singulae unciae pondo auri) each, which indicates elite women could still wear their gold rings — if they were below a semuncia in weight — and have (but not wear) more than a semuncia of gold.61 Thirdly, it appears that some or all of the gold in the dowries of married women remained untouched, as married women were able to draw on this gold for religious donations in 207.62 These actions all indicate that women were able to retain far more than

56 Confiscatory (or asset seizure): Pomeroy, Goddesses, p. 178; Bauman, Women, pp. 25–26; Olson, Dress, pp. 100–04. Sumptuary: Culham, ‘The Lex Oppia’, p. 793; ‘Again’, pp. 238–41; Hemelrijk, ‘Women’s’, pp. 220–21; Baltrusch, Regimen morum, 52–59; Evans, War, pp. 16, 52–53, 61–65; Hopwood, ‘Livy’, pp. 129–30; Elster, Gesetze, pp. 217–20; Kunst, ‘Ornamenta uxoria’, p. 133; Zanda, Luxury, pp. 51, 69, 114–17; Tamer, ‘Lex Oppia’; Ehrman, ‘Is All that Glitters’. 57 Losses at Cannae: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxii.49.15 with caution regarding exact figures from Brunt, Italian Manpower, p. 419 n. 4; Erdkamp, ‘Manpower’, p. 67. 58 Male deaths during the Second Punic War: Hin, Demography, pp. 142–71. Possibility of devolution of wealth: Evans, War, pp. 27, 53. 59 214: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxiv.18.13–14 with Weissenborn, Titi Livi Ab urbe condita libri, v, 41–42; Evans, War, p. 52; Andreau, ‘Banking’, pp. 114–15; Niczyporuk, ‘Mensarii’, p. 111. 60 210: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxvi.36.5–11 with Weissenborn, Titi Livi Ab urbe condita libri, v, 287–89; Vishnia, State, pp. 97–98; Niczyporuk, ‘Mensarii’, p. 113. Cf. L. Annaeus Florus, Epitome de T. Livio Bellorum omnium annorum DCC Libri duo, i.22.96–98; Festus, Glossaria Latina, 500L. Tributum temerarium: Festus, Glossaria Latina, 500L with Nicolet, The World of the Citizen, pp. 156–57. 61 210: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxvi.36.5 with Weissenborn, Titi Livi Ab urbe condita libri, v, 287; Oakley, Commentary, iii, 638; Davenport, Equestrian, p. 49 n. 155. Cf. L. Annaeus Florus, Epitome de T. Livio Bellorum omnium annorum DCC Libri duo, i.22.96–98. 62 207: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxvii.37.9–10 with Weissenborn, Titi Livi Ab urbe condita libri, vi, 92–93.

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a semuncia of gold after 215, suggesting that the lex Oppia was not confiscatory or, at least, unsuccessfully so.63 As mentioned, the effect of the law was that it inhibited conspicuous displays of gold and purple, and the secular use of carpenta by women in Rome, that is, expensive objects that were also some of the status symbols of the ordo. It was therefore at least partially sumptuary in purpose, as it limited some of the means and opportunities for families to display their wealth and compare and differentiate their status, and thus perhaps curbed their spending on gold jewellery, purple clothing, and vehicles.64 It is feasible that this legislation was enacted to either enforce or express a form of social cohesion and wartime solidarity during the Second Punic War and the attendant financial crises. Conspicuous displays of wealth and status (symbols) might have otherwise led to social discontent between the wealthy and the poor, disrupting wartime solidarity.65 Another purpose may have been to reduce conspicuous, public movement and appearances by women for secular purposes, as suggested by the limitations imposed on the secular use of carpenta.66 It is possible that some women — their husbands or male relatives absent or deceased due to warfare — were engaging in public and private activities deemed inappropriate by some male members of the elite. Married women had engaged in mourning throughout the city after Cannae in 216, mourning that was consequently limited by senatorial decree, perhaps due to its socially disruptive nature.67 In the same year, two Vestals, Opimia (RE 14) and Floronia (RE 1), were accused of sexual misconduct, one committed suicide, and the other was buried alive near the Porta Collina, as was custom.68 Furthermore, as previously mentioned, in 213 several married women were placed on public trial for sexual misconduct and punished with exile.69 It would appear that female activities were very much in focus after Cannae. The limitations on the secular use of carpenta may reflect a desire on the part of some elite men to restrict some female activities by restricting their movement. As to penalties for violating the lex Oppia, while no sources retain sanction clauses or mention a penalty, other, later sumptuary legislation included penalties (unstated or confiscations), and contemporary laws with extant sanction clauses 63 Interpretation: Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, p. 44. 64 Interpretation: Culham, ‘The Lex Oppia’, pp. 792–93; ‘Women’, p. 146. 65 Interpretation: Culham, ‘The Lex Oppia’, p. 793; ‘Again’, pp. 243–45; ‘Women’, p. 146; Hemelrijk, ‘Women’s’, pp. 220–22; Zanda, Luxury, pp. 114–17. 66 For such conspicuous public appearances, cf. the reputedly public, political actions of Pomponia M’.f. (RE 28) in Polybius, Historiae, x.4.4–8 with Culham, ‘Women’, p. 146 and Webb, ‘Gendering’, pp. 158–60. 67 Mourning: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxii.56.4–5; Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, i.1.15; Plutarch, Vitae parallelae, Fabius Maximus, xviii.1 with Bauman, Women, p. 24; Culham, ‘Women’, p. 146. 68 Vestals: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxv.57.2; Plutarch, Vitae parallelae, Fabius Maximus, xviii.3 with Bauman, Women, pp. 23–24; Culham, ‘Women’, pp. 146–47. 69 Public trial: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxv.2.9 with Evans, War, pp. 27–28.

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included fines of up to half an estate as penalties.70 Presumably, then, the lex Oppia either included such penalties or had no penalties, that is, either elite women risked punishment by violating the law or did not risk punishment. As I will discuss subsequently, the lex Oppia fomented great discontent among women, resulting in a major female demonstration and abrogation (repeal) of the law in 195. This suggests to me that there was a penalty and that it was significant, as otherwise women may not have felt the need to demonstrate. Livy records a partial and temporary reprieve of the law after the Roman victory at the Metaurus in 207, when married women (matronae) gave thanks to the gods in their most magnificent clothing (amplissimae vestes), but this reprieve was sanctioned by senatorial decree and was not an abrogation of the lex Oppia.71 Despite this brief reprieve, the lex Oppia remained in force until its abrogation in 195, a matter I return to later below. Censorial Action of 184

In the census of 184, the censors Lucius Valerius Flaccus (RE 173, consul 195, censor 184) and Marcus Porcius Cato (RE 9, consul 195, censor 184) directly targeted female adornment and transport through their censorial edict(s).72 Abbreviated accounts of the censorial action survive in Livy’s Ab urbe condita and Plutarch’s Vitae parallelae, Cato Maior, and there is a brief mention in the Roman historian Nepos’s Cato. In what follows, I address Livy’s account, then discuss the effect, purpose, occasion, and implications of the censorial action. In Livy’s account of the census of 184, he indicates the censors removed the public horse (equus publicus) of the elite man Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiagenus (RE 337, consul 190), increased the census assessments tenfold for jewellery (ornamenta), female dress (vestis muliebris), and vehicles (vehicula) worth more than 15,000 asses (1500 denarii) and for young enslaved persons (mancipia) worth more than 10,000 asses (1000 denarii), and determined a property tax (tributum ex censu) liability of 3 asses per thousand for these items (Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxix.44.1–3): In equitatu recognoscendo L. Scipioni Asiageni ademptus equus. In censibus quoque accipiendis tristis et aspera in omnes ordines censura

70 Later sumptuary laws and penalties: Macrobius, Saturnalia, iii.17.6 (lex Fannia cibaria of 161 and lex Didia sumptuaria of 143, unstated penalties); Suetonius, Divus Iulius, xliii.2 (various leges sumptuariae, confiscations) with Elster, Gesetze, pp. 396–400, 434–35; Dari-Mattiacci and Plisecka, ‘Luxury’, pp. 5–6. Contemporary laws with extant sanction clauses: n. 18. 71 207: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxvii.51.8–9 with Weissenborn, Titi Livi Ab urbe condita libri, v, 122; Hopwood, ‘Livy’, p. 130. 72 The ancient sources on this censorial action: Nepos, Cato, ii.3; Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxix.44.1–3; Plutarch, Vitae parallelae, Cato Maior, xviii.2–3. Nepos’s account connects these actions with Cato’s censorial edict (edictum). Modern discussion: Suolahti, The Roman Censors, p. 356; Astin, Cato, p. 83; ‘Regimen morum’, pp. 16, 24; Baltrusch, Regimen morum, pp. 26–27; Briscoe, Commentary: 38–40, pp. 363–64.

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fuit. Ornamenta et vestem muliebrem et vehicula, quae pluris quam quindecim milium aeris essent, in censum referre iuratores iussi; item mancipia minora annis viginti, quae post proximum lustrum decem milibus aeris aut pluris eo venissent, uti ea quoque deciens tanto pluris quam quanti essent aestimarentur, et his rebus omnibus terni in milia aeris attribuerentur. (In the review of the equestrians, the [public] horse of L. Scipio Asiagenus was removed. The censorship was also severe and harsh on all orders in its census [assessments]. The assessors were instructed to assess jewellery [or ornaments], female dress, and vehicles worth more than 15,000 asses [their value] in the census. Enslaved persons [mancipia] under twenty years of age who had fetched 10,000 asses or more since the last lustrum [i.e. last census] were likewise [to be assessed] at ten times more than what they were valued, and all these items were to be taxed at 3 asses per thousand.)73 Beyond the tenfold increase in assessments for these items, the determination of a property tax liability of 3 asses per thousand (0.3 per cent) was significant; for example, it was three times higher than one well-known instance of a property tax liability of 1 as per thousand (0.1 per cent) imposed on twelve Latin colonies in 204.74 So, for example, if a piece of gold jewellery, a dress, a vehicle, or a young enslaved person was worth 16,000 asses (1600 denarii), it was assessed at 160,000 asses (16,000 denarii), and the property tax on it would be 480 asses (48 denarii). We can imagine, then, that the families of wealthy women like Tertia Aemilia, who herself had access to vast wealth and was known to use elaborate clothing, vehicles, and numerous enslaved persons, would have been liable to pay exorbitant amounts of property tax following this assessment.75 Prima facie, Livy’s account suggests the censors were punishing at least one member of the senatorial elite, Asiagenus (brother of Africanus and brother-

73 Plutarch’s account could be read as equating the determination of tax liability with a fine (προστιμᾶν): Plutarch, Vitae parallelae, Cato Maior, xviii.2–3 with Briscoe, Commentary: 38–40, pp. 363–65. However, as Briscoe argues, Livy’s text is clear that their actions involved an assessment of these items at ten times their value and a determination of tax liability at 3 asses per thousand. While these actions might appear punitive, they were not sensu stricto fines: Briscoe, Commentary: 38–40, pp. 363–65. 74 Property tax liability of 0.1 per cent: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxix.15.9–10 with Briscoe, Commentary: 38–40, pp. 363–65. Note that property tax liability for Roman citizens could have been variable instead of fixed, e.g. it may have varied depending on several factors (for example the tax liability could have been annual total stipendium divided by the total wealth of assidui, while the tributum could have been liability multiplied by the wealth of an assiduus). For discussion and hypothetical formulae: Rosenstein, ‘Tributum in the Middle Republic’. 75 Tertia Aemilia and her equipment: Polybius, Historiae, xxxi.26.3–5 with Webb, ‘Mihi’.

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in-law of Tertia Aemilia), by removing his public horse — the status symbol of his position as one of the 1800 equestrians with a public horse (equites equo publico) — and that they aimed at financially punishing women with expensive jewellery, dress, and vehicles, and anyone with expensive, young enslaved persons.76 The focus on jewellery, dress, and vehicles immediately recalls the provisions of the lex Oppia (gold, purple dress, carpenta), a law which had been abrogated several years earlier in 195, as I will discuss subsequently. Not only had the censors punished women for displaying their wealth, but they also indirectly punished the display of some of the status symbols of the ordo matronarum, namely expensive gold jewellery, purple clothing, carpenta, and pilenta. The effect of the lex Oppia and this censorial action were thus similar. Plutarch explicitly connects the censorial action of 184 with conspicuous displays of wealth, suggesting that the wealthy were incensed that they had to either a) endure (ὑπομένω) the tax for the sake of their luxury (τρυφή) or b) stow away (ἀποτίθημι) their luxury to avoid the tax.77 Whether or not this is mere anachronistic speculation, in 184 the censors clearly punished some displays of wealth and status (symbols). The focus on Asiagenus’s public horse and expensive female adornment, vehicles, and enslaved persons suggests to me that the censors were particularly targeting wealthy senatorial and non-senatorial equestrian men and women. But what was the purpose of this censorial action? Nepos, Livy, and Plutarch attribute this action to Cato and frame it as a direct attack by him on the wealthy (senatorial and non-senatorial equestrians, etc.) and their luxury (conspicuous display, etc.), an attack that fostered hostility and enmity towards Cato for the rest of his life.78 A fragment of a speech Cato delivered concerning clothing and vehicles (De vestitu et vehiculis) on this or a similar occasion is extant, although the fragment is not illuminating.79 Notably, this censorial action may have been part of Cato’s contemporary self-fashioning — as severe censor, as vigorously concerned with public and private conduct and morals, as an enemy of luxury, etc. — and not necessarily representative of all of his earlier ideological or political positions.80 The occasion of the censorial action provides further context. The 180s were a turbulent period for the senatorial elite, marked by, inter alia, the famous trials of Asiagenus and his brother Africanus in 187 and 184 for alleged improper acquisition of wealth from Asiagenus’s military victory over Antiochus in 190, the triumphal procession of Cnaeus Manlius Vulso (RE 91, consul 189) with its abundance of luxurious spoils in 187, and the suppression of the cult of

76 On the equestrians with a public horse: n. 4. 77 ἦσαν οὖν αὐτῷ χαλεποὶ μὲν οἱ τὰς εἰσφορὰς διὰ τὴν τρυφὴν ὑπομένοντες, χαλεποὶ δ’ αὖ πάλιν οἱ τὴν τρυφὴν ἀποτιθέμενοι διὰ τὰς εἰσφοράς. πλούτου γὰρ ἀφαίρεσιν οἱ πολλοὶ νομίζουσι τὴν κώλυσιν αὐτοῦ τῆς ἐπιδείξεως· ἐπιδείκνυσθαι δὲ τοῖς περιττοῖς, οὐ τοῖς ἀναγκαίοις. Plutarch, Vitae parallelae, Cato Maior, xviii.3–4. 78 Nepos, Cato, ii.4; Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxix.44.9; Plutarch, Vitae parallelae, Cato Maior, xviii.2–4. 79 Cato, fr. 93, Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta4 with Astin, Cato, p. 83. 80 Cato and his relatively late self-fashioning: Ruebel, ‘Cato’. Cf. Astin, Cato, pp. 78–103.

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Bacchus in Italy in 186 with the attendant trials and mostly capital penalties for its numerous elite and non-elite male and female members.81 Without going into the complex details of these events, it is abundantly clear that elite male and female wealth, status, and values were in regulatory focus in this period. Cato and others were attempting to restrain elite wealth and the display thereof, that is, one of the primary practices of elite status competition. In the censorial action of 184, the censors aimed in part at discouraging the display of expensive female jewellery, dress, and transport and indirectly punished the display of some of the status symbols of the ordo matronarum. Longevity, Efficacy, and Significance of Regulation

In summary, both the lex Oppia de mulieribus and the censorial action of 184 inhibited or punished female conspicuous display in the domains of adornment and transport, and the display of wealth and some of the status symbols of the ordo matronarum. As discussed earlier, conspicuous displays of wealth and status symbols were visible practices of status competition itself. Collectively, the effect of both forms of regulation was to inhibit elite (and other) female status competition directly via regulation of its domains and resources. I turn now to the longevity, efficacy, and significance of this regulation. The lex Oppia remained in force until its abrogation in 195.82 Whether this law was complied with, effective, enforced, or enforceable during this twenty-year period is another matter. As mentioned, any penalties for non-compliance with the lex Oppia are unknown due to the absence of any sanction clauses. If the penalty was a small fine, the sum may have been insignificant for a woman like Tertia Aemilia with wealth exceeding 50 talents (300,000 denarii). For some wealthy women, the desire to engage in conspicuous display may have exceeded the financial imposition and, moreover, a fine itself could signal wealth.83 Alternatively, women may have been more concerned with the disrepute attached to any penalty than the penalty itself.84 Perhaps the wealthy were expected to self-regulate, the legislation and penalty acting as forms of pressure to comply.85 Moreover, there may have been forms of extra-legal collective action and social pressure that encouraged them to

81 Trials of the Scipios: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxviii.50.4–60.10 with other ancient sources and bibliography in Briscoe, Commentary: 38–40, pp. 170–208. Vulso’s triumphal procession: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxix.6.3–7.6 with Briscoe, Commentary: 38–40, pp. 225–29. Bacchanalian suppression: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxix.8–19 with other ancient sources and bibliography in Briscoe, Commentary: 38–40, pp. 230–90. 82 Abrogation: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.1.1–8.3 with Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 39–63; Elster, Gesetze, pp. 220, 294–96. 83 Fines and signalling wealth: Dari-Mattiacci and Plisecka, ‘Luxury’. 84 Disrepute: Vishnia, State, p. 78. 85 Self-regulation and other sumptuary legislation: Tacitus, Annales, iii.53–55; Macrobius, Saturnalia, iii.17.1 with Rosivach, ‘The lex Fannia’, pp. 11–12.

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comply with the legislation, e.g. forms of public protest and popular justice if the wealthy ignored the legislation.86 However, as I have suggested above, if there were penalties for the lex Oppia, I suspect they were significant, given the extent of the female response to the law in 195 (as discussed below), given contemporary legislation prescribed fines of up to half of an estate, and given the severe penalties imposed on women for violations during this period.87 As to the censorial action of 184, the increased census assessments and tax liability presumably lasted until the next census of 179, unless they were added to future censorial edicts via tralatition (edictum tralaticium), although this is unlikely given Cato’s criticism of one of the censors of that year, Marcus Fulvius Nobilior (RE 91, consul 189, censor 179).88 Furthermore, they would certainly have ceased after the suspension of the property tax (tributum ex censu) for Roman citizens in 167.89 Nevertheless, any property tax levied according to these assessments would have been a considerable financial imposition. Women may have avoided the tax by stowing away their valuable jewellery, dresses, and vehicles in 184, but this would have inhibited their conspicuous display. Women were either punished for or inhibited from displaying their jewellery, dresses, and vehicles. On balance, this regulation appears to have been effective. Beyond efficacy, it is perhaps useful to consider the expressive function of the lex Oppia and the censorial action, that is, how they attempted to convey or shape social norms, how they indicate what Uwe Walter terms a ‘certain prevailing mood’,90 and, in the case of the censorial action, a particular Catonian agenda. Both forms of regulation aimed at inhibiting the practice of female conspicuous displays of wealth and the status symbols of the ordo; they are thus powerful witnesses to contemporary social concerns and debates, including, in this case, some men’s disapproval of elite (and other) female status competition. The lex Oppia remained in force until 195 and it fomented immense discontent amongst women, who worked together to repeal it, revealing their interest in status competition, as we will see.

Women and the Abrogation of the lex Oppia de mulieribus in 195 From 215–195, the lex Oppia de mulieribus prohibited women from publicly wearing more than a semuncia of gold, wearing purple, and using carpenta

86 Public protest and popular justice: Nippel, Public Order, pp. 39–46. 87 Contemporary legislation: n. 18. Penalties imposed on women: n. 19. 88 Census of 179: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xl.45.6–46, 51–52 with Suolahti, The Roman Censors, pp. 360–66. Cato’s criticism of Nobilior: Cato, frs 148–51, Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta4 with Suolahti, The Roman Censors, pp. 358–66. 89 Suspension: Cicero, De officiis, ii.22; Pliny, Naturalis historia, xxxiii.56 with Nicolet, The World of the Citizen, pp. 149–50, 169–70. 90 Mood: Walter, ‘Legislation’, p. 539.

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for secular purposes. It thus placed very specific prohibitions on female conspicuous displays of wealth and status (symbols). In what follows, I will argue that when women successfully lobbied for the abrogation of the lex Oppia in 195, they revealed their deep investment in such display and, ipso facto, status competition. Livy records that in 195 married women rose up as a body and publicly and successfully petitioned their husbands, consuls, praetors, and the plebeian tribunes to ratify the lex Valeria Fundania de lege Oppia abroganda, a law that would abrogate (repeal) the lex Oppia de mulieribus.91 In effect, married women engaged in collective action to lobby for legislative change: these were powerful women who could engender the institution of a law in their favour, even one to abrogate another law. A recent article has suggested that this collective action could not have occurred, because women were, at this time, predominantly under the legal power (potestas, manus, tutela) of men, and that Livy must be fabricating his account.92 But this collective action was not an abnormality or extra-legal per se, as married women engaged in collective and organized public actions (mourning, financial contributions, demonstrations) and collective public religious activity throughout the republic, despite the legal power of men.93 Livy even mentions some of these collective public actions in his account of the lex Oppia, making note in particular of the widows’ contributions to the public treasury in 214.94 Married women may have drawn on pre-existing female networks to plan and prosecute the collective action of 195 — networks built on their collective religious activity and clan and family relationships — and senatorial and non-senatorial equestrian married women may have mobilized the ordo matronarum.95 Elite married women, particularly the wives and female relatives of the aforementioned magistrates (consuls, praetors, etc.), may have taken a principal role in this collective action and exerted the strongest influence on these magistrates, given their family connections and social position (rank).96

91 Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.1.1–8.3 with Rotondi, Leges, pp. 267–68; Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 39–63; Hemelrijk, ‘Women’s’, pp. 218–32; Elster, Gesetze, pp. 294–96. 92 Perl and El-Qalqili, ‘Problematik’, esp. pp. 433–34. On these legal powers, see e.g., Gardner, Women, pp. 5–29. 93 Previous collective public actions: Livy, Ab urbe condita, ii.7.4; ii.16.7; v.25.8–9; xxii.1.17; xxvii.37.8–10; xxix.14.10–14 with Purcell, ‘Livia’; Hemelrijk, ‘Women’s’; Bauman, Women; Culham, ‘Women’; Schultz, Women’s; DiLuzio, A Place. 94 Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.5.5–10, esp. 10 with Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 56–57. 95 For the presence of the ordo matronarum see discussion below and Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.7.1. Cf. Purcell, ‘Livia’; Hemelrijk, ‘Women’s’, pp. 230–32; Matrona docta, p. 217 n. 21; Valentini, Matronae, pp. 44–81. 96 See discussion below on the leading role of the consular senatorial woman Hortensia Q.f. (RE 16) in the collective action of 42.

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Livy fashioned an opposing speech (dissuasio) for Cato against the abrogation of the lex Oppia.97 Livy also fashioned a supporting speech (suasio) for the plebeian tribune Lucius Valerius (RE 38, praetor 192), who proposed the lex Valeria Fundania along with the plebeian tribune Marcus Fundanius (RE 3) in 195.98 In both speeches, Livy — through Cato and Valerius — suggests that the law was concerned with competition. In the opposing speech, Livy’s Cato claims that the reason for this female revolt (seditio muliebris) was that women wanted to shine (fulgere) in gold and purple and to be conveyed in carpenta for religious and secular purposes, that is, they wanted to engage in conspicuous display (Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.3.8–9): [Cato:] Quid honestum dictu saltem seditioni praetenditur muliebri? ‘Ut auro et purpura fulgamus’ inquit, ‘ut carpentis festis profestisque diebus, velut triumphantes de lege victa et abrogata et captis ereptis suffragiis vestris, per urbem vectemur: ne ullus modus sumptibus, ne luxuriae sit’. (What so-called honourable plea is offered for this female revolt? ‘So we can shine in gold and purple,’ she [the woman] says. ‘So we can be conveyed in two-wheeled carriages through the city on festival and ordinary days alike, as if triumphing over a law vanquished and abrogated, and over your votes captured and seized. Let there be no limit to expenditure, no limit to extravagance.’)99 Livy’s Cato also claims that wealthy women could not bear the levelling (exaequatio) the lex Oppia produced — i.e. the visual and social homogeneity — but contends that, if it was repealed, it would start a competition (certamen) among wives (Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.4.14–15): [Cato:] ‘Hanc’ inquit ‘ipsam exaequationem non fero’ illa locuples. ‘Cur non insignis auro et purpura conspicior? Cur paupertas aliarum sub hac legis specie latet, ut quod habere non possunt habiturae, si liceret, fuisse videantur?’ Vultis hoc certamen uxoribus vestris inicere, Quirites, ut divites id habere velint quod nulla alia possit, pauperes ne ob hoc ipsum contemnantur, supra vires se extendant? (‘This itself is the levelling I cannot bear’ says the rich woman. ‘Why am I not observed [conspicuous] as distinguished by my gold and purple? Why is the poverty of others hidden under the pretext of this law, which makes it appear that they would have had, if it were lawful, what they cannot have?’ Is this the competition you want to incite among your wives, Roman citizens, with rich women wanting to have

97 Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.2–4 with Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 39–43; Perl and El-Qalqili, ‘Problematik’. 98 Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.5–7 with Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 39–43, 53–54; Perl and El–Qalqili, ‘Problematik’. 99 Commentary: Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 49–50.

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what no other woman can, and poor women extending themselves beyond their means in order not to be scorned for not having it?)100 Beyond levelling, Livy’s Cato ascribes to an imagined wealthy woman (illa locuples), the desire to be observed (conspici, conspicuous) as distinguished (insignis) by her gold and purple, and suggests she is displeased that the poverty of other women (paupertas aliarum) is hidden by the lex Oppia. Moreover, he links this desire for conspicuous display with a certamen among wives. Cato’s opposing speech is an invention of Livy, but the sentiments attributed to Cato, at least, reflect his economic censure of wealthy women (censorial action of 184) and his focus on them elsewhere, and were perhaps modelled on Cato’s speeches.101 These sentiments are echoed by Livy’s Valerius in the supporting speech, but in defence of the abrogation. Therein, he wonders whether all orders (ordines) except wives (coniuges) are to prosper in the improving state of the res publica, detailing how males continue to wear their purple sartorial status symbols. He evokes competition (aemulatio) among women, linking it with gold, purple, and vehicles. He also condemns the lex Oppia for producing pain, indignation, social homogeneity, and the visual degradation of Roman women in comparison with the wives of the Latin allies (Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.7.1–3, 5–11): [Valerius:] Omnes alii ordines, omnes homines mutationem meliorem statum rei publicae sentient: ad coniuges tantum nostras pacis et tranquillitatis publicae fructus non perveniet? Purpura viri utemur, praetextati in magistratibus, in sacerdotiis; liberi nostri praetextis purpura togis utentur; magistratibus in coloniis municipiisque, hic Romae infimo generi, magistris vicorum, togae praetextae habendae ius permittemus, nec id ut vivi solum habeant [tantum] insigne sed etiam ut cum eo crementur mortui: feminis dumtaxat purpurae usu interdicemus? Et cum tibi viro liceat purpura in vestem stragulam uti, matrem familiae tuam purpureum amiculum habere non sines, et equus tuus speciosius instratus erit quam uxor vestita? […] Nullam aemulationem inter se singularum, quoniam nulla haberet, esse aiebat. At hercule universis dolor et indignatio est, cum sociorum Latini nominis uxoribus vident ea concessa ornamenta quae sibi adempta sint, cum insignes eas esse auro et purpura, cum illas vehi

100 Commentary: Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 53–54. 101 Livy infused this speech of Cato with Catonian elements (language, perspectives) and may have modelled it on extant Catonian speeches. Livian invention: Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 39–43; Perl and El-Qalqili, ‘Problematik’. Economic censure: Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxix.44.1–3; Plutarch, Vitae parallelae, Cato Maior, xviii.2–3 with above discussion. Focus on wealthy women: Cato, Origines, frs 109, 119, 128, 145, Cornell, ed., Fragments; fr. 158, Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta4. On these themes in Cato: Astin, Cato, pp. 25–27, 92–93; Chassignet, ‘La condamnation’; Bauman, Women, p. 33; Cornell, ed., Fragments, pp. 140, 145–46, 150, 156–57.

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per urbem, se pedibus sequi, tamquam in illarum civitatibus non in sua imperium sit. Virorum hoc animos volnerare posset: quid muliercularum censetis, quas etiam parva movent? Non magistratus nec sacerdotia nec triumphi nec insignia nec dona aut spolia bellica iis contingere possunt: munditiae et ornatus et cultus, haec feminarum insignia sunt, his gaudent et gloriantur, hunc mundum muliebrem appellarunt maiores nostri. (Will all the other orders, all other people feel that the state of the res publica has changed for the better? Is it only to your wives that the rewards of our public peace and tranquillity are not to reach? Shall we men wear the purple? Shall we be praetextate [purple-striped] as magistrates, as priests? Will our sons wear purple toga praetexta? Will we permit the right to have [wear] the toga praetexta to magistrates in the colonies and municipal towns, along with the lowest kind here in Rome, the vici magistri? And not only allow them to have [wear] such insignia in their lifetime but also to be cremated with it when they die? Is it only to women that we will forbid the use of purple? And you as a husband are permitted to use purple as a covering garment. Shall you not permit your materfamilias to have [wear] a purple mantle, and will your horse be more splendidly covered than your clothed wife? […] He [Cato] asserts there was no competition between individual women because each woman had nothing. Yet, by Hercules, there is universal pain and indignation, when they [Roman women] see the wives of our Latin allies granted the jewellery [or ornaments] denied them, when they are distinguished by gold and purple, when they are conveyed through the city, while they themselves [women] follow on foot, just as if imperium lay in those women’s communities, not in our own. A thing like this would wound the minds of men: what do you suppose [it does to the minds] of little women, whom even small things disturb? They can receive no magistracies, nor priesthoods, nor triumphs, nor insignia, nor gifts, nor war spoils: elegance, adornment, fine appearance, these are the insignia of women, in these they rejoice and boast, this our ancestors called the womanly world.)102 Valerius’s supporting speech is also a Livian invention and ahistorical in elements, especially as women could hold priesthoods in mid-republican Rome, e.g., as Vestals, regina sacrorum, flaminicae, and sacerdotes.103 Nevertheless, those sentiments Livy attributes to Valerius provide key insights into the status ramifications of the lex Oppia. Firstly, he seems to allude to the ordo matronarum when he suggests that all other orders except wives have felt the improving state of the res publica. One possible inference is that this law

102 Commentary: Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 60–62. 103 Invention: Briscoe, Commentary: XXXIV–XXXVII, pp. 39–43; Perl and El-Qalqili, ‘Problematik’. On the many female priesthoods: Schultz, Women’s; DiLuzio, A Place.

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impacted this ordo more than any other, that is, it primarily affected wealthy senatorial and non-senatorial equestrian married women, and if I surmise correctly, namely the wives of the equites equo publico. Secondly, he asks why males — elite senatorial males as magistrates and priests, sons, other minor magistrates — should be permitted the use of purple when wives were not. He mentions that males used purple on the toga praetexta, covering garments, and horses, and that it was an insignia (insigne), that is, status symbol. Indeed, the purple-striped toga praetexta was a particularly important status symbol for adult senatorial males, as it signified magisterial or sacerdotal public office and senatorial identity.104 The implicit question here then is: Why were senatorial (and other) men allowed their status symbols but — presumably senatorial and non-senatorial equestrian — women were not? Thirdly, Livy’s Valerius suggests the existence of competition among women (Roman, Latin neighbours) and exposes the raw emotions (dolor, indignatio) produced by the law’s denial of jewellery (ornamenta), gold (aurum), purple (purpura), and vehicles to Roman women, when wives of their Latin allies retained the use of all of these. Fourthly, he directly contrasts these with domains of elite male status competition and status symbols (resources): magistracies, priesthoods, triumphs, (unidentified) insignia, gifts, and war spoils. Fifthly, he characterizes elegance (munditiae), adornment (ornatus), and fine appearance (cultus) as the insignia of women (insignia feminarum), that is, as their status symbols, and what they boast of (literally gloriari, gloried in). The implication of these insights is that this law denied wealthy women their status symbols and ability to compete in the domains of adornment and transport, while men, particularly elite senatorial men, retained their own symbols and ability to compete. Moreover, the law seems to have particularly affected the status symbols of members of the ordo matronarum. The law effectively reduced the collective status of the ordo by rendering its members invisible: wealthy married women experienced levelling.105 As suggested previously, the law may not have hindered the public display of the senatorial gold ring, but it certainly aimed at hiding wealth and female status symbols in the domains of adornment and transport: it curtailed some of their means and opportunities for comparing and differentiating status. This invisibility or levelling would have been an affront not just to women, but also to many of their male relatives; the visual and social homogeneity it produced degraded the status of senatorial and non-senatorial equestrian families by hiding their wealth and status symbols, that is, it prevented status comparison and differentiation. As mentioned previously, one purpose of elite (and other) female status competition may have been to advertise the collective capital of families, as a means to enhance familial status. By hindering these

104 Toga praetexta as senatorial status symbol: Kolb, ‘Zur Statussymbolik’, pp. 246–55; Olson, Masculinity, pp. 44–48. 105 Similar interpretations: Hemelrijk, ‘Women’s’, pp. 229–30; Berg, ‘Wearing Wealth’, p. 43.

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practices, the lex Oppia, then, may have indirectly impeded elite male status competition too. This might explain why Livy reports many elite men (multi nobiles) supported the abrogation of the law, delivered supporting speeches in favour of its abrogation and, indeed, why they allowed and even supported their wives’ collective action, although Livy notes other elite men opposed the abrogation.106 Collectively the opposing and supporting speeches illuminate what Livy represented as the social tensions behind the repeal and suggest the pain and indignation felt by women at being denied their privileges, status symbols, and ability to compete with each other and the wives of Latin allies. After Cato’s opposing speech and Valerius’s supporting speech, Livy recounts how women besieged the home of two plebeian tribunes, Marcus Iunius Brutus (RE 48, consul 178) and Publius Iunius Brutus (RE 54, praetor 190), who refused to support the abrogatory legislation and were vetoing their colleagues. According to Livy, the physical presence of these women forced the Bruti to withdraw their veto and, twenty years after it was passed, the lex Oppia was abrogated.107 While there were certainly opposing attitudes towards the abrogation among the male senatorial elite, those men supporting the abrogation prevailed, heralding success for the female demonstrators. The successful collective actions of these women constitute the earliest historical female demonstration in Rome.108 Such a demonstration was not repeated until 42 (to our knowledge), when the ordo matronarum demonstrated against what they deemed was unjust taxation of 1400 of their members by the triumvirs.109 This demonstration was led by an elite woman, the celebrated female orator and consular senatorial woman Hortensia Q.f. (RE 16), who marched with the ordo into the forum and delivered a speech denouncing the taxation, which led to a reduction in the number of those taxed. Here, then, is a later example of how elite women led successful collective action. In this speech, a version of which is preserved by the Greek historian Appian, Hortensia confirms the existence of elite female networks and the importance of wealth and status for elite women, and also notes that women had previously, voluntarily contributed their wealth in the Second Punic War.110 Livy modelled elements of his account of the abrogation of the lex Oppia on this later demonstration of 42 and, in particular, modelled Valerius’s supporting speech on a version of the speech of Hortensia.111 Thence the supporting and opposing speeches

106 Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.1.4 with Culham, ‘Women’, p. 148. 107 Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.8.1–3. 108 Earliest historical female demonstration: Culham, ‘The Lex Oppia’; Hemelrijk, ‘Women’s’; Bauman, Women, pp. 27–30, 33–34. 109 Demonstration of 42: Valerius Maximus, Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, viii.3.3; Appian, Bella civilia, iv.32–34 with Hemelrijk, ‘Women’s’, pp. 223–25; Hopwood, ‘Hortensia’. 110 Appian, Bella civilia, iv.32–34 with Hopwood, ‘Hortensia’, esp. pp. 311, 315–17. 111 Livy and Hortensia: Hopwood, ‘Hortensia’, pp. 315–17. Cf. Purcell, ‘Livia’, pp. 81–84.

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should be read as multivalent documents: Livy infused Valerius’s supporting speech with Hortensian elements, just as he infused Cato’s opposing speech with Catonian elements.112 Livy clearly had multiple events and meanings in mind when he constructed it. Thus at least the speeches in the account must be read cautiously and with the understanding that Livy was linking the demonstration of 195 with that of 42. While it is outside the purpose of this chapter to explore this latter demonstration, in both cases, women were clearly invested in defending their wealth and status symbols (resources). In so doing, women also defended their ability to compete for superiority in status. Beyond Livy’s account, the Roman playwright Plautus alludes to these themes in his Aulularia, a play written and performed roughly contemporarily to the collective action of 195, as various scholars have recognized.113 Notably, Plautus’s old man Megadorus censures wealthy women for, inter alia, their display of and demands for purple (purpura), gold (aurum), and elaborate ivory decorated vehicles (eburata vehic[u]la), foreshadowing Livy’s Cato (Plautus, Aulularia, 167–69, 498–502): [Megadorus:] Istas magnas factiones, animos, dotes dapsiles, | clamores, imperia, eburata vehicla, pallas, purpuram, | nil moror quae in servitutem sumptibus redigunt viros. […] Nulla igitur dicat ‘equidem dotem ad te adtuli | maiorem multo quam tibi erat pecunia; | enim mihi quidem aequomst purpuram atque aurum dari, | ancillas, mulos, muliones, pedisequos, | salutigerulos pueros, vehicla qui vehar’. (I care nothing for those great social connections, those spirits, those sumptuous dowries, those shouts, those commands, those ivory decorated vehicles, those mantles, and that purple; such women drive their husbands into slavery with their expenses. […] So let no woman say: ‘I brought you a dowry far greater than the money you had. So it’s equitable that I should be given purple and gold, enslaved women [ancillae], mules, muleteers, male followers, boys to greet people, and vehicles to ride in’.)114 Here Plautus may have been parodying contemporary speeches against wealthy women, perhaps even those by figures like Cato.115 Plautus’s rich description of wealthy women evokes Polybius’s account of Tertia Aemilia and her conspicuous display, included at the beginning of this chapter.

112 Multivalent documents: Hopwood, ‘Hortensia’, pp. 316–17. 113 A selection of these studies include: García Jurado, ‘La critica’; Chassignet, ‘La condamnation’; Moore, The Theater, pp. 161–62; Gaertner, ‘Das antike Recht. Teil 1.’, pp. 10–11 n. 32; ‘Das antike Recht. Teil 2.’, pp. 50–51; Manuwald, Roman, p. 165. 114 Commentary: MacLennan and Stockert, Plautus, pp. 127, 160–66. The pedisequi and salutigeruli pueri were enslaved persons: Richlin, Slave Theater, pp. 49, 57, 75–76, 89, 250, 288, 301, 452; ‘Owners’, p. 353. 115 Cato, fr. 158 Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta4 with Moore, The Theater, pp. 162–64.

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Indeed, Plautus’s description is a caricature of real women, recognizable to his audience — perhaps even as members of that same audience or as present nearby.116 Here and elsewhere Plautus illuminates the contemporary prevalence of female conspicuous display.117 The status symbols of women mentioned by Livy were clearly contemporary and relevant at the time of the abrogation of the lex Oppia in 195 and not Livian inventions. The collective action of 195 and successful abrogation of the lex Oppia indicate the collective investment elite (and other) women had in the status symbols of the ordo and in public, conspicuous displays of wealth and status symbols in the domains of adornment and transport. These latter forms of status competition were a vital part of elite female lives, for they both conferred status and constituted their elite female identity. Conspicuous displays were central to elite male and female identity in mid-republican Rome. In 195, Roman women collectively defended the status symbols of the ordo and their means and opportunities for status comparison and differentiation, for without their gold, purple, and carpenta, they were invisible.

Exaequatio and aemulatio In mid-republican Rome, the lex Oppia de mulieribus of 215 prohibited the conspicuous display of gold, purple, and carpenta by women, while the censorial action of 184 temporarily punished or inhibited the conspicuous display of expensive jewellery, dresses, and vehicles by women. Both regulations hindered the conspicuous display of wealth and the status symbols of the ordo matronarum, the latter being the symbols of senatorial and non-senatorial equestrian married women (perhaps the wives of the equites equo publico). These regulations struck at the heart of the practice of elite (and other) female status competition, impairing the ability of women to compete via conspicuous displays of wealth and status symbols (resources) in the domains of adornment and transport, and thereby curtailing some of their means and opportunities for status comparison and differentiation. On balance, this regulation appears to have been effective and, moreover, its enactment is a witness to contemporary social concerns and debates, including some men’s disapproval of elite (and other) female status competition. The lex Oppia fomented immense discontent among married women. Not only did the law deny them the right to display purple dress, gold jewellery, and carpenta — some of the traditional status symbols of the ordo matronarum 116 Female presence: Plautus, Poenulus, 32; Terence, Hecyra, 35 with Manuwald, Roman, p. 98; Brown, ‘Were there Slaves’, p. 662. 117 Similar themes in Plautus: Plautus, Asinaria, 85–87; Menaechmi, 120–22; Miles gloriosus, 679– 700; Mostellaria, 281–89, 703; Poenulus, 297–307 with Johnston, ‘Poenulus’; García Jurado, ‘La critica’; Chassignet, ‘La condamnation’; Moore, The Theater, pp. 161–62; Gaertner, ‘Das antike Recht. Teil 1.’, pp. 10–11 n. 32; ‘Das antike Recht. Teil 2.’, pp. 50–51.

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— but it reduced the collective status of this same ordo by rendering its members invisible. Effectively, the lex Oppia sought to produce exaequatio, levelling (visual and social homogeneity), and was a barrier to aemulatio, competition. In 195, married women publicly lobbied male magistrates to abrogate the lex Oppia and successfully engendered legislative change. Their collective action demonstrates their interest in their status symbols and, moreover, their collective investment in conspicuous displays of wealth and status symbols. Not only did public, conspicuous display confer, compare, and differentiate status in republican Rome, but it constituted and defined identities, particularly elite identities. Is it any wonder elite (and other) married women desired its return? The lex Oppia was an affront to entire families, not just women, for it prevented one means of displaying the collective capital of families and thus indirectly impaired male status competition too. Is it any wonder women were supported by their male relatives? Despite opposition, these women rose up in 195 and won back their right to shine in gold and purple and to be conveyed through the city in carpenta. We return to Tertia Aemilia. After the abrogation of the lex Oppia in 195 and the temporary sting of the censorial action of 184, she displayed her elaborate dress, vehicle, religious instruments, and enslaved persons throughout Rome until her death c. 163–162. After her death, her female relatives used this same equipment for their own conspicuous display.118 To paraphrase Livy, Roman women had triumphed, vanquishing and abrogating a law that inhibited their status competition. Their exaequatio had ended and aemulatio began anew.

Works Cited Primary Sources

N.B. By ‘primary sources’ here, I mean ‘ancient sources’. Only directly quoted ancient sources are included below.

Appian, Bella civilia, iv = Appian, Appian: Roman History, iv, ed. by Paulo Viereck, trans. by H. White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) Cicero, In Verrem = Cicero, M. Tulli Ciceronis: Orationes, iii: Divinatio in Q. Caecilium; In C. Verrem, ed. by William Peterson, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917) Livy, Ab urbe condita, xvi–xxx = Livy, Titi Livi Ab urbe condita, iv: Libri XXVI– XXX, ed. by Robert Conway and Stephen Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935) ———, Ab urbe condita, xxxi–xxxv = Livy, Titi Livi Ab urbe condita, v: Libri XXXI–XXXV, ed. by Alexander McDonald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965)

118 Polybius, Historiae, xxxi.26.3–8, 28.8–9 with Webb, ‘Mihi’.

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———, Ab urbe condita, xxxvi–xl = Livy, Titi Livi Ab urbe condita, vi: Libri XXXVI–XL, ed. by Peter Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) ———, Ab urbe condita, xxi–xxv = Livy, Titi Livi Ab urbe condita, iii: Libri XXI– XXV, ed. by John Briscoe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Nepos, Cato = Nepos, Cornelii Nepotis vitae cum fragmentis, ed. by Peter Marshall (Leipzig: Teubner, 1977) Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta4 = Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta liberae rei publicae, ed. by Henrica Malcovati, 4th edn (Turin: Paravia, 1976) Plautus, Aulularia = Plautus, T. Macci Plauti comoediae, i, ed. by Walter Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1904; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Plutarch, Vitae parallelae, Cato Maior = Plutarch, Plutarchi vitae parallelae, i.1, ed. by Konrat Ziegler, 4th edn (Leipzig: Teubner, 1969) Polybius, Historiae, xx–xxxix = Polybius, Polybii historiae, iv: Libri XX–XXXIX, ed. by Thedor Büttner-Wobst (Leipzig: Teubner, 1904; repr. 1967) Secondary Studies Ando, Clifford, Paul du Plessis, and Kaius Tuori, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Andreau, Jean, Banking and Business in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Astin, Alan, Cato the Censor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) ———, ‘Regimen morum’, The Journal of Roman Studies, 78 (1988), 14–34 Baltrusch, Ernst, Regimen morum: Die Reglementierung des Privatlebens der Senatoren und Ritter in der römischen Republik and frühen Kaiserzeit (Munich: Beck, 1989) Bauman, Richard, Women and Politics in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1994) ———, Crime and Punishment in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1996) Beck, Hans, ‘Wealth, Power, and Class Coherence. The ambitus Legislation of 180s BC’, in Money and Power in the Roman Republic, ed. by Hans Beck, Martin Jehne, and John Serrati (Brussels: Peeters, 2016), pp. 131–52 Berg, Ria, ‘Wearing Wealth. Mundus muliebris and Ornatus as Status Markers for Women in Imperial Rome’, in Women, Wealth and Power in the Roman Empire, ed. by Päivi Setälä and others (Rome: Institutum Romanum Finlandiae, 2002), pp. 15–73 Bernard, Seth, ‘Political Competition and Economic Change in Mid-Republican Rome’, in Eris vs. aemulatio: Valuing Competition in Classical Antiquity, ed. by Cynthia Dixon and Christoph Pieper (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 230–50 Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups’, Theory and Society, 14 (1985), 723–44 ———, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Briscoe, John, A Commentary on Livy: Books XXXIV–XXXVII (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) ———, A Commentary on Livy: Books 38–40 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

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Broughton, Thomas, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, i: 509 b.c. – 100 b.c. (New York: American Philological Association, 1951) ———, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, ii: 99 b.c. – 31 b.c. (New York: American Philological Association, 1952) Brown, Peter, ‘Were there Slaves in the Audience of Plautus’ Comedies?’, The Classical Quarterly, 69 (2020), 654–71 Brunt, Peter, Italian Manpower, 225 b.c. – a.d. 14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Cantarella, Eva, ‘Women and Patriarchy in Roman Law’, in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society, ed. by Clifford Ando, Paul du Plessis, and Kaius Tuori (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 419–31 Champlin, Edward, Final Judgments: Duty and Emotion in Roman Wills, 200 b.c.– a.d. 250 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) Chassignet, Martine, ‘La condamnation des dépenses somptuaires à Rome au iie siècle av. J.-C.: l’exemple de l’œuvre de Plaute et de Caton’, in Les petits-fils de Caton, ed. by Marianne Coudry (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1998), pp. 21–32 Clemente, Guido, ‘When the Senators Became “the Best”’, in Institutions and Ideology in Republican Rome: Speech, Audience and Decision, ed. by Henriette van der Blom, Christa Gray, and Catherine Steel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 203–21 Cornell, Tim, ed., The Fragments of the Roman Historians, iii: Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Crawford, Michael, Coinage and Money under the Roman Republic: Italy and the Mediterranean Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) ———, ed., Roman Statutes, 2 vols (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 1996) Culham, Phyllis, ‘The “Lex Oppia”’, Latomus, 41 (1982), 786–93 ———, ‘Again, What Meaning Lies in Colour!’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 64 (1986), 235–45 ———, ‘Women in the Roman Republic’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic, ed. by Harriet Flower (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 139–59 Cumbo-Floyd, Andi, ‘Slaves vs Enslaved People – The Subtle, Strong Power of Words’ [accessed 8 July 2021] Dari-Mattiacci, Giuseppe, and Anna Plisecka, ‘Luxury in Ancient Rome: Scope, Timing and Enforcement of Sumptuary Laws’, Legal Roots, 1 (2012), 1–25 Davenport, Caillan, A History of the Roman Equestrian Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) DiLuzio, Meghan, A Place at the Altar: Priestesses in Republican Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016) Dixon, Suzanne, ‘Polybius on Roman Women and Property’, American Journal of Philology, 106 (1985), 147–70 ———, Cornelia: Mother of the Gracchi (London: Routledge, 2007) Ehrman, Radd, ‘Is All that Glitters the Lex Oppia? Titinius, Barbatus’, Mnemosyne, 70 (2017), 808–19

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Elster, Marianne, Die Gesetze der mittleren römischen Republik: Text und Kommentar (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003) Erdkamp, Paul, ‘Manpower and Food Supply in the First and Second Punic Wars’, in A Companion to the Punic Wars, ed. by Dexter Hoyos (Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2011), pp. 58–76 Evans, John, War, Women and Children in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1991) Evans Grubbs, Judith, Women and the Law in the Roman Empire: A Sourcebook on Marriage, Divorce and Widowhood (London: Routledge, 2002) Fantham, Elaine, Roman Readings: Roman Response to Greek Literature from Plautus to Statius and Quintilian (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011) Fisher, Nick, ‘Competitive Delights: The Social Effects of the Expanded Programme of Contests in Post-Kleisthenic Athens’, in Competition in the Ancient World, ed. by Nick Fisher and Hans Van Wees (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2011), pp. 175–219 Fisher, Nick, and Hans Van Wees, eds, Competition in the Ancient World (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2011) Flaig, Egon, Ritualisierte Politik: Zeichen, Gesten und Herrschaft im Alten Rom (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003) Flower, Harriet, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) ———, ‘Spectacle and Political Culture in the Roman Republic’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic, ed. by Harriet Flower (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 377–98 Gaertner, Jan, ‘Das antike Recht und die griechisch-römische Neue Komödie: Untersuchungen zu Plautus und seinen griechischen Vorbildern. Teil 1’ (unpublished habilitation thesis, Leipzig University, 2011) ———, ‘Das antike Recht und die griechisch-römische Neue Komödie: Untersuchungen zu Plautus und seinen griechischen Vorbildern. Teil 2’ (unpublished habilitation thesis, Leipzig University, 2011) García Jurado, Francisco, ‘La crítica al exceso ornamental femenino en la comedia latina a partir de los recursos léxicos relativos a la Lex Oppia’, Minerva, 6 (1992), 193–208 Gardner, Jane, Women in Roman Law and Society (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991) Grueber, Bernhard, The Roman Law of Damage to Property: Being a Commentary on the Title of the Digest ad legem Aquiliam (IX.2); With an Introduction to the Study of the Corpus iuris civilis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1886; repr. Clark: Lawbook Exchange, 2004) Harris, William, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) Hemelrijk, Emily, ‘Women’s Demonstrations in Republican Rome’, in Sexual Asymmetry: Studies in Ancient Society, ed. by Josine Blok and Peter Mason (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1987), pp. 217–40 ———, Matrona docta: Educated Women in the Roman Élite from Cornelia to Julia Domna (London: Routledge, 1999)

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Hillard, Tom, ‘Popilia and laudationes funebres for Women’, Antichthon, 35 (2001), 45–63 [with ‘Erratum: vol. 35 (2001)’, Antichthon, 36 (2002), 80] Hin, Saskia, ‘Counting Romans’, in People, Land, and Politics: Demographic Developments and the Transformation of Roman Italy, 300 bc–ad 14, ed. by Luuk de Ligt and Simon Northwood (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 187–238 ———, The Demography of Roman Italy: Population Dynamics in an Ancient Conquest Society 201 bce–14 ce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Hölkeskamp, Karl-Johan, ‘Conquest, Competition and Consensus: Roman Expansion in Italy and the Rise of the nobilitas’, Historia, Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte, 42 (1993), 12–39 ———, Reconstructing the Roman Republic: An Ancient Political Culture and Modern Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) ———, ‘Konkurrenz als sozialer Handlungsmodus – Positionen und Perspektiven der historischen Forschung’, in Konkurrenz in der Geschichte: Praktiken – Werte – Institutionalisierungen, ed. by Ralph Jessen (Frankfurt: Campus, 2014), pp. 33–57 Hopwood, Bronywn, ‘Livy and the Repeal of the Lex Oppia’, Stele, 5 (2001), 121–39 ———, ‘Hortensia Speaks: An Authentic Voice of Resistance?’, in Appian’s Roman History: Empire and Civil War, ed. by Kathryn Welch (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2015), pp. 305–22 Hudson, Jared, ‘Carpento certe: Conveying Gender in Roman Transportation’, Classical Antiquity, 35 (2016), 215–46 Jehne, Martin, ‘The Rise of the Consular as a Social Type in the Third and Second Centuries bc’, in Consuls and ‘res publica’: Holding High Office in the Roman Republic, ed. by Hans Beck and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 211–31 ———, ‘Performing Senatorial Status in the Roman Republic: The Limits of Displaying Wealth’ (forthcoming) Johnston, Patricia, ‘Poenulus I, 2 and Roman Women’, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 110 (1980), 143–59 Kajava, Mika, Roman Female ‘praenomina’: Studies in the Nomenclature of Roman Women (Rome: Institutum Romanum Finlandiae, 1994) Kay, Philip, Rome’s Economic Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Kolb, Frank, ‘Zur Statussymbolik im antiken Rom’, Chiron, 7 (1977), 239–59 Kunst, Christiane, ‘Ornamenta uxoria. Badges of Rank or Jewellery of Roman Wives?’, The Medieval History Journal, 8 (2005), 127–42 Lintott, Andrew, ‘Electoral Bribery in the Roman Republic’, The Journal of Roman Studies, 80 (1990), 1–16 ———, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) MacLennan, Keith, and Walter Stockert, Plautus: Aulularia (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016) Manuwald, Gesine, Roman Republican Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

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McGinn, Thomas, ‘The Expressive Function of Law and the lex imperfecta’, Roman Legal Tradition, 11 (2015), 1–41 Moore, Timothy, The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998) Mousourakis, George, Fundamentals of Roman Private Law (Cham: Springer, 2015) Nebelin, Marian, ‘Aristokratische Konkurrenz in der Römischen Republik’, in Konkurrenz in der Geschichte: Praktiken – Werte – Institutionalisierungen, ed. by Ralph Jessen (Frankfurt: Campus, 2014), pp. 141–74 Nicolet, Claude, L’ordre équestre à l’époque républicaine (312–32 av. J.-C.): définitions juridiques et structures sociales (Paris: De Boccard, 1966) ———, The World of the Citizen in Republican Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) Niczyporuk, Piotr, ‘Mensarii, Bankers Acting for Public and Private Benefits’, Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, 24.37 (2011), 105–15 Nippel, Wilfred, Public Order in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Northwood, Simon, ‘Census and Tributum’, in People, Land, and Politics: Demographic Developments and the Transformation of Roman Italy, 300 bc–ad 14, ed. by Luuk de Ligt and Simon Northwood (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 257–70 Oakley, Stephen, A Commentary on Livy: Books VI–X, iii: Book IX (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) ———, A Commentary on Livy: Books VI–X, iv: Book X (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) OED3 = Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000–) [accessed 1 June 2021] Ogilvie, Robert, A Commentary on Livy: Books 1–5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965) Olson, Kelly, Dress and the Roman Woman: Self-Presentation and Society (London: Routledge, 2008) ———, Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2017) Östenberg, Ida, ‘Gendering the Roman Funeral’, in Gendering Roman Imperialism, ed. by Hannah Cornwell and Greg Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) Pauly, August, Georg Wissowa, and Wilhem Kroll, eds, Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, 84 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1893–1980) Perl, Gerhard, and Iradj El-Qalqili, ‘Zur Problematik der Lex Oppia (215/195 v. Chr.)’, Klio, 84 (2002), 414–39 Pomeroy, Sarah, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (New York: Schocken, 1975) Purcell, Nicholas, ‘Livia and the Womanhood of Rome’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 32 (1986), 78–105 Richlin, Amy, Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) ———, ‘Owners and Slaves in and around Plautus’, in A Companion to Plautus, ed. by George Fredric Franko and Dorota Dutsch (Hoboken: Wiley, 2020), pp. 347–59

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Robinson, Olivia F., The Sources of Roman Law: Problems and Methods for Ancient Historians (London: Routledge, 1997) Rohr Vio, Francesca, Le custodi del potere: donne e politica alla fine della repubblica Romana (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2019) Rosenstein, Nathan, ‘Competition and Crisis in Mid-Republican Rome’, Phoenix, 47 (1993), 313–38 ———, ‘Aristocrats and Agriculture in the Middle and Late Republic’, The Journal of Roman Studies, 98 (2008), 1–26 ———, ‘Tributum in the Middle Republic’, in Circum mare: Themes in Ancient Warfare, ed. by Jeremy Armstrong (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 80–97 Rosivach, Vincent, ‘The lex Fannia sumptuaria of 161 bc’, Classical Journal, 102 (2006), 1–15 Rotondi, Giovanni, Leges publicae populi Romani (Milan: Società editrice libraria, 1912) Ruebel, James, ‘Cato and Scipio Africanus’, The Classical World, 71 (1977), 161–73 Ryan, Francis, Rank and Participation in the Republican Senate (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998) Saller, Richard, Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Sandberg, Kaj, ‘Tribunician and Non-Tribunician Legislation in Mid-Republican Rome’, in The Roman Middle Republic: Politics, Religion, and Historiography. c. 400–133 b.c., ed. by Christer Bruun (Rome: Institutum Romanum Finlandiae, 2000), pp. 121–40 ———, ‘Consular Legislation in Pre-Sullan Rome’, Arctos, 38 (2004), 133–62 Schiller, Arthur, Roman Law: Mechanisms of Development (The Hague: Mouton, 1978) Schultz, Celia, Women’s Religious Activity in the Roman Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) Shatzman, Israel, Senatorial Wealth and Roman Politics (Brussels: Latomus, 1975) Suolahti, Jaakko, The Roman Censors: A Study on Social Structure (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1963) ———, ‘Claudia insons: Why Was a Fine Imposed on Claudia Ap.f. in 246 bc?’, Acta philologica Fennica, 11 (1977), 133–51 Tamer, Diler, ‘Lex Oppia and the Sumptuariae Leges’, Annales de la Faculté de Droit d’Istanbul, 39 (2007), 121–28 Treggiari, Susan, Roman Marriage: ‘Iusti coniuges’ from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991; repr. 2002) Valentini, Alessandra, Matronae tra novitas e mos maiorum: spazi e modalità dell’azione pubblica femminile nella Roma medio repubblicana (Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 2012) ———, ‘From Mother to Daughter. Aemilia Tertia’s Legacy and ornamenta’, in The Material Sides of Marriage: Women and Domestic Economies in Antiquity, ed. by Ria Berg (Rome: Institutum Romanum Finlandiae, 2016), pp. 133–37 Van Wees, Hans, ‘Rivalry in History: An Introduction’, in Competition in the Ancient World, ed. by Nick Fisher and Hans Van Wees (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2011), pp. 1–36

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Giulia Morosini

Manly Virtues, Emotions, and Scars Competition among Italian Renaissance Soldiers through Bodily Practices

During the Italian Renaissance, competition was at the core of many social practices. The military environment, in particular, was structured around principles, ideas, and values characteristic of a strictly hierarchical organization infused with competition and rivalry. With this contribution, I shall argue how the group of condottieri (i.e. the military captains) made use of the male sexed body, its symbols, and the narratives created around it, to express and communicate feelings useful to the status competition between soldiers and between captains. Emotions such as courage, pride, fear, and love for the army were fundamental features of the perfect soldier and gendered traits which constructed not only the masculine man but also the masculine body. The communication of these emotions through the body in performances and emotional practices was part of the continuous competition between captains and soldiers alike to rise to the higher ranks of the Italian armies. In fifteenth-century Italy, the profession of arms was carried out by specialized soldiers within a system that preferred and privileged those who both possessed excellent military skills and were eager for power and riches. For a period of time — from the late fourteenth century to the early decades of the sixteenth century — not only noblemen were allowed to hold military high offices such as capitano, conestabile (i.e. captain of infantry), condottiero or general captain, but also those who had showed themselves to be worthy of the position.1 The competition for the higher military positions was of course driven by the riches that came with them, like a higher salary, the command over groups of soldiers (lance), the right to more and richer spoils during pillages, and the possibility

1 On Renaissance Italian warfare see: Del Treppo, ed., Condottieri e uomini d’arme; Mallett, Mercenaries and their Masters; Pieri, Il Rinascimento. Giulia Morosini    is a PhD in Early Modern History at the University of Padova, Verona and Ca’ Foscari of Venice, and teaching assistant at the University of Verona. Her doctoral project entitled ‘The Body of the condottiero: Honour and Emotions in Renaissance Italy’ focuses on culture and emotions of fifteenthcentury Italian soldiers. Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 79-107 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126142

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in a few cases of gaining a property or the dominion over a territory or a city. Another strong incentive for competition was honour in the sense of glory and fame. The humanistic production of biographies and commentari of the lives of the captains, which will be largely used in this contribution, insists on the rhetorical construction of glory as the main goal of the perfect captain, following the examples of classical heroes; his actions had to be guided by this continuous striving towards victory and glory, in order to gain immortal fame.2 The concept of honour, identified as glory and fame obtained through military skills, and fundamental for the military and hierarchical competition within the military company, will be used in this contribution synonymously with status. All of these different factors combined to make status competition a central part of both the military community’s culture and the everyday life of its members. Furthermore, from the central part of the Middle Ages, competition (structured around jousts and games of war) was part of the nobleman’s ethos, and these chivalric ideals informed the military culture of the Renaissance.3 The main sources used are the biographies of lives and deeds of the condottieri, which were written by either former soldiers or by men close to the captains, who spent a good portion of their lives among the military companies and eye-witnessed most of the events narrated. This literary genre of the biography was the privileged means used in the Renaissance to write what was intended as ‘history’.4 Another type of sources analysed are military treatises of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which can give us information about the ideal characteristics of the captains and of the soldiers, as well as hints on how war, virtue, honour, command, and emotions were interpreted within the military community.

Mobilizing Status and Authority through Bodily and Emotional Practices In the primary sources — such as biographies and military treatises — the spirito di emulazione (sense of emulation) is defined as a fundamental trait 2 Ianziti, Humanistic Historiography. Some of the sources analysed were originally written in Latin and then vulgarized in Italian around the same years: in the present contribution the direct quotations are translated from the Italian texts but a reference to the Latin counterpart will be given in the footnote. This will be the case for Pompeo Pellini’s L’Historie et vite di Braccio Fortebracci detto da Montone, et di Nicolo Piccinino perugini, which is a vulgarization of Giovanni Antonio Campano’s Braccii Perusini ab anno 1368 usque ad 1424, and of Giovambattista Poggio’s Vita Nicolai Picinini; the same will be done for Cristoforo Landino’s Sforziade, an Italian translation of Giovanni Simonetta’s Rerum gestarum Francisci Sfortiae commentarii; lastly, Giannozzo Manetti’s Dialogus de morte Antonini, filii sui, consolatorius, was written in 1438 and vulgarized by the same author in 1439. 3 Cavina, Il sangue dell’onore, pp. 31–40. See also: Balestracci, La festa in armi. 4 See for instance: Tateo, I miti della storiografia umanistica; Garin, Medioevo e Rinascimento; Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past.

m an ly vi rt u e s, e mot i o ns, and scars

which was characteristic of all good soldiers, and was often intended as the main driving force of the captains’ military actions and decision-making. ‘Dell’emulatione anchor vien spinta | spesso la turba de soldati udendo | laudare altrui per gloria o cossa vinta’ (Often the crowd of soldiers is propelled by emulation, when they hear others being praised for glory or victory),5 said Antonio Cornazzano in his treatise about the military profession. Emulation derives from the Latin word aemulatio, which means the attempt to imitate someone else’s skills, and surpass others with those skills in a contest; during the Renaissance it was often used in a negative connotation, meaning rivalry as well as jealousy of someone else’s accomplishments, glory, or wealth. Therefore the concept of emulation refers to the competition between captains, intended both as a ‘positive’ competition based upon the manifestation of personal military skills in order to surpass others within the military hierarchical struggle, and as a ‘negative’ competition driven by jealousy and competitive spirit, characterized by rivalry, envy, and occasionally hatred. The soldier’s body constituted the central site for this competition, particularly in its capacity to endure the pain and suffering that came together with the military profession. Since competition was mainly based upon a display of skills and virtues, it was fundamental for the soldier to show them through actions and therefore through the body. Pain and suffering were a typical aspect of the Renaissance war rhetoric. The endurance of pain, not intended as ascetic but associated with will in the military mentality, was connected to an understanding of the body both as the site of the creation and representation of the masculine gender, and as an outward projection of the inner self. The soldier’s body and its appearance were the outcome of military training, his practical skills, and the material manifestation of his virtues. Both Vittorino da Feltre and neo-Aristotelian philosophy insisted on the correlation between physical training and education to the masculine sex and gender, together with the proliferation of images that stressed the ideal of muscular male beauty derived, for instance, from the classical figure of Hercules.6 Therefore the body was both the seat of the external representation of a kind of manhood that was strictly connected to the military work and its consequences on the physical self, and also a symbolic means that transcended its materiality to become the place that represented the soldier’s virtues.7 The peculiar features of military masculinity, such as strength, endurance, patience, as well as courage, boldness, and honour, were expressed through the embodiment of gender notions. Since gender was a socially agreed upon system of distinction, it also pertained to the competition between soldiers,

5 Antonio Cornazzano, Opera bellissima, vi.3. See also Cardini, Quell’antica festa crudele, pp. 70–71. 6 D’Elia, Pagan Virtue, pp. 90–91. 7 Smith, ‘Body Doubles’.

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obviously because the military man who best embodied the perfect masculine virtues could aim at the highest hierarchical positions.8 This framework of interpretation was embedded in the Italian Renaissance environment, which established a tripartite relation between masculinity, violence, and social status, based on the fundamental role of honour in social relations and on the expansion of these dynamics to a wider audience, due to a new social mobility and economic growth in the fifteenth century.9 Masculinity, endurance of pain, and courage (as the ability to overcome suffering and fear) were linked together by neo-Stoic and neo-Aristotelian philosophy through the virtue of fortitudo. The humanist scholar Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) writes about the virtue ‘dell’animo e del corpo’ (of soul and body), which is called ‘virilità’ (virility). This virtue, which is also commonly called ‘fortezza’ (fortitude), has two main purposes, namely ‘equale sofferimento delle fatiche del corpo e delle angosce dell’animo’ (the equal suffering of body’s labour and soul’s pain).10 Humanists adopted this characterization of fortitude as the ability to endure both physical and emotional distress and made it one of the abilities demanded of the perfect soldier.11 All of the descriptions of captains that can be traced in biographies and poems insist on the ability to submit the body to hardships, suffering and pain, to starvation and thirst, to heat and cold. For instance, Sigismondo Malatesta’s conduct during the siege of Piombino (1448) was described by Roberto Valturio, who recounted that the condottiero excelled in the resistance of the difficulties of wakefulness, thirst, starvation, and of every hardship. He was happy to break the mouldy and black bread with his soldiers that otherwise would have been thrown to the dogs. He was not nauseated to drink the muddy and sulphate waters; on the contrary he savoured them so playfully that, seeing him, the soldiers did not mind being deprived of wines and clean waters.12 Fortitude was a quality so revered and so fundamental to an identity as a strong masculine soldier that it was used rhetorically to argue for the superiority of Italian soldiers over foreigners, who were described as effeminate and weak because they had not trained their bodies as vigorously as the Italian

8 Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes. 9 Carroll, ed., Cultures of Violence. See the introduction by Carroll, pp. 1–43. 10 Giannozzo Manetti, Dialogus, i.8, p. 11. 11 Fortitude became one of the features of the so-called ‘virtù militare’ (martial virtue), proposed by humanists such as Francesco Petrarca (De officio et virtutibus imperatoriis), Leonardo Bruni (Oratione detta a Nicolò da Tolentino, quando ricevecte il bastone in sulla ringhiera), and Giannozzo Manetti (Orazione per Sigismondo Malatesta). 12 Roberto Valturio, De re militari, vii.17, p. 145. For other examples see: on Bartolomeo Colleoni, Antonio Cornazzano, Vita di Bartolomeo, pp. 96–97; on Francesco Sforza, Cristoforo Landino, Sforziade, book 1 and Giovanni Simonetta, Rerum gestarum, p. cxi, and Antonio Minuti, Vita di Muzio, pp. 140–41; on Niccolò Piccinino, Giovambattista Poggio, Vita Nicolai, fol. 15r–v.

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mercenaries had from adolescence on.13 Indeed, military training used to start around the age of thirteen, when a young squire entered the army as the servant of a man-at-arms, and beginning at that moment he trained to accustom his body to deprivation and hardship. This same narrative was used to demonstrate the superiority of a specific Italian military company over another as well: it was said that one group (the foreigners) was effeminate due to home’s pleasures and did not dare to see and face enemy soldiers in battle, while the other (the Italians), having their bodies hardened by the sun and the wind and accustomed to pain, did not even fear the blows of the swords.14 In this brief description of the braccesca company, taken from the life of Braccio da Montone (1368–1424), various aspects are present: the masculine superiority of the suffering and habituated body opposed to the lack of virility of those who forgot the hardships of war; the importance of the appearance of the injured and suffering body; and finally, the ability of good soldiers to disregard the pain of wounds and to overcome fear. The experience of pain was not interpreted as a mere physical fact but as an emotional experience that involved both body and soul, and was tolerated thanks to courage. In Giovanni da Pontano’s treatise De fortitudine (written around 1480) he argues that heroic virtue consists of the manifestation of fortitude, since the hero is the one who voluntarily endures and faces the greatest dangers for the sake of his honour. ‘Courage is to be discovered and admired in people who surmount their own natural weakness in exhibiting extraordinary qualities of strength and endurance.’15 In the wake of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, the body accustomed to war helps to accustom the mind to the emotions inherent in the practice of war, in which body and courage are closely linked, for physiological and medical reasons originating in the theory of humours.16 This is not the place to retrace a history of the passions in medieval and early modern medicine and philosophy.17 Suffice it to say that for Aquinas, virtue does not involve just reason and will, but the passions as well, and it does not consist of the forced submission of emotion to reason.18 Therefore it is easy to notice how much the emotions and the body were intertwined in Renaissance culture, and how emotions were seen 13 About the French soldiers see for instance: Giovanni Simonetta, Rerum gestarum, pp. 386–90. See also the long dispute between Alfonso d’Aragona and Braccio da Montone about Italian warfare in: Giovanni Campano, Braccii Perusini, pp. 164–68 and Pompeo Pellini, L’Historie et vite, fols 110v–114v. 14 Pompeo Pellini, L’Historie et vite, fol. 44v; Giovanni Campano, Braccii Perusini, p. 70. 15 Nassichuk, ‘Anger and its Limits’, p. 206. 16 Walter, ‘Peril, Flight and the Sad Man’, p. 29. 17 Boquet and Nagy, Sensible Moyen Âge; Broomhall, ed., Early Modern Emotions. About the perceived relation between the emotions and the self through the body, see: Floyd-Wilson and Sullivan, eds, Embodiment and Environment; Paster, Humoring the Body: Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson, eds, Reading the Early Modern Passions. 18 Lombardo, ‘Emotions and Psychological Health’, pp. 38–39. See also: Boquet and Nagy, Sensible Moyen Âge, pp. 218–24.

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as not only ‘accidents of the soul’ but also as actions. In order to understand how emotions such as courage, pride, fear, and love were interpreted and communicated by the Renaissance military community and the role they played in the competition between soldiers, it is necessary to look at emotional practices and performances.19 The contribution of the performative approach to the history of emotions is the assimilation of emotions to the sorts of gestures that are involved in rituals and social performances.20 Starting with Monique Scheer’s definition of emotional practices, it is possible to highlight how the Renaissance military community used to mobilize and communicate emotions in a goal-oriented way through actions and the body. In her definition of mobilizing practices, Scheer refers to the ‘use of rituals as a means of achieving, training, articulating and modulating emotions’.21 By interpreting the rituals in the broader sense, it is possible to observe how they are found in the everyday life of the army, that is, the rituals intended as a learned code of conduct and that contribute to the physical and mental strength required by the military profession. In this sense, military training fulfils a fundamental role as the moment of life dedicated to the education and learning of the emotional practices, since war shapes new habitus through the demands it makes of the body and mind.22 The perfect captain had to be able to conceal those emotions that could have been dangerous to the morale of his soldiers. He needed to be able to mobilize his emotions to counteract feelings interpreted as dishonourable in a given situation, and that could have shown in his face and in physical changes, such as trembling, sweating, going pale, and so on. In Renaissance military culture, two concepts of the bodily emotions (among which gestures are included) and their role in the communication of emotions are intertwined. The first concerns the ability of the bodily emotions to better show feelings, compared to the use of words and speech. In this sense gestures and bodily expressions are regarded as more efficient than words in the communication of an emotional state, in addition because it is harder to fake one’s bodily emotions. This can be applied to the ritual gestures that communicate a specific emotion, since the success of the ritual depends on the perceived ‘sincerity’ of the emotions communicated through it. The same can be argued of specific military contexts, such as the public acceptance of a challenge to a duel or the self-confidence that had to be manifested before a battle. This perceived sincerity, however, is not intended to represent a

19 About the concept of emotional community, see: Rosenwein, Emotional Communities and Generations of Feeling. 20 Rosenwein, ‘The Place of Renaissance Italy’, pp. 20–21. See also: Rosenwein and Cristiani, What Is the History of Emotions?, pp. 78–81; Boddice, The History of Emotions, pp. 106–31; Barclay, The History of Emotions, pp. 93–110; Maddox, ‘Performing Emotions’, pp. 127–42. 21 Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?’, pp. 209–10. See also: Plamper, The History of Emotions, pp. 266–70. 22 See the introduction to Downes, Lynch, O’Loughlin, Emotions and War, pp. 1–23.

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personal inner feeling (what is a pure ‘real’ emotion anyway?), but rather as the appropriate performance of such emotion. Falseness is nowadays mostly regarded as a negative trait, so we are led to interpret the fake emotions — or better, the performed emotions — as of lesser value than the sincere emotions. On the other hand, this distinction depends on how sincerity and insincerity are perceived and judged by a given community.23 Further, the success of the communication of an emotional state depends on the participation of the individuals performing the emotion, basically on their determination to perform it in the appropriate way. The second concept regards the captain’s personal skills: one of the characteristics the good captain had to possess was the ability to control his emotions and to be able to show whatever emotion was needed. Hence the insistence of the military treatises on the need to show courage and strength in order to be obeyed by the soldiers, to inspire bravery, and, in case of need, the necessity of concealing fear and doubt through practices learned during years of service in the military. Antonio Cornazzano wrote that one way to give courage to the men rests in the captain’s face, through which he communicates his strength and confidence; but if that is not enough, and the soldiers are still debilitated, the only remedy is to feign, ‘simular’ (simulate). When the captain has some doubts himself, ‘celando el tuo cor’ (by concealing your heart), that is his thoughts and emotions, he must show that he did not share the soldiers’ fright, so much and so skilfully ‘tal che color della verità rende’ (that it becomes true to them).24 Indeed, the main interest in the emotions communicated through the body — and through the face in particular — is not in their ‘true sincerity’, that is the fact that the captain was actually feeling those feelings, but rather in the perceived sincerity of those emotions, which depends on their appropriate performance. The ability to control and manage emotions was praised by the captains’ biographers as a virtuous trait, part of the military virtue of prudentia, which was the ability to foresee the events and to make the right decision in a military context, derived from the experience of the military profession. This military kind of prudence has nothing to do with conscience nor with moral actions. Of Muzio Attendolo Sforza it was said that with his ‘prudentia et sapientia’ (prudence and experience) he was able to ‘fingere et coprire’ (to fake and conceal) troubles and melancholy of heart and mind.25 The capability of manifesting the feelings of the soldier and how these emotions could affect the emotions of those who observed him was ascribed to the body and to the face in particular. The courage of the army was closely

23 See, for example, Torquato Accetto, Della dissimulazione onesta, first edited in 1641, in which he links the dissimulation of emotions to the virtue of prudence. See also: Van Houdt and others, eds, On the Edge of Truth. 24 Antonio Cornazzano, Opera bellissima, vi.4. 25 Antonio Minuti, Vita di Muzio, p. 250.

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linked to the emotions expressed by its captain, just as the feelings of the soldiers were to a certain degree dependent on the perceived sincerity and strength with which the condottiero showed his state of mind through speech, appearance, and acts. Finally, on the ability of the face to convey emotions and to influence soldiers’ feelings, Onosander, a Greek philosopher of the first century ce, in a military treatise which had a wide diffusion during the Renaissance, states: Se alle volte alcuna maninconia nata, come è solito avenire, da qualche paura parrà haver occupato l’animo de soldati […] al Capitano si richiede di mostrarsi allegro et giocondo. Perciochè il sembiante et l’aspetto del Capitano suole farsi gli animi de soldati conformi, et del tutto con la sua sembianza gli muove. […] Onde veramente meglio è, et più si conviene alla prudenza del Capitano col sembiante della faccia finger allegrezza alle genti, et con la sua letitia farle allegrare, che con parole, et orationi consolarle, mentre sono afflitte dalla maninconia. (If sometimes some kind of melancholy, born from fear, arises in the soldiers’ spirits, as it usually happens […] the captain is requested to show himself cheerful and joyous. That is because the appearance and aspect of the captain usually shapes the soldiers’ souls, and he totally moves them with his appearance. […] Hence it is better and more suitable to the captain’s prudence to fake joy with the aspect of his face, and to make them happy with his happiness, rather than comfort them with words and speeches while they are afflicted with melancholy.)26 Two different conclusions about the emotional practices connected to gestures and bodily emotions can therefore be drawn. They were either practices used to communicate specific emotions and able at the same time to mobilize feelings, since they were embodied military practices connected to specific contexts or moments; or they were communicating practices aimed at performing the appropriate emotion required by the gesture, ritual, or context in the right way. In both cases, we can surely talk about an ‘emotional involvement’ needed in the performance of a gesture or bodily emotion connected to specific feelings. With emotional involvement it is possible to understand both the mobilization of emotions through bodily practices, and the will and ability of a captain to communicate the appropriate emotions in the appropriate way and time, with a gesture. Fundamental to both cases is that the gesture or bodily emotional state has to be ‘emotionally charged’ in order to succeed in its communication. The connection between emotions and actions signifies how feelings were not only thought but also lived as a mediator between verbal language,

26 Onosandro Platonico, Dell’ottimo Capitano generale, fol. 27v.

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body language, and actions.27 To show disgraceful or inappropriate emotions in a given situation was more shameful than defeat in battle, due to the fact that entering into combat signified the ability to overcome fear and weakness and mobilize courage, and was more virtuous than fleeing or being scared. Since ‘the social logics of honour and manliness operated by mobilizing and displaying particular emotions’,28 to show bravery, courage, and endurance of pain was a distinctive trait of the honourable soldier and a fundamental part of status competition. These traits of course encouraged violent behaviours — inherent to the performance of masculine emotions and to the defence of honour — that needed to be contained by the proliferation of rituals and practices connected to competition, rivalry, and making peace, which aimed at showing and communicating specific emotions and at neutralizing the violence inherent to competition itself by shifting it onto a symbolic level.29 The mobilizing practices had the principal role of helping to endure and overcome the emotions connected to the dangerousness of the military profession, in particular the fear of pain. To be wounded and to feel pain, as previously argued, was an inescapable truth, especially for the good captains, who had to put themselves in the front lines together with the soldiers in order to give them courage and to lead them by example. Honour, bravery, virtue, and manliness depended on the mobilization of emotions through pain and fear, as described by Pierantonio Paltroni on the injury and death of Captain Alessandro Gambacorti during a siege. A stone falling from the wall broke Alessandro’s thigh and then caused his death in a couple of days: during that short time he showed ‘la virtù e la grandezza de lo animo suo’ (his virtue and his greatness of spirit), by comforting everyone to bravely defend the city ‘cum quella virilità come se lui non havesse hauto male alcuno’ (with as much virility as if he did not have any pain at all).30 The fundamental role of training as the moment dedicated to the shaping of the habitus is underlined by this fictional speech of Braccio da Montone, in which he connects the ability to manage fear and the driving force of competition: E cosa parimente spaventevole il vedere i colpi, le ferite, le lance in resta, et l’havere sempre avanti a gli occhi le spade ignude. Infin da quell’età cominciamo à non tener conto di quel, che si pruova nelle battaglie, percioche sol delle cose nuove, et inusitate altri suole spaventarsi, […] cosi siamo noi, che ammaestrati dall’uso, passiamo avanti all’età, et meniamo le mani non ancora indurate, et gagliarde, quanto richiede il mestier della

27 Boquet and Nagy, Sensible Moyen Âge, pp. 251–56. 28 Liliequist, ‘From Honour to Virtue’, p. 47. 29 Nye, ‘How the Duel’, p. 184. See also: Petkov, The Kiss of Peace; Althoff, Family, Friends and Followers; Buc, The Dangers of Ritual. 30 Pierantonio Paltroni, Commentari, pp. 241–42.

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guerra, non tanto per comandamento de’ Capitani, quanto per un certo stimolo di gareggiare con altri. (It is frightening to see the blows, the wounds, the jousting poles, and always to have the naked swords before the eyes. From youth we begin to disregard what we feel in battle, because only of new and unusual things it is common to be scared of. […] We are those who trained by practice, still young and with not yet hardened hands, we fight not by the order of the captains, but by the impetus to compete with others.)31 Therefore the possibility of being wounded in battle and, consequently, of experiencing bodily pain, was the result of a mobilization of emotions that instilled bravery in the soldier, a soldier who did not surrender to the fear prior to the battle but was capable of managing and controlling emotions thanks to long training and service in the army. The ability to endure pain and to submit the body to the hardships of war was the consequence of an act of will together with the mobilization of emotions, in view of a specific purpose, namely to express one’s virtue. The mobilization of emotions was not aimed at denying fear and pain but at showing the ability to manage and overcome them through a virtuous behaviour. The captains praised for their ability to endure pain were described as pazienti (patient); patience was indeed the virtue — subsidiary to the cardinal virtue of fortitude — of those who willingly tolerated physical pain and emotional suffering.32 Therefore the suffering soldier’s body, which was culturally informed in its perception and expression of pain, became the material manifestation of mobilized emotions, such as courage and bravery. Hence the physical self became central to the communication of specific emotions through practices such as showing an injured body. In her definition of communicating emotional practices, Monique Scheer argues: Reading emotion in faces, gestures, vocal patterns, bodily postures, or manifestations such as tears, changing skin color, or heavy breathing is a complex process that functions on a multisensory level and involves different modes of knowledge. It includes judgments about the situational context, the actors involved, and social expectations.33 What has been previously stated about the face is even more important in relation to communicating emotional practices. Not only the face but the whole body, its appearance and posture, is a vector of emotions and expression of military virtue, and therefore it is transformed into a cultural symbol within

31 Pompeo Pellini, L’Historie et vite, fols 111r–114v; Giovanni Campano, Braccii Perusini, pp. 165–68. 32 Casagrande, Il dolore virtuoso. On the theory of pain-as-a-type-of-event, which is adopted here, see: Bourke, The Story of Pain. 33 Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?’, p. 214.

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the community. As noted above, the virtuous soldier is the one who has been able to mobilize his emotions such as bravery and to excise fear and pain, thanks to the practices learned during his training. Consequently the material outcome of this mobilization of emotions is the capability to run into battle with all the consequences implied in this act, like the possibility of being injured. Therefore the wound and the scars are objectified and transformed from the material level to the symbolic one, as the result of an inflicted violent act which represents the mobilization of emotions, the active participation in battle and the act of will which is at the basis of the practice of war.34 The body’s ability to communicate emotions and, in turn, to influence the emotions of those around it is exemplified by Niccolò Piccinino, who, after being injured in 1431, decided to rejoin his army and be seen by his soldiers in order to instil bravery in his men and intimidate their adversaries.35 In his poem about Niccolò, Lorenzo Spirito wrote that he commanded to be taken back to the camp, since he wanted to die among the pavilions and then, wounded and half dead, was placed on a big chair to be seen by everyone. The enemy, who had news of the captain’s return, decided to retreat, knowing how much courage such an act could have instilled in the soldiers. The author commented on this event by insisting on the role played by the body, saying ‘qui puoi ben vedere et ben pensare | quanto puoi fare uno homo, quanta temenza | uno corpo a tanta forza venne a dare’ (Here you can well see and think | how much a man can do, how much fear | One body strongly gave).36 The emotions intentionally demonstrated through the body, interpreted as bravery and love for the army, inspired feelings of pride and courage in the soldiers who witnessed the practice.

Scars and Wounds: Incised Symbols of Status and Honour Given the symbolic and emotional value expressed by the body, wounds and scars acquired a central role in the competition between soldiers. The wound

34 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 64. 35 The theory of constructed emotions argues that to transform emotions into social reality you need a group of people to agree that an emotion concept, such as ‘Happiness’, exists, and this shared knowledge is called collective intentionality. Emotion concepts have three main functions, which work only on the individual, namely to make meaning, to prescribe action, and to regulate the ‘body budget’, or the physical responses of the body. They also have two other functions useful in the social life of the individual: the first is emotion communication, which requires that the people involved agree on the function of the bodily state; the second is social influence, with which concepts are able to regulate other people’s body budget. ‘These latter two functions require that other people — the ones you are communicating with or influencing — agree that certain body states or physical actions serve particular functions in certain contexts. Without this collective intentionality, one person’s actions, no matter how meaningful they are to him, will be perceived by others as meaningless noise’. Barrett, How Emotions Are Made, p. 139. 36 Lorenzo Spirito, L’Altro Marte, ii.47.

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interpreted as pain of the body is replaced with the wound as a representation of virtue and emotions, able to communicate the personal characteristics of those who possess it. Therefore it became important for the soldier to show his wounds and scars in order to communicate his personal skills and abilities. Achille Marozzo, a fencing teacher of the first half of the sixteenth century, wrote in his treatise: ‘L’homo armigero debbe cercare sempre la cagione per la quale possa mostrare le virtù del suo invitto animo et quello il quale desidera premio dimostra le ferite per ornamento’ (The man-at-arms has to always try to find a reason to manifest the virtues of his unconquered soul and the one who desires recognition shows the scars as decoration).37 The Renaissance military culture linked the certainty of being injured to personal virtue, and gave specific recognition within the military community to a sign otherwise interpreted as ignoble.38 Pietro Aretino wrote that he comforted Giovanni de’ Medici (who was dying from the consequences of a leg amputation) on his deathbed by saying that ‘Le ferite e la perdita dei membri, sono le collane e le medaglie de i famigliari di Marte’ (The wounds and the loss of limbs are the necklaces and the medals of the family members of Mars).39 The scar was a symbolic sign that represented not only the emotions inherent to the profession of arms but also war itself, as the cultural framework embodied by the soldiers; the scar signified membership in a specific community, namely the Italian military one.40 Hence the scar was a tell-tale sign that told the story of the soldier’s past gestures and his ability to endure pain, interpreted as a manly virtue that leaves marks on the body; it was a symbol that recounted and reminded at the same time. Since all these symbolic meanings were ascribed to the wounds, they became one of the elements taken into account in the selection of soldiers. Giovanni Antonio Campano (vulgarized by Pompeo Pellini) described how Braccio da Montone was particularly meticulous about his soldiers’ physical features: he did not want them big and large, but small and even less than a medium stature, as long as they were strong and violent; furthermore he preferred those ‘che fossero stati riguardevoli per li segni delle ferite nel volto, et che dalle percosse havessero lacerate l’altre membra del corpo’ (who had signs of wounds in the face and who had other limbs torn by blows).41 In this passage wounds and scars are described in the Latin text as insignia bellicae virtutis, namely material symbols of martial virtue, since insigne in

37 Achille Marozzo, Opera nova, v.189. Indeed, he continues by stating that ‘quelli li quali non havranno sparso sangue da lor persone, dando et pigliando rigide ferite, non è verisimile da tali si possa sperare vittoria’ (from those who have not spilled their blood by giving and receiving hard wounds, it is unlikely to hope for victory). 38 Groebner, Defaced, pp. 67–86. 39 Pietro Aretino, Lettere, ed. by Procaccioli, Letter from Pietro Aretino to Francesco de gli Albizzi, 10 December 1526, i, book 1, p. 55. 40 Scarry, The Body in Pain, pp. 116–17. 41 Pompeo Pellini, L’Historie et vite, fol. 44v; Giovanni Campano, Braccii Perusini, p. 70.

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Latin means both a mark or a badge, and a sign of distinction as an evidence of honour. Furthermore, in this passage various qualities related to the soldier’s body are listed, focusing on the Renaissance interpretation of balance and measure, which concerned the military body as well. In the descriptions of the captains’ aspect, it is always emphasized that they were well proportioned, since proportion and balance corresponded to ideal beauty, while wounds and injuries were depicted as ugly, even for those captains who were later praised for their scars. Therefore the symbolic value of wounds was not linked to beauty but only to virtue, by maintaining the two interpretations of the body — the beautiful body on one side and the virtuous body on the other — separated. In the description of Federico di Montefeltro, written by his biographer Pierantonio Paltroni, the condottiero is said to be of a greater than common stature, well shaped, very patient about cold, heat, starvation, thirst, sleepiness, and other difficulties without showing that any of these gave him stress; furthermore, regarding the captain’s passions, Paltroni said he was without any arrogance or anger (intended as negative passions for a prudent condottiero), and that all the emotions that he showed were guided by reason and not because ‘da impeto fosse superato et vinto’ (he was overcome and defeated by impulse).42 In his treatise about the military profession, Antonio Cornazzano describes what a good soldier should look like, and recounts all the different qualities that have been analysed so far: Un soldato mi piacie usato al male | […] Al volto gli guardo io non guardo a panni | uno ochio maschio vigoroso aspecto | rubiginoso e cotto ne gli affanni | Gli homeri larghi et animoso pecto | gamba tornita e ben la vita porti | tal forma marte havea si come ho lecto | Gli comun di statura sun più forti | gli grandi agli hosti son de più terrore | anchor fra picholini gli ne d’acorti | […] Ne qualche cicatrice mi dispiace | vederli in volto; Chio n’ho veduti alcuni e ben de grandi | che col piatello in anzi ella caraffa | trarran marte del ciel se glel comandi | Gionti poi dove la pelle si sgraffa | morti nel elmo stan de la paura | e gli tremanno i piedi nelle staffa. (I like a soldier who is used to pain | […] I look at his face and not at his clothes | A manly eye and a vigorous aspect | Tempered and toughened in hardships | Large limbs and fine chest | A muscular leg and a good waist he must have | I read that Mars had this aspect | Those of common stature are stronger | The big ones give terror to the enemies | But still there are some wise among the small ones | […] And I also 42 Pierantonio Paltroni, Commentari, pp. 53–54. The perfect captain was always described as proportioned but his stature was often said to be ‘a little more than common’. For other physical descriptions of condottieri and how their beauty was described, see for example: Antonio Minuti, Vita di Muzio, pp. 184–85; Giovanni Simonetta, Rerum gestarum, pp. 488– 90, and Cristoforo Landino, Sforziade, book 31; Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca universale, quoted in Luigi Tonini, Storia di Rimini, v.5, p. 324.

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like | to see some scars in their faces; I saw some big soldiers | who, in front of the plate and the carafe, | would have brought Mars down if you commanded them. | But then, when they came where the skin can be scratched, | they were scared to death inside their helmets, | and their feet trembled in the stirrup.)43 In this passage the author summarizes all the qualities connected to the body: a good soldier must have the capability to endure pain and hardships; he must have a well-proportioned and manly body and be of medium stature; it is even more virtuous if he shows some scars on the face; finally, he must be able to mobilize his courage and to face and overcome the fear of battle. It is possible to notice how the face is yet another site fundamental both as a vector for the communication of emotions and as a symbolic site in which to show one’s virtue through scars. The skin had both symbolic and cultural qualities, since it belonged to organic reality and cultural image at the same time, and it contained and showed one’s individuality, given the correlation between body and soul, matter and form.44 If the skin was interpreted as the outward expression of the soul, the signs incised on it became symbols of one’s virtues and vices, like a canvas painted with the marks of war.

The Rhetorical Uses of Body and Emotions in Competition for Status and the Defence of Honour After relating the cultural and emotional features of injuries to the characteristics of the good fighter and the process of selecting the soldiers, it is possible to argue that hierarchy was also connected to the symbolic value of scars. As written by Braccio da Montone’s biographer, those who exceeded all the others in virtue, courage, and faith were the captains of the Italian armies and there was nothing that they felt more proud of ‘che del mostrare una gran quantità di ferite nel petto, et il corpo tutto lacerato dalle cicatrici’ (than to show a great quantity of wounds in the chest, and the body all lacerated by scars).45 Therefore showing and displaying scars was sometimes a practice useful in being selected to be among the greatest members of a military company, and central to the status competition between the soldiers. The grand entrance of Braccio da Montone into the city of Perugia in July 1416 exemplifies this practice. It is reported that he was organizing his company for the parade and that the city’s exiles were asked to parade with the soldiers. Then a quarrel started between the veterans and the exiles, since all of them wanted to stand by the sides of the condottiero, which was the most honourable position. In 43 Antonio Cornazzano, Opera bellissima, i.8. 44 Harvey, ‘The Touching Organ’, p. 87; Walter, ed., Reading Skin. 45 Pompeo Pellini, L’Historie et vite, fol. 113v; Giovanni Campano, Braccii Perusini, p. 168.

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order to demonstrate their virtue and their right to stay at the side of the captain, the veterans opened their clothes, showing and pointing to their chest scars, saying that there was nothing more honourable in the militia than having bled for victory, and also ‘dicevano di non havere più intiera ne fronte, ne alcuna altra parte del viso’ (they said that they did not have either forehead or any other part of the face unharmed). Some of the exiles answered that nobility was more important, others said that the citizens had to go first, but those of the exiles who found themselves in battles in the past, decided to show their own scars.46 In this moment of extreme competition both between soldiers and between them and the exiles, the practice of revealing and showing scars was central to expressing and communicating one’s virtue in order to be praised and selected by the condottiero, and gain honour and prestige within the military community. The fight and emulation between captains and the desire to endlessly outdo one another in skills and virtue were carried out at several practical and symbolic levels, and were the principal cause of rivalries characterizing the Italian Quattrocento. Most of these rivalries led to animosity between condottieri with which humanistic authors embellished their biographies in order to create myths, such as the rivalry between the sforzeschi and the bracceschi (the two companies and military schools derived by Muzio Attendolo Sforza and Braccio da Montone).47 This competition led also to violent consequences in the interaction between soldiers that needed to be regulated and contained by the creation of formal institutions, like the duel, and therefore constituted the ‘negative’ side of the spirit of emulation.48 Hatred and animosity between two captains is referred to as hostility between factions marked by both a verbal and a physical state of conflict. This competitive relation is guided by principles of honour and personal virtue; in this sense, the competition between condottieri is aimed at imposing one’s superiority over the other, not only through the demonstration of military virtue but also through personal attacks designed to insult and mock the adversary, in order to reveal his cowardice and ineptitude. The formal tool useful to the practice of these rivalries was the challenge to duel, which was created following the tradition of medieval jousting, and from the fourteenth

46 Pompeo Pellini, L’Historie et vite, fol. 75r–v; Giovanni Campano, Braccii Perusini, pp. 110–11. 47 Ferente, La sfortuna di Jacopo Piccinino; Covini, La fortune e i fatti; Baruti Ceccopieri, ed., Braccio da Montone. In order to justify the violence with which the rivalries were often performed, the primary sources ascribe these behaviours not so much to hatred as to emulation, as in the life of Francesco Sforza, in which it is said that ‘tra lui, et Nicolo […] non era stata inimicitia alcuna capitale, ma emulatione di virtù et di gloria militare’ (between him and Nicolo there was no mortal enmity, but emulation of virtue and military glory), Cristoforo Landino, Sforziade, book 16; ‘Inter Nicolaum patrem eosque et se capitalis alicujus injuriae causa, sed aemulatio tantummodo quaedam virtutis et gloriae et rerum bellicarum contentio intercessisset’, Giovanni Simonetta, Rerum gestarum, p. 265. 48 Cavina, Il sangue dell’onore; Frevert, Men of Honour.

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century turned into an institution for the expression of the aristocratic ethos, based upon social status and social honour.49 The practice of the duel followed a series of formal steps, from reciprocal insults to written challenges, from the selection of the battlefield and the number of participants to the kind of weapon used, up until the ‘rare’ final violent encounter.50 In this contribution, I will highlight the gestures and symbolic practices which surrounded these formal passages, such as challenges, truces and peace, by putting the body and its performances at the centre of the historical analysis. The following is an example of a challenge between two condottieri, in which it is possible to highlight various aspects of military rivalry. In 1443, the military company commanded by Niccolò Piccinino was besieging the city of Fano, defended by the troops of Francesco Sforza. One of Francesco’s soldiers, Antonello da Corneto, was captured and brought in front of Niccolò in order to be questioned, but ‘semper el ditto Antonello animosamente li rispondia honorando el suo signore e dispregiando el prefato capitano e’l prefato capitano alquanto disdegniato per lo suo altiero parlare infine pervennero al dire intra loro di più parte’ (semper Antonello bravely answered by honouring his captain and disparaging Niccolò, who was somewhat scorned by his arrogant words, and they ended up insulting each other).51 The offensive words, if intended as speech acts, were performances able not only to damage the honour of the contenders, but also to mobilize and communicate emotions, such as rage, pride, and hatred, which served the rivalry of the relationships and defended and legitimized honour and social status.52 In order to defend his captain’s honour, Antonello answered Niccolò’s challenge in this way: Do capitano Zoppo, voi vi hofferite di volere avere a fare col mio splendido signore, il quale, congiungendovi insieme abile inpresa con lo braccio suo ve levaria da cavallo […]; volete conbattere e sete stropiato, e’l mio signore vigoroso e potente, e giovane, e voi vecio; dove sua signoria vergognaria di pervenire con voi a tale effecto. […] e si pure vi condurete vedendo sua magnianima apariscientia, vi farà tremare dal capo per in sino alli piedi. (Oh, crippled captain, you offer to fight with my splendid lord who, when he encounters you, will nimbly unseat you with his arm […]; you want to fight but you are crippled, and my lord is vigorous and powerful and young, and you are old; and my lord will be ashamed to fight you in this manner. […] And even if you will come to fight,

49 See the introduction to: Strange, Cribb, and Forth, eds, Honour, Violence and Emotions in History, pp. 1–22. See also: Carroll, Cultures of Violence, pp. 1–43. 50 See: Cavina, Il sangue dell’onore, pp. 30–69. 51 Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca Malatestiana, p. 93. This and the following quotations are taken from the vivid description of this challenge, pp. 92–102. 52 Gentile, ‘La vendetta di sangue come rituale’, p. 217.

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after seeing his magnanimous appearance, he will make you tremble from head to toes.)53 Here it is possible to notice a different use of the body for the demonstration of superiority and military virtue. Niccolò Piccinino was fifty-seven years old at the time and suffered from a serious case of dropsy, which impeded him in walking but not in riding; in order to insult him Antonello called him old and crippled in comparison with the young and vigorous body of Francesco Sforza.54 The insult lies in declaring Niccolò unfit to fight because of his disease; indeed, it is not the disease that is shameful, but the obstacle it represents for the profession of arms. Furthermore, Antonello declares that Niccolò will tremble in fear at the sight of Francesco, in this way denying his ability to control and manage his emotions in front of the enemy. This provocation triggered Niccolò’s rage and then they exchanged many offensive words, so much that Broglio notes that Niccolò would have liked to have Antonello’s tongue cut out for his dishonest words.55 Francesco accepted the challenge but, in his answer, he emphasized in addition the unfit physical status of Niccolò, to provoke and insult him and to show his superiority: he affirmed that he would have loved Niccolò to be healthy but unfortunately, since the old captain was not, he deemed the fight to be dishonourable, because he was put in such a favourable position by Niccolò’s disability; nonetheless he accepted.56 By saying that it would have been dishonourable to fight against Niccolò due to his physical condition, Francesco was both insulting Niccolò’s masculine honour and questioning his status as captain of the papal state army, which of course unleashed rage from Niccolò, who was ‘infiamato del dire del conte Francesco’ (inflamed by Francesco’s words).57 Among the formal steps of the duel, it was common that third parties would interfere with its development. In this case, Alfonso d’Aragona on one side and Filippo Maria Visconti on the other tried to convince the two captains to step back from the challenge. At this point, though, and after the words that were exchanged, it was impossible for the two to formally refuse without being perceived as dishonourable and cowardly. Francesco answered Filippo Maria Visconti, saying that ‘essendo richiesto che li era necessario conservare suo honore’ (since he has been requested [to fight] he had to do it in order to preserve his honour).58 Niccolò was even more explicit in his answer to Visconti (with whom he had had a long friendly relationship): he stated that the duke’s request was like ‘un cortello al core’ (like a dagger in the heart) and reiterated that he wanted to fight, first for his honour and

53 54 55 56 57 58

Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca Malatestiana, p. 94. Giovambattista Poggio, Vita Nicolai, fol. 154r–v. Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca Malatestiana, p. 94. Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca Malatestiana, p. 95. Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca Malatestiana, p. 96. Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca Malatestiana, p. 97.

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second because if he happened to die, he would have died happily ‘considerato d’avere sanato la mente contra el suo inimicho’ (since he would have done what he had to against his enemy).59 Indeed, honour fulfilled a fundamental role in the challenges between captains, for whom the competition was aimed at showing one’s superiority and defending one’s honour from the insults and provocations that were usually exchanged. Rarely, though, were these challenges settled in a proper fight. Most of the time one of the contenders either used some legal technicality to nullify the duel or simply let the time pass without formally deciding one aspect of the challenge; in fact, these men played too important a role in the political and military theatre and could have not been put in (physical and political) danger due by their rivalry.60 The challenge between Niccolò Piccinino and Francesco Sforza is no exception, because when the day of battle finally arrived, Francesco refused to fight by offering excuses such as that the presence of Alfonso d’Aragona in Niccolò’s military camp could not be trusted. Niccolò replied accusing Francesco of cowardice and saying that despite Francesco’s refusal he would be present at the arranged place in time, as an honourable man would do.61 Then he went to the field with his hundred men and said in front of them that it would be public knowledge that he had respected his part of the agreement; furthermore, to show his will to fight, he offered to give Francesco an advantage by taking ten men-at-arms out of his hundred.62 This last provocation was reported to Francesco in front of everybody through his trombetti (heralds), and started an escalation of rage and insults between the two: ‘Lo illustrissimo conte Francesco, inteso che ave li dicti trombetti, fece una cera magnianima e alegra, con viso chiaro, ben che nel suo petto tucto ardiva di furore e mal talento’ (Francesco, after hearing [Niccolò’s] trombetti showed a magnanimous and happy expression, with a clear/pale [chiara] face, although in his chest he burned with rage and resentment).63 In his reaction it is interesting to notice how, through his ability to control his emotions, Francesco is able to show a face which is chiara, a term that means both something that is easily understandable and determined, and also pale, in contrast to his rage, culturally associated with the boiling blood that makes people flush. Anyway, Francesco could not keep from trying to partially defend his honour by insisting on Niccolò’s age and unfit command: ‘che quando considerasse bene nell’essere che si trova della sua persona che quando perveniremo a tal caso li faremo tremare osse e polpe e vene’ (He should consider well how he is in his person, and when we fight we will

59 Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca Malatestiana, p. 98. 60 See for example the challenge between Galeazzo Maria Visconti and Bartolomeo Colleoni in: Fumi, La sfida del duca Galeazzo Maria a Bartolomeo Colleoni, pp. 357–92. 61 Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca Malatestiana, p. 100. 62 Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca Malatestiana, p. 100. 63 Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca Malatestiana, p. 101.

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make his bones, flesh, and veins tremble).64 This provocation also affected Niccolò, who, after hearing Francesco’s response ‘fremiva como fa il lione ched à volontà di cibare, essendo tucti li suoi valenti homini dinanzi alla sua presentia, così dicendo loro: “Voi avete inteso la risposta che n’à mandata el conte Francesco, della infinita sua viltade”’ (was quivering like a lion who wants to eat, and in front of all his courageous men said: ‘You have heard Francesco’s answer, and you know his limitless cowardice’).65 Finally, as a last humiliation to Francesco, Niccolò made his trombetti play their horns and trumpets in front of the city walls. This example of how a rivalry could be performed shows the central role played by words, insults, and provocations in the competition between condottieri. Since the words had the power to damage one’s honour (particularly if these were circulating in a libel directed against the rival) the captain could decide to halt the escalation and defend himself by challenging the other to a duel. For example, Sigismondo Malatesta decided to challenge his mortal enemy Federico di Montefeltro after reading an insulting letter written by Federico which was circulating in the Italian courts. This letter, however, was itself the reply to a libel written by Sigismondo to Francesco Sforza against Federico. In this particular moment of their long rivalry, the two captains were competing for a privileged position within the army of Francesco Sforza, who was Sigismondo’s father-in-law and general captain, and who wanted to hire Federico di Montefeltro.66 On 21 February 1445, Sigismondo wrote a challenge: Magnifice domine — La Signoria Vostra sa le differentie sonno state bon pezo fra noj, si in quello havesse bono giuditio, intenderia molto bene la colpa essere dal canto suo et non dal mio. La patientia non me giova, nè pare siate disposto ad emendare, anci omne dì a multiplicare errore, et novamente havete scripto in mia calunnia in corte de Roma, et facto dire male de mj; delibero non lo comportare più, ancj mustrarvj de la persona mia a la vostra che so’ più valenthomo che non sete voj, ancj sete uno cativo et fate male ad oltragiarmj; però mando là ser Giohanne da Saxoferrato, mio canzellero, cum pieno mandato a rechedervj de duello. (Magnifice domine — Your lordship knows that we have been in disputation for some time now, and if you exercise good judgement, you would see that the fault is yours and not mine. Patience does me

64 Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca Malatestiana, p. 101. 65 Gaspare Broglio, Cronaca Malatestiana, p. 101. 66 The libel circulated in fall 1444 and is edited in: Franceschini, I Montefeltro, pp. 445–47. Federico’s answer, dated 8 January 1445, is edited in Franceschini, ‘La prima giovinezza’, pp. 46–49. Sigismondo had already challenged Federico once, in June 1444, as we can read in Pierantonio Paltroni, Commentari, p. 66: ‘[Sigismondo] disperato, lo mandò a richiedere de singulare bataglia, cioè da corpo a corpo, et aceptò de bona voglia, ma may el prefato Sigissmundo se condusse’ (The desperate [Sigismondo] asked him to duel, namely one-onone, and he [Federico] gladly accepted, but Sigismondo never showed up).

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no good, nor does it seem that you will change your ways; on the contrary you keep multiplying your faults, and again you wrote a libel against me to the court of Rome, and you have had people speaking ill of me; I declare that I cannot tolerate it any more, but rather I will show you myself that I am a more courageous man than you, on the contrary you are a reprobate and you wrongfully offend me; therefore I am sending lord Giovanni da Sassoferrato, my chancellor, there with full mandate to ask you to duel.)67 The challenge was presented at the court of Urbino in front of everyone, and Federico agreed: ‘Illariter et leto vulto predictam requisitionem acceptavit’ ( Joyfully and with a happy face he accepted the aforementioned challenge). We can note here the insistence of Sigismondo on the offensive and insulting words circulating against him and his determination to settle the dispute by proving his military skills. Once again the public acceptance of a challenge is received with a happy face, as a way of demonstrating one’s control over emotions. This challenge, as with many others exchanged between them, came to nothing.68 Indeed, a significant part of the competition between captains was usually performed through words and insults; the challenge to a duel marked the peak of the exchange of libel and letters, and was a useful means of defending one’s honour and, at the same time, of halting (even momentarily) the competition. Sigismondo and Federico were sworn enemies throughout their lives but, on more than one occasion, third parties tried to mediate a truce or peace. The competition between captains was usually arrested before reaching a dangerous physical encounter that could have imperilled the military and political balance. Therefore another central part of the competitive relations between captains was constituted by truces and peace agreements, and the gestures connected to them. Typical gestures of peace were, for example, hugging, kissing, and touching the hands, interpreted as actions that might sanction peace, a renewed

67 The challenge and the formal acceptance of Federico are edited in Osio, Documenti diplomatici, iii.2, no. 317, pp. 363–65. 68 Federico decided to renew the challenge in October 1445, when the two armies were facing each other between Rimini and Urbino. He sent a formal request in which he wrote ‘Et in questa non venendo, sarà chiaro che non vi sia basto l’animo. E così ho deliberato di porre fine a questa nostra lite, o con la prova chi meglio la potrà fare, o con discoprire le vostre articelle e machinelle, che nè lì nè altrove sia vostra intenzione combattere; se non con la lingua, simulando e fingendo’ (If you won’t come [to fight], it will be clear that you have no courage. So I have decided to end this dispute of ours, by either proving who is the best or by exposing your trickery and craftiness, that neither there nor anywhere else do you have any intention to fight, except in dissembling and pretending with your tongue), edited in Filippo Ugolini, Storia dei Conti, pp. 350–51. See also: De La Sizeranne, Federico di Montefeltro, pp. 56–58. On this challenge see also Pierantonio Paltroni, Commentari, pp. 76–77.

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friendship, or an alliance between two groups. Essential to the success of the performance of such gestures was the perceived sincerity of the emotions communicated through it and, as previously argued, the degree of emotional involvement performed by the captains. The touching of hands, for instance, was aimed at communicating benevolence, deference, and respect, and was supposed to be performed with the facial expressions and bodily postures that could communicate such feelings. To blatantly deny the necessary emotional involvement was a clear way to fail the ritual and to sabotage the attempt to end the competitive and rivalrous relationship. Sigismondo and Federico, once again used as examples, were invited to the castle of Belfiore in May 1457 by Borso d’Este, who tried to mediate a truce between them. When the two enemies met, they reached out their hands to each other, and touched their hands as a sign of reverence, but more quickly toward the duke of Modena than to each other, and even showed that the gesture of touching the hand was made only to satisfy and appease the duke.69 Given the intentions demonstrated through the incorrectly performed gesture, the following formal meeting was bound to be a disaster. The two talked for a long time about their turbulent and competitive relationship, but it was only when the past challenges to duel were brought up that they abandoned any formality and started to aggressively provoke each other. Federico argued that their opposite point of view should have been compared by a third party: ‘staronne a paragone’. Et el signore Sigissmondo rispuse: ‘sicome del combatere’. Et el Conte replicò: ‘che volite dire del combattere? Haveria io mai decto de non voler combattere? Vui ne havite invidato più fiate, cum speranza forse che qualche fiata me ne venisse decto de no: et el pinsiero non vi è reuscito, né è per reuscire, ché sempre me trovarite de uno proposito. Et vergogna et mancamento è istato il vostro, havendo tante fiate invidato et mai esservi conducto’ Respuse el signore Sigissmondo: ‘Io non cercavo altro, et vui testimonii’ Replicò el Conte: ‘Si, et se notario ce è, sia rogato’ Et el signore Sigissmonso alora, levandose su cum le mane in su l’arme, disse: ‘Per lo corpo de Dio, io te cavarò le budelle del corpo’ Et el Conte disse, levandose similiter: ‘Et io te cavarò la corada a te’. (‘[our different opinions] will be compared’. And Sigismondo answered: ‘Yes, just like the fighting’. And the Conte replied: ‘What do you mean about the fighting? Have I ever said that I did not want to fight? You have invited me many times, maybe hoping that sooner or later I would have refused: but you failed in your resolution, and you will fail again, because you will always find me ready. And the shame and dishonour were yours, since you have invited me many times, but you 69 Pierantonio Paltroni, Commentari, pp. 114–15.

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never showed up’. Sigismondo answered: ‘I was not looking forward to anything other [than fighting], and you all are my witnesses’. The Conte replied: ‘Yes, and if there is a notary, let it be authenticated’. Then Sigismondo stood up with his hands on his weapon and said: ‘On the body of God, I will gut you’. And the Conte, rising similiter: ‘And I will take out your bowels’.)70 The two had to be parted by force and left the castle angrier than ever. The competitive relationship revolved around shame, cowardice, and honour; hence both of the captains could not tolerate being accused of refusing a fight. The defence of honour was performed through aggressive and violent behaviour, despite the fact that this was in opposition to the purpose of the meeting itself, since a truce was required to lessen their rivalry. As stated above, cultural gestures were central to the performances required in competitive relationships, and they were often performed in combination with material objects. For instance, the challenge to duel was usually sent together with symbolic war objects, such as a glove or a spear stained with blood: ‘Sforza mandò el guanto insanguinato secondo la usanza in punta de una lanza insanguinata a Brazo’ (Sforza sent the bloody battle glove to Braccio, as customary, at the tip of a bloody spear).71 The same happened during a challenge to battle between Francesco Sforza on one side and the captains of the Venetian army on the other (Gentile da Leonessa, Jacopo Piccinino, and Carlo Gonzaga, October 1452): ‘Con lieto animo vi promettiamo venire a bactaglia giudicata el di che a voi parrà […] vi mando pel nostro Trombetto el guanto tincto di sangue’ (Gladly we promise you to come to battle the day you wish […] and I sent you through our trombetto the glove stained with blood). The Venetian captains accepted and sent back two gloves and two bloody spears to let him know that they and all the other captains and conestabili were ready to fight for the honour of the Venetian army. After seeing the arrogance of the enemies, Francesco became infuriated but, as always, on the day of the battle the Venetian army refused to fight, because it was raining. Francesco then ‘Fece fare una gictata di balestro […] in su la quale puose sopra una hasta e guanti, e quali e nemici gli havevon mandati. Il che fussi in memoria del dì, et ignominia de’ nemici’ (Shot a crossbow [towards the enemy camp] […] on the tip of which he put the spear and gloves sent by his enemies, so that it would be in memory of that day and of the enemy’s shame).72

70 Pierantonio Paltroni, Commentari, p. 124 (the full meeting pp. 114–24). Other sources in which this violent exchange is mentioned are: Ser Guerriero da Gubbio, Cronaca, pp. 66–67; Anonimo Veronese, Cronica, p. 91; a letter from Borso d’Este to Ugolotto Facino, edited in Soranzo, Pio II, doc. 3, pp. 466–67. 71 Antonio Minuti, Vita di Muzio, p. 208. 72 Cristoforo Landino, Sforziade, book 22. See: Giovanni Simonetta, Rerum gestarum, pp. 361–65.

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During peace meetings, an object often used in combination with gestures is the hat. To this, different meanings, such as honour, respect, and deference, were attributed; it was a symbolic object that, on the basis of its shape and colour, was a sign of status, and with which it was possible to convey different emotions through codified practices. The condottieri commonly wore a hat called a capitanesca (literally ‘the captain’s hat’): to take it off meant that the captain momentarily deprived himself of his title and his freedom, and became a servant of the person to whom the gesture was directed. To succeed, this gesture had to be performed in the appropriate way, with a good face, without putting the hat back on too quickly, with no sign of contempt. To fail to take off the hat, if someone else had taken off his in front of you, was a sign of great arrogance.73 The following is an example of how the hat was used in order to provoke a rival during a peace meeting between Muzio Attendolo Sforza and Giulio da Capua, in 1417. At one point of the meeting they started to exchange insults, the discussion got very heated, and at the peak of rage Muzio took his hat and threw it on the floor, then Giulio threw his hat on the floor as well; Sforza bent forward to pick up Giulio’s hat, but the other refused to pick up Sforza’s. In the face of such disrespect Muzio got infuriated, they started again to insult each other, and those who were there (to witness the encounter) had to grab Muzio by the arms and drag him out, since it was dangerous to leave him in the room.74 This practice shows on one hand how, by throwing the hat on the floor, the captains could demonstrate rage, but also the possibility of ending the dispute, by picking up the other’s hat. When Giulio refused to do that, he achieved the opposite effect of the one the ritual was intended to convey, therefore triggering Muzio’s fury. Thus emotions are both a part of the ritual and an outcome of the ritual, and the emotional involvement of both parties is required for it to succeed.

Conclusions Masculinity and manly virtues were displayed through the soldier’s body and its ability to endure pain and hardships, which corresponded to the virtue of fortitudo (and its subsidiary patientia) which was a cornerstone ideal of the Renaissance military mentality. Hence to possess fortitude and to show it was fundamental in the competition between soldiers. As we have seen, status was vertical, hierarchical, and connected to social position in the military company, which could be won by the display of virtue and personal ambition. Indeed, ambition and the spirit of emulation were often described as the driving forces of the military profession and one of the

73 Giovanni Bonifacio, L’arte de’ cenni, pp. 23–26. 74 Antonio Minuti, Vita di Muzio, pp. 185–86.

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forces behind the mobilization of emotions, such as courage and bravery. Endurance and the virtue of fortitude were linked to the Renaissance interpretation of emotions, and so the soldier who endured pain without showing distress was deemed the most virtuous. In this way suffering was acknowledged by military culture, and connected to the fear of suffering and to the ability to overcome it. The perfect soldier was the one able to bear hardships and pain, to overcome fear, and to mobilize emotions such as courage, without revealing his tribulations — hence the central role played by the face and the communication of feelings through it. Thanks to the mobilizing of emotional practices — as practices learned during military training from adolescence on — the soldier could run into battle, which was one of the principal sites of status competition. The mobilization of emotions and its material consequences (i.e. to be wounded in battle and to feel pain) left permanent marks on the soldier’s body, such as scars and mutilation, which were transposed from a physical to a symbolic level as a representation of fortitude. Given the cultural value attributed to scars, they became a fundamental means of the communication of virtuous manly emotions. Therefore to show one’s scars became a practice useful for the competition between soldiers, since they expressed how greatly the body was accustomed to the hardship of war, the ability to mobilize emotion and overcome fear through courage, the personal characteristics of the soldier, his skills and dedication to the profession of arms. Indeed, the presence of scars on the face and in the chest was taken into consideration by the captains in the selection of the soldiers. The suffering and marked body demonstrated the soldier’s dedication, his will to submit himself to pain, and his training, and it was a means of performing the correct emotions in the right way. The Renaissance Italian soldier who decided to compete in the hierarchical struggle for the highest position in the army had to possess these features to hope to succeed. Finally, the communication of emotions through gestures and bodily emotions was fundamental both in order to command, and in the negative competition between captains. Rivalries and animosity were another part of the hierarchical struggle, performed through aggressive behaviour and the use of insults and mockery, managed through the formal institution of the duel. This kind of competition fuelled rival relationships aimed at imposing one’s superiority over another condottiero by undermining his social and military status through insults, lies, and threats, meant to target the contender’s honour, virtues, and manliness. In order to de-escalate the conflictual and violent competition, peace negotiations and truces were needed, but these could provide the captains the opportunity to once again try to impose their superiority, by failing to perform the emotional involvement required by the situation. Therefore the various forms of competition between condottieri were guided by the communication, mobilization, control, and management of different emotional states, since emotions were fundamental elements of

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the conflictual military environment. The soldier who aspired to rise to the top of the military hierarchy was called upon not only to master his own feelings but also to influence others’ emotions through his speech, body, and performances.

Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources Giovambattista Poggio, Vita Nicolai Picinini, Città della Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 916 Primary Sources Achille Marozzo, Opera nova chiamata duello, o vero fiore dell’armi de singulari abattimenti offensivi, & difensivi (Modena, 1536) Anonimo Veronese, Cronica, ed. by Giuseppe Soranzo, Deputazione Veneta di storia patria (Venice, 1915) Antonio Cornazzano, Opera bellissima dell’arte militar dell’excellentissimo poeta miser Antonio Cornazano in terza rima (Venice, 1493) ———, Vita di Bartolomeo Colleoni, ed. and trans. by Giuliana Crevatin (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 1990) Antonio Minuti, Vita di Muzio Attendolo Sforza, in Miscellanea di storia italiana: edita per cura della Regia deputazione di storia patria, vii, ed. by Giulio Porro Lambertenghi (Turin: Stamperia Reale, 1869), pp. 97–365 Cristoforo Landino, Sforziade, Milano: Antonio Zarotto Parmesano, nelli anni del Signore MCCCCLXXXX (Milan, 1490) Filippo Ugolini, Storia dei conti e duchi di Urbino, 2 vols (Florence: Grazzini, Giannini, 1859) Giannozzo Manetti, Dialogus consolatorius, ed. by Alfonso De Petris (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1983) Giovanni Antonio Campano, Braccii Perusini vita et gesta ab anno 1368 usque ad 1424, ed. by Roberto Valentini, Rerum Italicarum scriptores, 2nd ser., 19.4 (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1929) Giovanni Bonifacio, L’arte de’ cenni, con la quale formandosi favella visibile, si tratta della muta eloquenza, che non è altro che un facondo silentio (Vicenza: Appresso Francesco Grossi, 1616) Giovanni Simonetta, Rerum gestarum Francisci Sfortiae commentarii, ed. by Giovanni Soranzo, Rerum Italicarum scriptores, 2nd ser., 21.2 (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1932–59) Ser Guerriero da Gubbio, Cronaca dall’anno 1350 all’anno 1472, ed. by Giuseppe Mazzatinti, Rerum Italicarum scriptores, 2nd ser., 21.4 (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1932–59) Lorenzo Spirito, L’Altro Marte (Vicenza: Presso Simone Bevilaqua, 1489)

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Luigi Osio, Documenti diplomatici tratti dagli archivj milanesi, iii.1–2 (Milan: La Goliardica, 1970) Onosandro Platonico, Dell’ottimo Capitano generale, et del suo ufficio, tradotto di greco in lingua volgare italiana per messer Fabio Cotta nobil romano, in Vinegia appresso Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari (Venice: Gabriel Giolito, 1546) Pierantonio Paltroni, Commentari della vita et gesti dell’illustrissimo Federico Duca d’Urbino, ed. by Walter Tommasoli (Urbino: Accademia Raffaello, 1966) Pietro Aretino, Lettere, ed. by Paolo Procaccioli (Rome: Salerno, 1997) Pompeo Pellini, L’Historie et vite di Braccio Fortebracci detto da Montone, et di Nicolo Piccinino perugini (Venice, 1572) Roberto Valturio, De re militari (Paris: Wechel, 1534) Secondary Studies Althoff, Gerd, Family, Friends and Followers: Political and Social Bonds in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Balestracci, Duccio, La festa in armi: giostre, tornei e giochi nel Medioevo (Bari: Laterza, 2001) Barclay, Katie, The History of Emotions: A Student Guide to Methods and Sources (London: Red Globe, 2020) Baruti Ceccopieri, and Maria Vittoria, eds, Braccio da Montone: le compagnie di ventura nell’Italia del XV secolo; atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Montone 23–25 marzo 1990 (Narni: Centro studi storici di Narni, 1993) Boddice, Rob, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018) Boquet, Damien, and Piroska Nagy, Sensible Moyen Âge: une histoire des émotions dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Seuil, 2015) Bourke, Joanna, The Story of Pain: From Prayers to Painkillers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) Broomhall, Susan, ed., Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2017) Buc, Philippe, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) Burke, Peter, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Arnold, 1969) Cardini, Franco, Quell’antica festa crudele: guerra e cultura della guerra dal Medioevo alla Rivoluzione francese (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1995) Carroll, Stuart, ed., Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Casagrande, Carla, ‘Il dolore virtuoso. Per una storia medievale della pazienza’, in Piacere e dolore: materiali per una storia delle passioni nel Medioevo, ed. by Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, Micrologus Library, 29 (Florence: SISMEL edizioni del Galluzzo, 2009), pp. 31–47 Cavina, Marco, Il sangue dell’onore: storia del duello (Bari: Laterza, 2005) Covini, Maria Nadia, ‘La fortuna e i fatti dei condottieri “con veritate, ordine e bono inchiostro narrati”: Antonio Minuti e Giovanni Simonetta’, in Medioevo

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dei poteri: studi di storia per Giorgio Chittolini, ed. by Maria Nadia Covini and others (Rome: Viella, 2012), pp. 215–44 De La Sizeranne, Robert, Federico di Montefeltro: capitano, principe, mecenate (1422–1482) (Urbino: Argalia, 1972) D’Elia, Anthony F., Pagan Virtue in a Christian World: Sigismondo Malatesta and the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016) Del Treppo, Mario, ed., Condottieri e uomini d’arme nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Naples: Liguori, 2001) Downes, Stephanie, Andrew Lynch, and Katrina O’Loughlin, Emotions and War: Medieval to Romantic Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) Feldman Barrett, Lisa, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) Ferente, Serena, La sfortuna di Jacopo Piccinino: storia dei bracceschi in Italia 1423–1465 (Florence: Olschki, 2005) Floyd Wilson, Mary, and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr, eds, Embodiment and Environment in Early Modern England (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Franceschini, Gino, ‘La prima giovinezza di Federico da Montefeltro ed una sua lettera ingiuriosa contro Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta’, Atti e memorie della Deputazione di storia patria per le Marche, 9th ser., 11 (1956), 27–61 ———, I Montefeltro (Milan: Dall’Oglio, 1970) Frevert, Ute, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (Cambridge: Polity, 1995) Fumi, Luigi, ‘La sfida del duca Galeazzo Maria a Bartolomeo Colleoni’, Archivio storico Lombardo, 4th ser., 18 (1912), 357–92 Garin, Eugenio, Medioevo e Rinascimento (Bari: Laterza, 1961) Gentile, Marco, ‘La vendetta di sangue come rituale. Qualche osservazione sulla Lombardia fra Quattro e Cinquecento’, in La morte e i suoi riti in Italia, ed. by Francesco Salvestrini, Gian Maria Varanini, and Anna Zangarini (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2007), pp. 209–41 Groebner, Valentin, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Zone, 2008) Harvey, Elizabeth D., ‘The Touching Organ: Allegory, Anatomy and the Renaissance Skin Envelope’, in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. by Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 81–102 Ianziti, Gary, Humanistic Historiography under the Sforzas: Politics and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Milan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) Liliequist, Jonas, ‘From Honour to Virtue: The Shifting Social Logics of Masculinity and Honour in Early Modern Sweden’, in Honour, Violence, and Emotions in History, ed. by Carolyn Strange, Robert Cribb, and Cristopher E. Forth (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 45–68 Lombardo, Nicholas E., ‘Emotions and Psychological Health in Aquinas’, in Emotions and Health, 1200–1700, ed. by Elena Carrera (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 19–46

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Maddox, Alan, ‘Performing Emotions’, in Sources for the History of Emotions: A Guide, ed. by Katie Barclay, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, and Peter N. Stearns (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 127–42 Mallett, Michael, Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy, introduction by William Caferro (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2009) Nassichuk, John, ‘Anger and its Limits in the Ethical Philosophy of Giovanni Pontano’, in Discourses of Anger in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Karl A. E. Enenkel and Anita Traninger (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 197–216 Nye, Robert A., Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) ———, ‘How the Duel of Honour Promoted Civility and Attenuated Violence in Western Europe’, in Honour, Violence, and Emotions in History, ed. by Carolyn Strange, Robert Cribb, and Cristopher E. Forth (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 183–202 Paster, Gail Kern, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds, Reading the Early Modern Passions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) Petkov, Kiril, The Kiss of Peace: Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval West (Leiden: Brill, 2003) Pieri, Piero, Il Rinascimento e la crisi militare italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1970) Plamper, Jan, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) Rosenwein, Barbara H., Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007) ———, ‘The Place of Renaissance Italy in the History of Emotions’, in Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy: Proceedings of the International Conference Georgetown University at Villa Le Balze, 5–8 May 2012, ed. by Fabrizio Ricciardelli and Andrea Zorzi (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), pp. 15–29 ———, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Rosenwein, Barbara H., and Riccardo Cristiani, What Is the History of Emotions? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018) Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) Scheer, Monique, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is that What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory, 51 (2012), 193–220 Smith, Vance, ‘Body Doubles: Producing the Masculine Corpus’, in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1997), pp. 3–19 Soranzo, Giovanni, Pio II e la politica italiana nella lotta contro i Malatesti, 1457–1463 (Padua: Drucker, 1911)

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Strange, Carolyn, Robert Cribb, and Christopher Forth, eds, Honour, Violence and Emotions in History (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) Tateo, Francesco, I miti della storiografia umanistica (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990) Tonini, Luigi, Storia di Rimini (Rimini: Ghigi, 1971) Van Houdt, Toon, and others, eds, On the Edge of Truth and Honesty: Principles and Strategies of Fraud and Deceit in the Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2002) Walter, Katie L., ed., Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) ———, ‘Peril, Flight and the Sad Man: Medieval Theories of the Body in Battle’, in War and Literature, ed. by Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Brewer, 2014), pp. 21–40

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Shame and Boastfulness in Early Modern Italy Showing off Masculinity and Exposing Sexual Submission in Class and Age Competitions

On 21 January 1572, in the republic of Lucca, seventy-two-year-old Girolamo Nucchelli confessed to the judges of the Office of Decency — a magistracy entirely devoted to the prosecution of the ‘nefarious crime’ of sodomy1 — that he had often committed the sodomitic act as the receptive partner of five younger men.2 Along with his confession, he demonstrated his repentance, declaring that he knew he had committed ‘a serious offence’, and seeking ‘forgiveness from God’ and their ‘Lordship’, the officers.3 Ordinarily, magistrates dealing with the crime of sodomy resorted to expedited hearings and negotiated sentences. In this case, however, they were adamant in their determination to apply the firm letter of the law which, for a man over fifty years of age, recommended the death sentence at the first conviction.4 Girolamo presented a written plea to the city council some months later, begging the authorities to save his life and revoke the capital punishment that had been meted out to him. He developed a subtle defence, reminding the judges of the impotence of human will when God’s grace went missing from the equation, and alluding to the importance of fervent prayer given that no one, arguably not even the recipients of his letter, should presume themselves safe from temptation. This potentially aggressive remark aside, he ended the letter by iterating his intention to



1 For a history of this magistracy see Grassi, Bathhouses and Riverbanks. Nucchelli’s case is introduced at pp. 76–83. 2 Lucca, Archivio di Stato di Lucca (henceforth ASL), Onestà, 2, fol. 14v. 3 ASL, Onestà, 2, fols 14v–16v. 4 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 14v. Gli statuti della città di Lucca, chap. 107. Dr Grassi    is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow based at the PoliTeSse Research Centre, University of Verona (host institution) and the Department of History of the University of Maryland (partner institution). This chapter was written while Dr Grassi was the recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship at the Sydney node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (the University of Sydney) (project number CE110001011). Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 109-124 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126143

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accept any decision of the authorities with patience and resignation, as if it had come directly from the hands of God. As it happened, grace was granted to him on the condition that he pay a steep fine. After two years in jail, his sentence of life imprisonment was commuted to a sentence of lifelong house arrest.5 This lenience was likely approved on the basis of the convict’s age and social standing; Girolamo was a citizen who had been invested with positions of high responsibility throughout his life. He was sent as an ambassador to Cosimo, the duke of Florence, during a delicate diplomatic affair in 1538,6 and in what may sound like an ironic twist, in 1567 he was elected to the very Office of Decency that charged him with sexual misbehaviour five years later.7 Before the trial commenced, he was serving in the ‘gabella’, the tax and duty office of the city council.8 Although his membership of the ruling class and his advanced age may have contributed in the end to his sentence being downgraded, these attributes had in fact elicited severe reactions from the judges in the initial stages of the trial. With his conduct, Girolamo had breached not only the penal code of the republican Statutes of Lucca, but also the unwritten rules that shaped contemporary performances of masculinity and ideals of social honour and respectability. Lucca was neither the only nor the first city to delegate control of sodomy to a specific magistracy. Historical studies have revealed that in the early modern period, sexual relations between men were commonly practised throughout the Italian peninsula, and, although extensively controlled by judicial institutions, the men who engaged in such activities were at the same time allowed a certain freedom of expression.9 In urban societies, religion was a binding element that reinforced social cohesiveness and political stability.10 Interestingly, the influence of religion resulted in a twofold outcome. On the one hand, it was the primary source of the increased control over sexual mores in late medieval and early modern urban societies. On the other, the interpenetration of politics and religion resulted in both secular and religious institutions being particularly receptive to the frailty of the human condition that, in its current state, was believed to be irreparably stained by original sin. The public management of brothels and prostitution in the majority of late medieval and early modern European cities provides us with a clear example of the miscegenation of the sacred and the profane that characterized urban

5 ASL, Podestà, Sentenze e Bandi, 286, 1572, fol. 140r. 6 Berengo, Nobili e mercanti, p. 169. 7 ASL, Riformagioni Pubbliche, Consiglio Generale, 53, fol. 464, 26 novembre 1566. 8 Onestà, 2, 1572, fol. 2r. 9 Baldassari, Bande giovanili e ‘vizio nefando’; Canosa, Storia di una grande paura; Martini, Il vizio nefando; Rocke, Forbidden Friendships; Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros. 10 Niccoli, La vita religiosa nell’Italia moderna; Terpstra, Prosperi, and Pastore, eds, Faith’s Boundaries; Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence; Trexler, Church and the Community 1200–1600; Trinkaus and Oberman, eds, The Pursuit of Holiness.

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societies at that time.11 Likewise, although sodomy was considered one of the worst sins against God’s creation, male-to-male homosexual intercourse was partially tolerated as long as it contributed to the reinforcement of the hierarchical order that held society together. In this context, ideals of honour, respectability, and masculinity were highly interwoven. As an older member of the ruling classes who allowed himself to be penetrated by younger men of lower social rankings, Girolamo had failed to conform to the unofficial and unspoken code that allowed sodomy to be practised so long as the penetrative role was performed by men of a higher social status than their partners. In this chapter, through focusing on behavioural codes and their embodiment in sexual acts and by paying particular attention to the symbolic value of penile erection, I will analyse how this unofficial code could be turned into a game of sexual competition by members of different generations and social status. For young people, showing their sexual dominance to older men was a means to compensate for the state of social and political inferiority in which the society kept them until they reached, at a very late stage, a state of economic independence and, if they belonged to the upper classes, their full rights as citizens. For many years before the trial, Paolino, one of the young men who was accused of having sexual intercourse with Girolamo, had been accustomed to go swimming in a river situated in the Luccan countryside during the summer months. It was likely in 1565 that he met Girolamo there for the first time. The older man, riding a donkey, approached Paolino and asked for his help in giving the animal a refreshing bath. Paolino, completely nude, mounted the donkey and led it into the water. After this first encounter, the same scene repeated itself many times, with Girolamo giving Paolino some coinage to reward his labour. After some time, Girolamo asked the young man to follow him to his abode at twilight, stating that he suspected thieves of intending to rob his house and that he did not want to sleep in the house alone. Paolino consented to follow him and the two had dinner together. When it was time to retire, Girolamo invited the young man to share his bed. Paolino refused, ‘thinking it inappropriate’, but his host was so persistent that in the end, ‘instigated by him’, he ‘had to take his clothes off and get into the bed’.12 Soon after, Girolamo began to touch him. The young man attempted to forestall him, but Girolamo insisted to such an extent that, as Paolino told the judges, he felt ‘forced to sodomize’ Girolamo.13 The morning after, Paolino snuck out on his own, but two weeks later he encountered Girolamo again. The two reached a shady spot next to the city walls, in the stronghold of San

11 Berengo, L’Europa delle città; Canosa and Colonnello, Storia della prostituzione in Italia; Mazo Karras, Common Women; Mazzi, Prostitute e lenoni; Pavan, ‘Police des moeurs’; Rossiaud, La prostituzione nel Medioevo; Trexler, ‘La prostitution florentine’. 12 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 11v. 13 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 12r. Italics mine.

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Piero. The older man tried once more to solicit favours from Paolino, but on this occasion Paolino’s fear of prying eyes convinced Girolamo to cease his advances.14 Girolamo managed to arrange another meeting between them, however, inviting the young man to his abode under the pretext of wanting to gift him an aged bottle of wine. Apparently Paolino did not refuse the offer, and in less than four days he returned to Girolamo’s home, returning the favour by sodomizing him again. This then occurred on numerous other occasions, with Girolamo once giving him a shirt, and sometimes coins, but primarily wine.15 During the trial, Paolino, the son of a baker, built his defence on his inability to resist the older man’s persistent requests. On 13 January 1572, during one of his interrogations, he stated that ‘as a young man’ he was unable to withstand the flatteries and material goods offered by Girolamo Nucchelli.16 Another young defendant attempted to justify himself before the Officers of Decency using similar phrasing: ‘being a young man I wanted to please him’.17 This young man, Luviso, was the only one of Nucchelli’s partners to belong to the ruling class; the rest were poor labourers and servants. Luviso’s father, Baldassarre Guidiccioni, was a major figure in Lucca’s political scene, having been elected to the Elders (Anziani), the highest office in the republic, twelve times between 1540 and 1571.18 Like Girolamo, Luviso also worked at the gabella, and it was there that the two had the chance to spend some time together. One day, when they met near the gate of San Donato, it was Girolamo who took the initiative, inviting him to walk with him in a nearby lawn. Once they were presumably out of sight, he started asking him about his brother, Conto Guidiccioni, and his travels to Rome, in which, according to Girolamo, he was likely pleasing many women because, in his words, ‘he has a nice piece of meat for them, and you’, he went on, pointing at Luviso, ‘must have one too, because you have a large nose’.19 The allusion to the nose as a metaphor for the penis was commonplace in early modern Italy. According to popular belief and erotic poetry one could determine how well a man was endowed from its size.20 In his Capitolo del naso (Chapter about the Nose), Lodovico Dolce addressed the female readers of his poetry, praising them for acting as pillars for the merit of the nose, ‘which they love and revere so much that they put it under their skirts’.21 Although Luviso modestly replied that

14 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 12r. 15 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 12r–v. 16 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 6r. 17 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 3v. 18 ASL, Anziani al tempo delle libertà, fol. 111. 19 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 2r. 20 Toscan, Le carnaval du langage, iii, 1208–07. 21 ‘Voi [donne] che del suo [del naso] valor sete colonne, | E per amarlo e riverirlo tanto, | Vel mettete talor sotto le gonne’: Dolce, Capitolo del naso, p. 354, quoted by Toscan, Le carnaval du langage, iii, 1208. Translation mine.

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he did not have any precise opinions about that off-colour subject, Girolamo urged him on, asking him more explicitly to allow him to simply look at it briefly. Luviso, however, preferred to run away, justifying himself by saying that he felt sick.22 Between six and eight months later, Luviso came across Girolamo once more; this time the older man seized the opportunity to invite Luviso to his home. After a drink, Girolamo asked him to his room, and so the younger man followed him. Girolamo sat down on the edge of the bed and, as he began to unbuckle Luviso’s codpiece, he said that he would be pleased to see what he referred to as ‘the thing’. The young Guidiccioni reported to the judges that upon ‘seeing Girolamo’s desire’, he unfastened his own trousers, showing him his virile member. He began to stroke it in an attempt to bring about an erection but, as he admitted, the attempt was without success. Girolamo then tried in his place, but upon seeing no results, decided to dismiss the young Guidiccioni.23 The episode was a source of embarrassment for Luviso, who repeated in his deposition that ‘as a young man’ he would have liked ‘to make it erect’.24 In order to repair the insult to his honour, Luviso turned to a friend of his, an apothecary named Giambattista Savona, looking for a remedy for his erectile dysfunction. The drug he was given, however, did not seem to be of any help to him; nor was a particular type of garlic that Lorenzo, Giambattista’s brother, prescribed to him later on.25 Soon after he returned to Girolamo’s of his own accord and confessed that the remedies he had taken had proved useless. The old man invited him to lie down on his bed and asked him to pull his penis out of his trousers, a request to which Luviso once again acquiesced. Despite their efforts, it seemed that there was no way to bring about an erection in the young man.26 At this point, when the judges asked him why he went so far with Girolamo, he simply repeated that ‘as [he] was a young man’, he was eager to show off his erection.27 The focus of the interrogation was clearly not on the pleasure that Luviso was seeking, but rather on his desire to prove his masculinity. This was more than an innocent game amongst men, however; Luviso admitted that he knew that Girolamo was a renowned passive sodomite, and that the son of a baker from San Frediano, the same Paolino discussed above, had made good money from him. At the time, rumours also circulated regarding the state of Girolamo’s anus, which was said to be a disgusting and festering passage full of haemorrhoids.28 In light of this repugnant description, the Officers of Decency again asked Luviso why he seemed so keen to show Girolamo 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 2r–v. ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 2v. ASL, Onestà, 2, fols 2v–3r. ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 3r. ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 3r. ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 3r. ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 3r.

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Nucchelli his erection. Luviso eventually admitted that if he had been able to make his penis erect, he would have penetrated Girolamo, as ‘he wanted to pull some money right out of his hands so he could spend it as young men want to’.29 It is clear that the generational gap was crucial, both for the accused, in building their defence, and for the judges, in trying to assess the accused’s degree of liability. At that time, being in one’s youth was considered a legally mitigating circumstance in sexual and violent crimes. In jurisprudence and legal treatises, youth were believed to be particularly inclined to succumb to passions, such as lust or irrational love, which was believed to blur their self-control, thus reducing their legal responsibility from a juridical perspective.30 This tolerance was legitimized by social circumstances. In those days, urban communities were overflowing with a vast population of unmarried men who, for various reasons, could not obtain a spouse. In the upper classes, marriage was an opportunity for a household to establish economic and political alliances, and the need to carefully deliberate on the choice of one’s partner often resulted in prolonged delays in organizing matrimonies. Moreover, in order to protect the integrity of familial assets, only a particular number of successors were entitled to marry, and often only the first heir. In the lowest ranks of the social hierarchy, men were also forced to put off their weddings for long periods of time. Labourers had to accomplish their apprenticeships and were bound by straitjacket contracts that reduced them almost to the status of captives in their masters’ workshops for many years.31 The urban landscape was thus populated by a mass of youths who were excluded, either for a long time or indefinitely, from the marriage market, and who saw the majority of marriageable women being hoarded by the older generations. Furthermore, youths were kept away from major political responsibilities until around the age of thirty. For these reasons, the youths of early modern Italian urban societies were considered a social class apart, in which the boundaries dividing upper and lower ranks on the basis of birth and wealth were often blurred. As their rage, dissatisfaction, and frustration in this situation sometimes resulted in outbreaks of violence, institutions often attempted to channel these potentially subversive emotions by promoting lay associations, brotherhoods, and confraternities of youths that aimed to control their unruliness. Besides these official organizations, other less formal gatherings were also tolerated, so long as the illicit activities in which they dabbled (such as gambling, drinking, brawling, or perpetrating sexual misconduct) prevented their members from embracing more radical forms of social and political subversion. Sadly, sexual harassment of women

29 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 4v. 30 Pertile, Storia del diritto italiano, pp. 146–64. 31 Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, I toscani e le loro famiglie, pp. 533–67; Lombardi, Storia del matrimonio, pp. 57–71. On Lucca, see: Berengo, Nobili e mercanti, pp. 40–41, 76–82.

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and group rape, which on occasion resulted in tragic murders, were included in the activities to which these groups were devoted.32 The interactions between Girolamo and his young lovers can be better understood in the light of these competitions of class and age. Although it raised great anxieties in Italian communities, who were eternally afraid of God’s punishments, the practice of sodomy was a transgression that society, and the law, was willing to tolerate among the youth, as long as it contributed to the reinforcement of class and age boundaries. In his groundbreaking study on homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Michael Rocke has revealed the central role played by sex in solidifying social bonds between men. The practice of sodomy was able to contribute to the transmission of hierarchical values, working as a stabilizing social force.33 Indeed, patriarchal understandings played a crucial role in the symbolic and sexual ordering of early modern societies: from the rulers, conceived of as the ultimate font of authority within the state, to the heads of the household governing the family, and then moving to institutions such as guilds, religious orders, and confraternities, everything supported the conceptualization of a world wherein some ruled and others submitted.34 Within this conceptual framework, adult men could be accorded the right to subjugate, even sexually, those who were under their authority (women, children, adolescents, workers, slaves, and employees). Even though this unwritten rule clashed with the moral values defended by the Church, this practice was nevertheless accepted, as long as it was performed with due discretion and without causing a scandal. Understandings of honour thus played a crucial role in determining what was allowed or not allowed in terms of sexual behaviours. Although honour was a powerful extra-legal force regulating individual and group behaviour, whose reach extended far beyond formal legislation, honour-related ideas were nevertheless subsumed within legal frameworks. Disobeying the laws was interpreted as dishonouring both the legislators and the rulers, and thereby God himself, as the source of all earthly authority. At the same time, honour possessed a pre-eminently social dimension, working as a measure of social standing.35 It was a ‘well-established, customary, and traditional regulatory process’ that ‘pervaded the very soul’ of women and men, demanding that they ‘conformed to certain accepted standards of behaviour and comportment’.36 Honour was inherited through birth right, but could also be acquired through wealth, power, sanctity, and prestige. Codes of honour varied greatly according

32 Crouzet-Pavan, ‘Un fiore del male’; Matthews-Grieco, ‘Corps et sexualité’, pp. 171–72; Rossiaud, La prostituzione, pp. 18–19, 26–32. On violence against women, see: Feci and Schettini, eds, La violenza contro le donne nella storia. 33 Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, pp. 148–91. 34 Berco, ‘Producing Patriarchy’, pp. 355–56. 35 Faar, ‘Honor, Law, and Custom in Renaissance Europe’, pp. 126–27. 36 Faar, ‘Honor, Law, and Custom in Renaissance Europe’, p. 126.

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to social status, power, sex, and notions of gender.37 The case explored in this chapter demonstrates the way in which sexual performance was crucial in reinforcing or diminishing the reputation of a man in relation to both vertical honour or status (that is, the right to special respect due to one’s superior position) and horizontal honour (that is, the honour that acted as a binding element within communities of peers).38 The capacity to penetrate was symbolically related to the notion of masculine honour, and this capacity had to be performed in a way that confirmed the pre-existing social hierarchies. From this perspective, shame was defined not so much as being in opposition to honour, but rather embodying a lack of honour; an incapacity to perform an ideal masculinity.39 While histories of masculinities have often overlooked the experiences of common people, focused as they traditionally are on the cultural performativity of codes of honour and their social construction, the case of Girolamo, Paolino, and Luviso allows us to grasp the materiality of power relations and the subjectivity of everyday life experiences in contexts of cross-class and intergenerational competition and conflicts in the early modern period.40 At the same time, the case helps to highlight the centrality of the body and its language, as a means of conveying deeply rooted social values. For example, obscene details were added regarding Girolamo’s physical appearance and the miserable condition of his bodily cavities. As young men, it seems that Paolino and Luviso could not help but to show off their sexual endurance, even while claiming to be disgusted by the ‘putrid arse’ (culo marcio)41 of the old man. For their part, the judges accepted this attitude matter-of-factly, apparently without revealing any particular concerns regarding the youths’ behaviour. In their eyes, that which was misplaced was not their urge to show off their turgid members, but rather the behaviour of the recipient of their performances: an older man who represented the city government. We do not know the tone of the rumours that the young men spread, but we may imagine that the same conceit they demonstrated during the trial likely also fashioned their chatter in the streets of Lucca. The act of penetrating a man of superior rank and extorting money from him seemed to be a source of pride for young men who were willing to prove their cunning and masculinity, and

37 Ferraro, ‘Honor’, p. 193. 38 Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England, p. 35. On the relation between notions of honour, masculinity, and the practice of the duel see: Cavina, Il sangue dell’onore; Frevert, Men of Honour; Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honour; Shoemaker, ‘The Taming of the Duel’. 39 Nye, Honor and Shame, p. 103. 40 Tosh, ‘The History of Masculinity?’, pp. 24–25. On masculinities: Arnold and Brady, eds, What Is Masculinity?; Corbin, Courtine, and Vigarello, eds, A History of Virility; Broomhall and Van Gent, eds, Governing Masculinities; Bauer, History of Masculinity; Shepard, Meanings of Manhood; Hitchcock and Cohen, eds, English Masculinities. 41 ASL, Onestà, 2, fols 3v, 4v.

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it worked as a form of social compensation in a context in which young men were kept in condition of economic, political, and social inferiority. From this point of view, we can understand Luviso’s concerns and his desire to rectify his failed performances. Girolamo seemed to have understood these dynamics, and thus shrewdly decided to wound the young man’s pride; after one of numerous such attempts to bring Luviso’s penis to life, Girolamo said bluntly, immediately before sending him away, ‘you have a weak spine’.42 The body and embodiments of masculinity were matters for concern for the actors involved in these proceedings.43 Luviso was not the only one to turn to medical explanations when it came to justifying his conduct. In order to both protect his own honour and attempt to save his own life from the threat of a death sentence, Girolamo declared that he had been looking for younger insertive partners as he believed that anal sex was a remedy for haemorrhoids, a disease that apparently tormented him. This pretence seemed to be confirmed by the young defendants, who remarked upon the sad state of Girolamo’s anus. One of the witnesses, a servant of Luviso Guidiccioni’s father named Santi di Gianmaria, reported that the younger Guidiccioni had boasted that he had ‘skewered’ (ficchato drieto) Girolamo Nucchelli.44 We do not know whether this was a false testimony designed to worsen Luviso’s position before the judges, or whether Luviso had indeed tried to compensate for his failure by spreading the word that he had successfully penetrated the old man, in order to negate Nucchelli’s potential gossip. At the same time, it is clear that the tale of his impotence could have acted as a means by which to reduce his liability, proving that actual sodomy between the two had never taken place. Whatever the case may be, it is relevant to note that even if the young nobleman’s defence was a fraudulent one, it was in all likelihood built according to the criteria of reliability, which, in order to be effective, had to correspond to common sense understandings of juvenile (mis)conduct at the time. When Santi continued to ask Luviso why he had indulged in so shameful an act, Luviso reportedly repeated that as Girolamo suffered from haemorrhoids, he had merely wanted to help him to scratch them.45 In Tuscany, the belief that anal sex was helpful in curing haemorrhoids went hand in hand with another vulgar opinion that stated that receptive sodomy could help old men in recovering their lost virility. This theme is found in the majority of burlesque poetry ironically dealing with ‘aberrant sexual practices’ between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.46 In his Capitolo in lode delle castagne (Chapter in Praise of the Chestnuts), in which ‘chestnut’ is to be read as a metaphor for 42 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 3v. 43 On bodies and historiography see: Simons, Sex of Men; Canning, Gender History in Practice; Gowing, Common Bodies; Finucci, Manly Masquerade; Laqueur, Making Sex. 44 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 5r. 45 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 5r. 46 Toscan, Le carnaval du langage, i, 240.

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the female sex, Lasca stated that the penis ‘is relished by everyone: | but particularly by old men and putti, whom we behold | celebrating it more than other friendly gatherings of people usually do’.47 It was commonly thought that old men were the neediest when it came to seeking relief and solace through receptive sexual intercourse.48 Although the case studied above may initially appear to confirm the assumption that age-structured homosexual interactions were supposed to follow a pattern in which the dominant role was performed by the older partner, many of its nuances in fact distort this well-established supposition. Firstly, returning to Girolamo Nucchelli’s ‘chance’ encounters along the river in 1565, we discover that it was almost certainly not by chance that Nucchelli loitered in those parts. From the early 1550s until the late 1560s, the aforementioned hidden spot in the Luccan countryside was subject to strict surveillance by the secret informers of the Office of Decency. Several trials took place during these decades, involving dozens of young men accused of acts of sodomy committed there. Evidently it was a meeting place where men sought casual homosexual affairs. The personal interactions and the way in which relationships were negotiated in these gatherings by the river were, however, quite different from those that occurred in other rendezvous points in Lucca. At night, one could have easily found a stranger for the purposes of stealthy sexual intercourse in certain areas of the gardens along the defensive walls of the city, as well as in other well-known meeting places for sodomites, such as public baths and inns. In these particular sites, it occurs repeatedly the pattern of casual homosexual interactions that scholars focusing on male-tomale homoerotic interactions in late medieval and early modern European urban scenarios have found elsewhere.49 Hurried negotiations, often based on an unspoken code of bodily signs, resulted in quick sexual intercourse and impersonal contact. In the majority of these cases, age difference implied a dichotomy between insertive and receptive roles, with the elder acting as penetrator.50 Contrarily, based on evidence from the trials, the homosocial gatherings along the river in Lucca seemed to be characterized by different modalities. The partners belonged to a narrow age range, primarily from ages fifteen to twenty-five, and the sexual roles in intercourse were far less polarized,

47 ‘Queste [le succiole, in this case a metaphor for the penis] son parimente a ciascun grate; | ma più a’ vecchi e putti, a cui veggiàno | più festa farne, ch’all’altre brigate’. Grazzini (Il Lasca), Le rime burlesche, p. 574, quoted by Toscan, Le carnaval du langage, p. 243. Translation mine. 48 Toscan, Le carnaval du language, p. 243. 49 Hergemöller, Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 39–65. For a European comparative perspective see: Gerard and Hekma, eds, The Pursuit of Sodomy. On Italy see: Martini, Il vizio nefando; Rocke, Forbidden Friendships; Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros. On Spain see: Carrasco, Inquisición y repressión sexual; Mantecón Movellan, ‘Los mocitos de Galindo’. On Germany see: Boes, ‘On Trials for Sodomy’. On Switzerland see: Naphy, ‘Sodomy in Early Modern Geneva’; Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland. 50 Grassi, L’Offitio sopra l’onestà, pp. 78–80.

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with most participants playing the receptive or the insertive role alternately with different partners, or being versatile with the same person. Although all interactions seem to have been characterized by a high degree of sexual promiscuity, the people who met there knew each other, and in some cases the sources document ongoing relationships. Moreover, none of these cases was accompanied by any kind of physical violence,51 which was otherwise a common feature in many sodomy trials preserved in the archives from the early modern period.52 The degree to which Paolino was involved in this sociability is unclear. Girolamo’s trial took place when the interest surrounding proceedings that had focused on the homoerotic gatherings along the Luccan river had already died out. We are aware of Paolino’s encounter with Girolamo due to a statement given almost seven years after the events occurred. The way in which their meeting is portrayed in the sources, however, seems to suggest that both men were part of this shared homoerotic subculture. If this is the case, we may hypothesize that Paolino’s behaviour in fact conformed to different sexual cultures in different circumstances; reciprocity and complicity amongst peers in the homoerotic subculture staged along the river could perhaps exist side by side with hierarchical understandings of sexual relationships in contexts of class and age disparities. Although Nucchelli was the older party, and the party who held a position of power and authority, in many passages it seems that he showed genuine affection for Paolino. According to a witness, on a past occasion in which the young man was thrown in gaol for an unspecified crime, he entreated Girolamo, who sent him money on request.53 Nucchelli also reportedly supported him financially when he returned from a military campaign. As Nucchelli continued to deny the charges, there came a moment during the trial in which they had to undergo an interrogation facing each other. When Paolino repeated the accusations that he had formulated word by word to Girolamo’s face, the older man burst into tears, saying: Paolino, please watch your soul […] you know very well why I gave you the money, and this is how you repay me for all the favours I have done for you and for your father; those favours do not deserve to be repaid in this way.54 Previous reports from the trial seem to show, however, that it had also not been easy for Paolino to turn his back on Nucchelli. In one of his depositions, he stated that he had decided to report Girolamo to the judges as he knew that there were too many rumours flying about what they had done, and he

51 Grassi, L’Offitio sopra l’onestà, pp. 87–91. 52 See Baldassari, Bande giovanili. 53 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 9r–v. 54 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 8v–9r.

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believed that they were about to be brought before the Palace of Justice.55 He reportedly stated that he met Girolamo in the entrance hall of the officers’ palace. When his friend asked him what he was doing there, Paolino justified himself by saying that he was going to denounce him so as to gain the right of impunity, a benefit that was always granted in Lucca, and elsewhere, to those who accused themselves of sodomy reporting their partners. He said that if he ‘could have saved him he would have sacrificed his own life’, but added that he was too poor and too afraid of torture to do so. He eventually invoked Girolamo’s patience, saying that ‘he could not have done otherwise’.56 In a subsequent interrogation, Paolino added that he had remarked to Girolamo that it would have been counterproductive for him to simply leave at that point, given that people in the palace had already seen them talking to each other. According to Paolino, Nucchelli sent some men to his father’s abode after this episode, offering him money to buy his silence.57 In this case study, we have observed the extent to which same-sex practices intersected with understandings of status, honour, and masculinity in contexts of class and generational competition during the early modern period. We have seen the ways in which male-male sexual conduct was able to either confirm or subvert the position assigned to a person according to his social standing, wealth, and political power. By acting as a receptive partner, Girolamo Nucchelli lost all the privileges that he had been afforded as a member of the ruling class; initially on a symbolic level, by being made an object of ridicule, and eventually by being exposed to the risk of a death sentence. Luviso’s boastful words that he had ‘skewered’ him could in their turn be seen as both an attempt to negate his alleged impotence and a way to gain prestige among his peers, whereas the eventual admission of his sexual failure before the court may have been a strategy to avoid a formal conviction, at the price of his masculine reputation. Thus, although suffering in different ways, Girolamo and Luviso, both members of the upper classes, experienced scorn and social shaming for failing to conform themselves to the ideals of an active and aggressive masculinity. As far as we are aware, after two years in jail, Girolamo spent the rest of his days under house arrest, completely excluded from the public life of the city-state. Luviso, however, who was still willing to prove his masculine stamina, was merely jeered at for his sexual defeat, which saved him from a formal conviction. At the same time, penetrative sexual performances, and their embodiment in a functioning penis being proudly exhibited, empowered young and poor men alike, compensating for their condition of social exclusion and their paucity of rights within the community. This was the strategy of Paolino. While not denying penetration, he told the court that as a young man he was unable to

55 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 6r. 56 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 6r–v. 57 ASL, Onestà, 2, fol. 13r.

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resist Girolamo’s persistent requests. In this way he could both diminish his own judicial responsibility and still conform himself to the popular image of the young man who could not help showing off his sexual potency at any given occasion. In this tale, sexual shame cannot merely be defined as the opposite of sexual honour. Girolamo did not question the foundational ethics that sustained the stability of the society in which he lived, preferring instead to exist in a limbo of half-voiced desires. He attempted to preserve his respectability in front of the judges until the end of the trial. Shame signified a deficiency, a lack of honour; a lack that was embodied by the absence of a turgid, erect penis or, even worse, by Girolamo’s refusal to identify with it.

Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources Lucca, Archivio di Stato di Lucca, Anziani al tempo delle libertà, fol. 111 ———, Onestà, vols 1–2 ———, Podestà, Sentenze e Bandi, 286, 1572, fol. 140r ———, Riformagioni Pubbliche, Consiglio Generale, 53, fol. 464, 26 novembre 1566 Primary Sources Dolce, Lodovico, Capitolo del naso, in Il primo libro delle opere burlesche del Berni, del Casa, del varchi, del Mauro, del Bino, del Molza, del Dolce, del Firenzuola (Usecht al Reno: Jacopo Broedelet, 1771), pp. 353–58 Gli statuti della città di Lucca nuovamente corretti, et con molta diligentia stampati per giovambattista Phaello Bolognese (Lucca, 1539) Grazzini, Antonio F. (Il Lasca), Le rime burlesche edite e inedite di Antonfrancesco Grazzini detto Il Lasca, ed. by Carlo Verzone (Florence: Sansoni, 1882) Secondary Studies Arnold, John H., and Sean Brady, eds, What Is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Baldassari, Marina, Bande giovanili e ‘vizio nefando’: violenza e sessualità nella Roma barocca (Rome: Viella, 2005) Bauer, Marc, History of Masculinity (Geneva: Attitude, 2007) Berco, Cristian, ‘Producing Patriarchy: Male Sodomy and Gender in Early Modern Spain’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 17 (2008), 351–76 Berengo, Marino, Nobili e mercanti nella Lucca del Cinquecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1965)

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———, L’Europa delle città: il volto della società urbana europea tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Turin: Einaudi, 1999) Boes, Maria R., ‘On Trial for Sodomy in Early Modern Germany’, in Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Tom Betteridge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 27–45 Broomhall, Susan, and Jaqueline Van Gent, eds, Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011) Canning, Kathleen, Gender History in Practice: Historical Perspectives on Bodies, Class, & Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006) Canosa, Romano, Storia di una grande paura: la sodomia a Firenze e a Venezia nel Quattrocento (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991) Canosa, Romano, and Isabella Colonnello, Storia della prostituzione in Italia: dal Quattrocento alla fine del Settecento (Rome: Sapere 2000, 1989) Carrasco, Rafaël, Inquisición y represión sexual en Valencia: historia de los sodomitas (1565–1785) (Barcelona: Laertes, 1985) Cavina, Marco, Il sangue dell’onore: storia del duello (Bari: Laterza, 2005) Corbin, Alain, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and Georges Vigarello, eds, A History of Virility, trans. by Keith Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) Crouzet-Pavan, Élisabeth, ‘Un fiore del male. I giovani nelle società urbane italiane (secoli XIV–XV)’, in Storia dei giovani, i: Dall’antichità all’età moderna, ed. by Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Bari: Laterza, 1994), pp. 211–77 Faar, James R., ‘Honor, Law, and Custom in Renaissance Europe’, in A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance, ed. by Guido Ruggiero (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 124–38 Feci, Simona, and Laura Schettini, eds, La violenza contro le donne nella storia: contesti, linguaggi, politiche del diritto (Rome: Viella, 2017) Ferraro, Joanne M., ‘Honor’, in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, iii, ed. by Paul F. Grendler (New York: Scribner, 1999), pp. 193–94 Finucci, Valeria, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) Frevert, Ute, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel, trans. by Anthony Williams (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995) Gerard, Kent, and Gert Hekma, eds, The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989) Gowing, Laura, Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) Grassi, Umberto, Bathhouses and Riverbanks: Sodomy in a Renaissance Republic (Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2021) Hergemöller, Bernd-Ulrich, Sodom and Gomorrah: On the Everyday Reality and Persecution of Homosexuals in the Middle Ages, trans. by John Phillips (London: Free Association Books, 2001) Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, I toscani e le loro famiglie: uno studio del catasto fiorentino del 1427 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988) Hitchcock, Tim, and Michèle Cohen, eds, English Masculinities, 1660–1800 (London: Longman, 1999)

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Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) Lombardi, Daniela, Storia del matrimonio: dal Medioevo a oggi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008) Mantecón Movellan, Tomás António, ‘Los mocitos de Galindo: sexualidad contra natura, culturas proscritas y control social en la temprana edad moderna’, in Bajtín y la historia de la cultura popular: cuarenta años de debate, ed. by Tomás António Mantecón Movellan (Santander: Edictorial Universidad de Cantabria, 2008), pp. 209–40 Martini, Gabriele, Il vizio nefando nella Venezia del Seicento: aspetti sociali e repressione di giustizia (Rome: Jouvence, 1988) Mazo Karras, Ruth, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) Mazzi, Maria S., Prostitute e lenoni nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1991) Matthews-Grieco, Sara F., ‘Corps et sexualité dans l’Europe d’Ancien Régime’, in Histoire du corps, ed. by Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, Georges Vigarello, i, De la Renaissance aux Lumières, ed. by Alain Corbin (Paris: Seuil, 2005), pp. 167–234 Naphy, William, ‘Sodomy in Early Modern Geneva: Various Definitions, Diverse Verdicts’, in Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Tom Betteridge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 94–111 Niccoli, Ottavia, La vita religiosa nell’Italia moderna: secoli XV–XVIII (Rome: Carocci, 2008) Nye, Robert A., Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) ———, ‘Honor and Shame’, in Encyclopedia of European Social History: From 1350 to 2000, v: Culture; Leisure; Religion; Education; Everyday, ed. by Peter N. Stearns (Detroit: Scribner, 2001), pp. 103–13 Pavan, Élisabeth, ‘Police des moeurs, société et politique à Venise à la fin du Moyen Âge’, Revue historique, 264 (1980), 241–88 Peltonen, Markku, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Pertile, Antonio, Storia del diritto italiano, v: Storia del diritto penale (Turin: UTET, 1892) Puff, Helmut, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) Rocke, Michael, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) Rossiaud, Jacques, La prostituzione nel Medioevo, trans. by Ezio Pellizer (Bari: Laterza, 1984) Ruggiero, Guido, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) Shepard, Alexandra, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

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Shoemaker, Robert B., ‘The Taming of the Duel: Masculinity, Honour and Ritual Violence in London, 1660–1800’, The Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 525–45 Simons, Patricia, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Terpstra, Nicholas, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore, eds, Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) Toscan, Jean, Le carnaval du langage: le lexique érotique des poètes de l’équivoque de Burchiello à Marino (xve-xviie siècles) (Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1981) Tosh, John, ‘The History of Masculinity: An Outdated Concept?’, in What Is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World, ed. by John H. Arnold and Sean Brady (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 17–24 Trexler, Richard C., Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980) ———, ‘La prostitution florentine au xve siècle. Patronages et cliènteles’, Annales, E.S.C., 36 (1981), 983–1015 ———, Church and the Community, 1200–1600 (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1987) Trinkaus, Charles E., and Heiko A. Oberman, eds, The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1974)

Jonas Li liequist

‘I Am as Honest a Man as You’ Gender and Conflicts about Status and Honour in Early Modern Sweden

The aim of this chapter is to study the ways in which competition and conflicts about status were interwoven with concepts of gender and honour. Examples will be drawn from four types of conflicts: disputes about the seating order in churches, refusals to drink to each other, joking relations turning antagonistic, and authority conflicts related to the household. It will be argued that competition about status could easily slide into more serious and sometimes fatal conflicts about honour. Analytically a distinction is made between status as encouraging competition in a vertical and positive way, and honour as a horizontal right to respect that must be defended from being violated and lost, nurturing what can be called a negative competition of insults, provocations, and challenges. Closely connected to status is ambition, prestige, and authority, while honour is continuously contrasted with infamy and dishonour as its very opposite. Gender in its turn is used here as referring to supposed natural differences in character between the sexes underlying cultural and legal notions of manhood and womanhood.

Status Status relates to a person’s social standing in society.1 Status could be both individual and collective. Its working principle is to mark and rank differences between individuals and groups in the form of titles, privileges, and orders of precedence. Status is thus hierarchical by nature. The principal status groups in early modern Swedish and Finnish society consisted of the four estates: nobility, priests, burghers, and farmers, ranked in that descending order. Within each of these estates there were further status hierarchies. Besides



1 For an overview of the concept and its theoretical development from Weber to Bourdieu, see Turner, Status. Jonas Liliequist    is Professor Emeritus of History at Umeå University, Sweden. Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 125-158 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126144

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the estates there was the military rank between officers in the army, as well as an official order of precedence within the civil and military administration issued by the king. The latter did at first only include the highest civil and military offices but was soon extended to the lowest levels of military and state officials and their wives.2 On an individual level, status can be both ascribed and achieved. Ascribed status is externally defined by law and statutes and has an objective and formal character. Achieved status, or social prestige, which is the preferred term here, is dependent on both the esteem of others and an individual’s self-esteem.3 As such it is strongly associated with ambition and competition. A person’s social prestige and subjective self-esteem can thus conflict with both his or her ascribed status, causing frustration, and with other persons’ status pretensions, causing conflicts. With status also followed a certain degree of authority and the right to be met with respect and reverence from persons of lower status.4 The sense of worthiness and self-esteem acquired different connotations according to status position and profession. This was already reflected in the way members of different estates and professional groups were formally addressed in early modern Sweden. Thus, commissioned and non-commissioned officers were addressed as ‘ädel och manhaftig’ (noble and manly) and ‘äreboren och manhaftig’ (honourable and manly) respectively, and common soldiers (at least from the eighteenth century) ‘ärlig och manlig’ (honest and manly), manly indicating fortitude and courage as key values for the whole military profession. While ‘highborn’ and ‘wellborn’ were reserved for the nobility, members of the clergy were addressed as ‘reverend’ in combinations with ‘most’, ‘highly’, etc. and common burghers and peasants as ‘ärlig och beskedlig’ (honest and upright) or ‘ärlig och förståndig’ (honest and sensible). Simpler civil servants and officials could be addressed as ‘well-trusted’ and artisans as ‘skilled’.5 Thus, members of the same corporation, estate, or profession were assigned and at the same time stratified by certain prestigious key values or civic virtues, providing a fertile ground for status competition. Status was also connected to stereotypical characterizations of temperaments. A nobleman was typically choleric, a priest melancholic, and peasants phlegmatic, while the sanguine temper had a more scattered representation in the social hierarchy.6 Early modern society consisted of not just one but several parallel and overlapping orders of status. The Lutheran three estates of church, civil government, and household ordered every member of society in hierarchical positions in each of these estates. Of these, a father’s rule of his household 2 Wirilander, Herrskapsfolk, pp. 140–45. 3 Turner, Status, pp. 1–5. Prestige is defined by Collins English Dictionary as high status or reputation achieved through success, influence, wealth, etc. 4 For the connection between status, authority, and reverence in the period of early modern state building process, see Liliequist, ‘Reverence, Shame and Guilt’, pp. 249–55. 5 Ågren, ‘Status, Estate, or Profession’, pp. 170–82. 6 Wirilander, Herrskapsfolk, pp. 34–40.

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represented the most elementary and basic order of society. A household of the landed farmers typically included a husband and wife and their minor children still living at home, one or two servants who were often young unmarried sons and daughters from other households, and rather often, paternal or maternal grandparents as well. These different positions in terms of age, gender, and marital and parent-child relations constituted a complex hierarchy of duties and obligations to show reverence, which nurtured disputes over status and authority, both ascribed and achieved, within the household.7

Status and Honour While status is used here in a modern analytical sense, honour has been used with a variety of meanings. In early modern Sweden the words for honour, ära and heder, could be used both in a general sense in contrast with infamy, ärelöshet, and more specifically for glory and fame connected to personal ambition and bestowed by the king in the form of honorary titles, medals, and positions.8 Following anthropologist Frank Henderson Stewart, the latter can be called ‘vertical honour’, defining a person’s right to special respect as superior in the social hierarchy.9 Analytically this kind of relative and acquired honour is like status, which is the preferred key-concept in this volume. Honour in the former more general and, according to Stewart’s terminology, ‘horizontal’ meaning, is ‘the right to be treated as a full or equal member of the honour group’.10 In its broadest and most fundamental sense this kind of honour was recognized by late medieval and early modern Swedish law as an irreproachable civic reputation irrespective of social status which qualified for the exercise of civic duties and rights. It is this ‘horizontal’ aspect of a person’s social standing in society that will be referred to in the following as honour, ära, and its possession as ärlig (honest).11 In legal terms the concept ära was first and foremost defined indirectly through statutes about its violation and loss and what constituted the state of infamy, ärelöshet. A key mark of infamy was exclusion from the right to testify in courts.12 Sincerity and trustworthiness were thus key characteristics of an honest man. Accordingly, 7 Liliequist, ‘“The Child Who Strikes his Own Father”’, pp. 19–42. 8 Delblanc, Ära och minne, pp. 109–35; Tunefalk, Äreminnen, pp. 53–197. 9 Stewart, Honor, pp. 59–60. 10 Stewart, Honor, pp. 54–58. For the distinction between vertical and horizontal honour and its development in relation to state building and royal autocracy see Liliequist, ‘From Honor to Virtue’ and Liliequist, ‘Royal Authority and the Taming of the Aristocracy’, p. 78. Stewart’s distinction has been widely accepted but with certain modifications. For an overview see Schwerhoff, ‘Early Modern Violence and the Honour Code’, pp. 27–30. See also the discussion in Kane ‘The Politics and Culture of Honour’, pp. 15–16. 11 ‘Honest’ denotes the quality of possessing honour while ‘honourable’ refers to the quality of an action. Being of more ancient origin, heder was often used synonymously paired with ära, Liliequist, ‘Du ljög som en tjuv och skälm’, pp. 5–6. 12 Inger, Vanfrejd, pp. 137–41.

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‘thief’ and ‘rogue’ (Swedish skälm — an untrustworthy, deceitful, unscrupulous person) were by far the most frequent abusive words cited before the courts in early modern Swedish towns and countryside, representing the master theme of infamy and dishonour.13 Honour in this sense could best be described as a fixed symbolic capital owned and possessed by the individual, implying a civic right which could not really be gained or increased, but only lost or restored according to the principles of the law.14 This all-or-nothing characteristic made challenges and conflicts about ‘horizontal honour’ especially drastic compared to status. Blows and abusive words were in this respect considered equally harmful by the law.15 Thus, this kind of honour also came close to a modern concept of personal integrity but in a more somatic sense as a sphere around every human whose trespassing by another person in word and action becomes potentially offensive.16 The old Swedish word for this concept of integrity was manhelgd — the protection by law of a free person’s personal peace, security, and inviolability.17 In this perspective, a blow could always be a potential attack on honour. Consequently, there was a whole repertoire of physical affronts, ranging from gestures to disrespectful touches and blows with strong degrading connotations. Infamy was in a corresponding way alluded to and demonstrated in gestures and words as a refusal to socialize. The thief, hanged by the neck, hands tied behind the back and the corpse left to be consumed by birds, was the ultimate representative in Nordic tradition of infamy and dishonour with the subsequent loss of integrity and exclusion from society.18 According to the moral message communicated in the illustration below from the national law code (Fig. 5.1), a sense of honour does not come naturally but has to be inculcated into the child from an early age. The inscriptions to the right and the left read ‘Aga bondabarn i tid, då kommer [det] ej hit’ (Chastise peasant children in time, then they will not end up here) and ‘Levde utan aga, ty [därför] haver denna plåga’ (Lived without chastisement, therefore sustaining this torment). Thus, the right to physical integrity was not absolute but conditioned with regard to chastisement during childhood up to the age of majority.

13 Andersson, ‘Bland tjuvkonor och hundsfottar’, pp. 26–33; Jarrick and Söderberg, Odygd och vanära, pp. 44, 151; Lindstedt Cronberg, Synd och skam, pp. 219–20, 225–26; Falk, Verbala förolämpningar, pp. 182–84; Liliequist, ‘Du ljög som en tjuv och skälm’, pp. 13–14. 14 Stewart, Honor, p. 57; Trolle Önnerfors, ‘Suum cuique tribuere’, pp. 187–88. 15 An abusive word was fined twice as high as a blow according to the town law Swerikes StadzLagh, ed. by Arnell: Rådstugubalken cap. 31, Såramålsbalken med vilje cap. 12 and equally with a blow according to both the national law Swerikes rijkes lands-lag, ed. by Abrahamsson: Tingmålabalken cap. 43 and Såramålsbalken med vilje cap. 13 respectively, and in the national law of 1734 Sweriges Rikes Lag 1734: Missgärningsbalken cap. 35 § 3 and 60 § 6, which replaced the two aforementioned law codes. 16 Simmel, ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’, chap. 2, § 4 ‘Discretion’, pp. 321–22. 17 Inger, Vanfrejd, p. 90; Ekholst, A Punishment for Each Criminal, pp. 95–96. The concept was replaced in early modern times by the royal peace legislation in Edsöresbalken and Dråpmål med vilje. 18 Gade, ‘Hanging in Northern Law and Literature’, pp. 166–67.

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Figure 5.1. ‘En man hängd med rep i galgen’ (A man hanged by the rope on the gallows). Uppsala, Uppsala University Library, MS B68, fol. 141r. Illustration to Tjuvabalken (the section on theft) fifteenth-century manuscript of Magnus Erikssons Landslag. Image released into public domain.

Given the basic theme of sincerity and trustworthiness, honour was articulated in different ways according to the specific key values and privileges of status groups and occupational corporations.19 This can best be demonstrated 19 The perspective of different articulations rather than different codes of honour is adopted from Sandmo, ‘Voldsamfunnets undergang’, pp. 101–07.

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with the following example. In a dispute in a local village outside the town of Gävle in 1690, one member of the town council, ‘well-trusted’ Per Grijs, urged the Lieutenant ‘noble and manly’ Petter Appel who had lived in town for some years, to become a burgher.20 Another member of the council, the merchant ‘Monsieur’ Anthon Martin, objected. ‘Why should he [Appel], who is a “cavalier”, want to become a burgher, since then he would become a lesser man than me and be placed on a seat behind me in church?’ So far, this was all about status. A lieutenant was ranked higher in society than a burgher and merchant, and commissioned officers were ranked equal with a nobleman; Appel may even have been ennobled. However, the merchant also added to his objection the words ‘ändoch thet finnes förlupne Leutenanter i Jämptlandh, som pläga krypa in i kyrkiogårdarne’ (even though there are examples of run-away lieutenants in Jämtland who have hidden themselves in the churchyards), with the implication that there were in fact lieutenants who had ‘voluntarily’ given up their social status by acting like cowards. This was just a joke, according to Anthon Martin, but Appel immediately perceived the merchant’s words as a factual accusation and an assault on his personal honour, and not without good reason — Appel was lieutenant of Jämtland’s regiment and cowardice was the very inversion of courage and manliness, the hallmark of military status and honour. These military key values also affected the way honour should best be restored. In early modern Sweden, there were principally two ways: the judicial way, to bring a case to court, and the extra-judicial mode, to challenge the antagonist to fight. The lieutenant’s choice was instant and without hesitation. Demonstratively he laid his hands on the merchant’s shoulder and challenged him: ‘If you are an honest man, come out with me’. The very point of such a challenge was not to win the fight in a technical sense but to test the courage of the antagonist. Not accepting a challenge caused a loss of honour and manliness and a corresponding restoration of the challenger’s honour and manliness. Despite this, Anthon Martin’s immediate response was ‘I dare not’, but in the next moment he nevertheless called the lieutenant ‘hundsfott’ (for the abusive meaning, see below) and hit him with his stick before leaving in great haste. The merchant’s response illustrates the horizontal and at the same time stratified character of honour according to status position. To defend one’s honour was an absolute necessity in conflicts with social equals sharing the same values. Thus, while the working logic of status was I’m superior to you, the corresponding social logic of honour was I’m as good as you. Accordingly, a person of high social position could either choose to ignore a challenge or an affront from a person of lower status as unworthy to reply or to report it to the bailiff or judge as a matter of punishment and discipline.21 An affront or a

20 Härnösand, Swedish National Archives, Valbo häradsrättsarkiv, AIa Domböcker vid lagtima ting, Valbo 6/12 1690. 21 See Liliequist, ‘From Honour to Virtue’, pp. 50–51.

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challenge from a social equal, on the other hand, always had to be acted against. From this perspective, challenging the merchant was both inappropriate and ill-considered. Given the social asymmetry and the advantage of the lieutenant in terms of military training and arms, a fight would not have been considered fair and honourable. Correspondingly, to decline such a challenge was not necessarily dishonourable for the inferior party, not even to run away, according to the saying ‘bättre fly än illa fäkta’ (better escape than bad fencing).22 Still, the merchant’s verbal abuse and blows with the stick in front of bystanders could not be ignored. Accordingly, the lieutenant submitted a supplication to the provincial governor demanding that Anthon Martin should be indicted and punished. Eventually the merchant was sentenced to fines after having corrected and recalled his abusive words before the court congregation and the representative of Appel, with a declaration that ‘he didn’t know anything else about Appel than what is honest and good’. If courage and defending one’s honour with violence were the hallmarks of the nobility and military estate, honesty, in the sense of being trusted, fulfilling obligations, and keeping mutual agreements was at the heart of the civic virtue and honour of burghers, explicitly stated in the ‘Borgareden’ (Burgher’s Oath).23 Accordingly, the thief and the rogue personified the very inversion of these values. This seems also to have been the case among peasants. A broad subcategory of more specific invectives and abusive words alluding to lying, cheating, embezzling, sponging, backbiting, and fraud were cited before the courts in towns and countryside alike.24 Burghers and peasants could challenge each other as well, but the most typical way to settle conflicts and restore one’s honour was to cite the antagonist before the local court. Conflicts between noblemen, however, were brought before the Svea Court of Appeal.25 Words like ‘rogue’ and ‘thief ’ certainly provoked strong resentments in conflicts between noblemen as well. Being characterized as a rogue by his antagonist, Count and Vice Admiral Axel Lewenhaupt immediately drew his sword.26 The words ‘thief ’ and ‘rogue’ could at the same time be used to discredit the violent attack of an antagonist as unfair or poor in a provocative way, by expressions like ‘Du slog mig som en tjuv’ (You hit me like a thief) or ‘Du stack mig som en skälm’ (You stabbed me like a rogue). The same metaphors of theft and fraud were used to brand ruthless violence and assaults on an unarmed and defenceless person as dishonourable and cowardly. Standing in ambush with a hidden rapier was to act like a rogue, thief, and murderer and the unarmed victim was in this way ‘plundered and robbed of his life’.27 The latter was labelled ‘nidingsverk’ 22 Liliequist, ‘Manlighetens flytande gränser’, pp. 98–100; Isogæus, Carla-seger-skiöld, p. 621. 23 Swerikes Stadz-Lagh, ed. by Arnell: Konungsbalken XV. 24 Liliequist, ‘Du ljög som en tjuv och skälm’, pp. 19–22. 25 Trolle Önnerfors, ‘Suum cuique tribuere’, pp. 171–75. 26 Collstedt, Duellanten och rättvisan, p. 190. 27 Liliequist, ‘Manlighetens flytande gränser’, p. 99.

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(base cowardly action) and ‘överdådigt och mordiskt’ (rash and murderous) by law and punished as infamous with a loss of honour.28 Niding was at the same time the old Swedish derogatory term for the person who challenged another person to combat but did not show up to the fight.29 Thus, what the thief, coward, and the rash villain had in common was that they could never be trusted and respected as honest and fair either in combat or in society. The thief and the murderer in their turn had in common that they acted in secret and not openly like honest persons.30 Honour was in this way always modelled by and intertwined with status ideals, but the basic essence of sincerity, trustworthiness, and uprightness remained the same. When it came to theft, a person of noble birth was exposed to the same kind of shameful penalties and loss of honour as a peasant or a burgher.31 Furthermore, the legal notions of infamy were supplemented and strengthened by sociocultural perceptions of defiled trades emerging in the late Middle Ages.32 Thus, ‘rogue’ also had a further connotation of an animal carcass, associated with knackers.33 Whereas a person who had committed theft was sentenced to loss of honour and to be called ‘thief ’, a knacker (Swedish rackare) was held to be dishonourable simply by his trade, including the removal and clearing of animal carcasses and latrines, the slaughter and skinning of horses, dogs, and cats, and other tasks considered demeaning and dirty. Often the knacker also assisted the executioner, the other main representative in this category of infamous and dishonourable people. While not infamous in a strict legal sense, these occupations and their practitioners were infused with a sense of contagious pollution.34 Even the slightest form of socializing with a knacker or an executioner could bring dishonour.35 This notion was exploited in judicial and penal practice by the authorities on purpose to mark dishonour — to be sentenced to be flogged by the executioner implied a total loss of honour. All physical contact with

28 Swerikes rijkes lands-lag, ed. by Abrahamsson, Dråpmål med vilja XV; Sweriges Rikes Lag 1734, Missgärningsbalken 12. 29 Nelson, ‘Envig och ära’, pp. 57–94. 30 For the feminine and cowardly connotations of murder in Nordic tradition, see Anderson, ‘The Thief in Beowulf ’, pp. 504–05. 31 For an illustrative example, see Trolle Önnerfors, ‘Suum cuique tribuere’, pp. 191–92. 32 For a discussion about the emergence and expansion of infamous professions in early modern society, see Stuart, Defiled Trades, pp. 23–32. 33 SAOB, ‘Skälm’. 34 Egardt, Hästslakt och rackarskam, pp. 250–69 and Liliequist, ‘The Cat on the Mayor’s Door’. The strength of this extra-judicial and popular notion of infamy is explicit not least in the authorities’ repeated attempts to declare the executioner honest in the exercise of his profession to counteract the popular opinion that a drunk or incompetent executioner who failed to carry out decapitation in one stroke could be stoned to death with impunity by the crowd. See Ulrich, ‘Livssaker och dödsfångar’, pp. 13–17. 35 Egardt, Hästslakt och rackarskam, pp. 186–216.

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the executioner’s person, objects associated with him, or anything he had handled were tainted by infamy.36

Status, Honour, and Gender Early modern gender was closely connected to both honour and status. A woman’s social status was dependent on her marital status and the social position of her husband and/or father. Formally, a woman did not reach majority until widowhood. While women did not have the formal right to testify in courts before 1695, they could do so in judicial practice.37 Thus, both individual women and men had honour in a legal sense. Statistical surveys of terms of abuse cited before the district and town courts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, show that ‘tjuv’ (thief) was the most common abusive word directed against men while ‘tjuv’ and ‘hora’ (whore) were about equally frequent against women.38 Licentiousness as the ultimate forfeiture of female honour and motherhood is demonstrated in the illustration below (Fig. 5.2). The inscriptions read: ‘Kära moder’ (Dear mother) and ‘Om jag vill unna dig ditt liv, då kallas jag lösaktig kvinna’ (If I let you live, I will be called a loose woman). ‘Whore’, however, also had strong connotations of unfaithfulness and deception, as in the abusive saying ‘du ljuger som en hora’ (you are lying like a whore).39 And like a thief, the murderous mother in the illustration above acts in secret to conceal her pre- or extra-marital promiscuity. The very act of female adultery could in this respect be considered a deception. According to the opinion of one member of the Law Commission a married woman’s adultery should be punished as ‘furtum, crimen falsi, plagium’ (theft, forgery, kidnapping) with regard to her husband and his heirs. A whore was in this way considered deceitful by nature and not trustworthy.40 While more marked for men, with ‘rogue’ as an exclusively male abusive word, the importance of honesty and trustworthiness was part of the social core meaning of female honour as well. ‘Hundsfott’ represented the exclusively male counterpart to ‘whore’ in the repertoire of verbal abuse. Its literal meaning, ‘dog cunt’, had strong obscene and sexual connotations, but the word could also be used to characterize someone as a scoundrel, coming close to ‘rogue’, ‘wretch’, or ‘coward’, emphasizing weakness and unmanliness.41 Thus, the connotations

36 Inger, Vanfrejd, p. 165. 37 Inger, ‘Studier’, p. 317. 38 Liliequist, ‘Du ljög som en tjuv och skälm’, pp. 13–14. ‘Hora’ refers to fornication and adultery. A more specific term for prostitute was ‘sköka’. 39 Liliequist, ‘Du ljög som en tjuv och skälm’, pp. 34–35. 40 Förarbetena till Sveriges rikes lag 1686–1736, i: Lagkommissionens protokoll, 1686–1693, ed. by Sjögren, 3/4 1690, p. 225. 41 SAOB, ‘Hundsfott’.

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Figure 5.2. ‘Draufskona’, Uppsala, Uppsala University Library, MS B68, fol. 114v. Illustration to Högmålabalken (the section on capital crimes) in a fifteenth-century manuscript of Magnus Erikssons Landslag. Image released into public domain.

of abusive words alluding to gender, dishonesty, and animality could overlap and be transformed into each other. Gender had at the same time its own hierarchical logic. In contrast to the ranking of precedence and privileges, the hierarchical relation between men and women was simple and straightforward, cutting through all estates and

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status groups alike. According to both medical, cultural, and religious notions, woman was weaker than man in both mind and body.42 Differences in fortitude and character were however not absolute — a woman could under certain circumstances take on a manly heart and overcome the natural weakness of her sex.43 Acting like a man could thus be prestigious. The reverse, however, to act like a woman, was unambiguously damaging for male prestige and reputation.44 According to this logic, calling a man a whore or by the name of female genitals was utterly denigrating, questioning the very manhood of the antagonist. This was taken one step further in likening a man to the genitals of a female animal by invectives like ‘märefitta’ (mare-cunt) or ‘hundsfott’. With the animality and the rear anatomy of mares and dogs, the obscene sexual connotation was instilled with a sense of filthiness, questioning not only the antagonist’s manhood but his worth in society as well, in line with the social exclusion of knackers and executioners. This was most obvious in the case of ‘hundsfott’, which seems to have been the especially preferred abusive word in provocations and challenges to fight.45 Being in a strict sense an anatomical impossibility, ‘hundsfott’ referred as much to the rear and anus of a dog as to the female genitals of a bitch, demonstrated in abusive practice when men were forced to kiss dogs and mares in the rear or under the tail.46 When a woman was called ‘cunt’, the point was rather to reduce the antagonist to her genitals as the seat of impure secretions and unrestrained lust, further strengthened by ‘slyna’ (bitch) and ‘märr’ (mare), which could be associated with the shameless libidinousness of a female animal in heat.47 Male genitals were by contrast typically referred to in a joking manner, but still with a possible insinuation of female licentiousness, as in a wife’s reprimand to a maid about a seating place in church: ‘If the cock had come, you would have made room for him’.48 According to the same logic, a husband’s inability to control his wife or perform his marital duties was a laughing matter.49 Not being infamous in a legal sense, the fate of a ‘henpecked’ or ‘cuckolded’ husband was probably not much better. Like honour, gender was articulated in different ways according to ideals of status and profession, but the hierarchical principle and the supposed natural asymmetry between manhood and womanhood remained the same as the ground for conflict and abuse, played out in marriage, family, and household in the positions of husband and wife, father and mother, master and mistress.

42 Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman, pp. 41–42. 43 Liliequist, ‘Drottning Margaretas märke’, pp. 106–08. 44 Liliequist, ‘Laughing at the Unmanly Man’, pp. 231–33. 45 Collstedt, Duellanten och rättvisan, pp. 152–53. 46 Liliequist, ‘Peasants against Nature’, p. 418. 47 For a discussion about symbolic connotations of male and female genitals in early modern culture, see Liliequist, ‘Drottning Margaretas märke’, pp. 112–17. 48 Härnösand, Swedish National Archives, Boteå tingslags häradsrätt, AIa:2 Domböcker, 28/1 1748. 49 Liliequist, ‘Laughing at the Unmanly Man’, pp. 230, 243–44.

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In addition, verbal allusions to immaturity or decrepitude and ugliness, like ‘pojk’ (boy) and ‘flicka’ (maid) or ‘gubbe’ (old man) and ‘kärring’ (hag) respectively, were also part of the standard repertoire of questioning a person’s respectable manhood or womanhood. Questioning an antagonist’s trustworthiness, likening him or her to a beast or to the female genitals of a woman or a beast, were all common themes for marginalization, stigmatization, and social exclusion as a mark of dishonour and disrespect. Together with physical affronts, including gestures and faces of scorn and disgust, these themes made up the cultural repertoire for questioning an individual’s right to respect in society, whether as a full man or woman or as an honest person. The latter is also what distinguishes status from honour and gender in an analytical sense. To question someone’s status was to question his or her place in the social hierarchy. To question a person’s honour or gender and/or sex qualities was to question his or her right to be a worthy member of society.

Status and Mimetic Desire — A Dispute about Seating Order in the Church Competition and conflicts are by nature strongly emotional. To compete is to continuously compare oneself with other persons who become one’s rivals. Emotions like envy and indignation are stirred up and as competitors, we easily become agitated. If early modern society fostered a strong sense of honour, the same was certainly true for status. In this respect, churches were not only a place for sermons and devotion but a social arena for the display and competition for status as well. In 1647, Queen Christina issued a statute against disputes and quarrels about seating places in the church caused by certain persons’ ‘inbillade’ (imagined) pretensions to precedence.50 Permanent benches were built after Reformation when the sermon became of central importance. The seating order was decided by the church council according to a general division between social status, gender, and age. Women were seated to the left on the north side and men to the right on the south side of the central aisle, with girls and maids, boys and servants respectively closer to the walls or further back, sometimes in separate galleries. Within this general order places close to the central aisle and in the front rows were the most prestigious, the latter reserved for women and men from the most distinguished families.51 In 1672, churchgoers attending the service in the castle-church of Kalmar became witnesses to a dispute between the wives of the treasurer and the

50 ‘Patent angående träta och kijf om ställen och bänckerummen i kyrckian. Stockholm den 24 December 1647’, in Kongl. Stadgar, ed. by Schmedeman, pp. 272–73. 51 Malmstedt, Bondetro och kyrkoro, pp. 39–42.

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bookkeeper respectively.52 Arriving a bit late, the bookkeeper’s wife found the wife of the treasurer already occupying the seat closest to the aisle. The treasurer’s wife rose from the bench to let her pass, but this provoked the pride of the bookkeeper’s wife. ‘Move, thou woman’, she said using the word ‘du’ (thou) instead of the formal ‘ni’ (you) with which she had been addressed by the treasurer’s wife.53 This was immediately perceived as demeaning and a claim for superior status. ‘Am I not as good as you?’ the treasurer’s wife answered. ‘I will never sit below you as if I were your maid’, calling her ‘din teppenippa’ (you pert girl). The dispute had so far concerned the wives’ relative status in the metaphorical terms of female household positions. With the degrading invective ‘pert girl’, however, it had turned into a question of honour. The wives started pushing each other until the bookkeeper’s wife had to let go and sat down on another bench, further in front but still in a less prestigious position away from the aisle. The bookkeeper’s wife (as represented in the church council by their husbands; the wives’ names are not given in the record) turned around in her bench and said in a loud voice ‘I was bitten by a dog today’. ‘Be a dog yourself ’, the treasurer’s wife immediately replied, ‘may the devil bite you’. The quarrel continued in high voices but now with references to the status of fathers and husbands. ‘Du sakramentska kona’ (You damned bitch) the treasurer’s wife cried out, banging her fist on the bench, who do you think your father was? Mine was a circuit judge. Only God knows what kind of man your father was and your husband is no more than a ‘lättfärdig’ (lewd) ‘hundsfott’. If you weren’t here (in the church) I would have beaten you up. You don’t dare to come out with me. To this the treasurer’s wife replied, ‘You don’t need to bleat so much, you goat, I will never sit below you anyway’, continuing in an ironic tone, ‘Perhaps my husband may not be as superior as yours — a worn-out bookkeeper, “din flåttmärr” (you mare of a knacker)’. With the abusive word ‘hundsfott’ the dispute escalated and became even more serious. Turning to her husband, the bookkeeper’s wife said, ‘Listen how she calls you “hundsfott”’. This abusive word could not be ignored by any man. The bookkeeper had to take action. ‘I and your husband have to fight about that word’, he replied to the treasurer’s wife. The latter was however not taken literally, and, brought before the church council, the treasurer’s wife eventually apologized, took her word back, and the case was closed. The original cause of the conflict may be described as a case of mimetic rivalry between two wives of husbands of about equal status, desiring the

52 Vadstena, Swedish National Archives, Kalmar Domkapitel, AI:4 Domkapitlets protokoll, 1672 16/8, 21/8. 53 For the uses and different connotations of these terms of address see Widegren, Svenskt och engelskt lexicon, ‘Du’, p. 128, ‘Ni’, p. 448; Walker, ‘Thou and You’, pp. 329–41. In the following, ‘du’ is only translated as ‘thou’ when it is used as an insult.

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same prestigious seating.54 Not yet unambiguously regulated, seizing the most prestigious seat was a question of timing. The one desired what the other already had possessed for the moment and which could not be divided. Before the more detailed orders of precedence and regulations of seating orders in the late seventeenth century, such conflicts were endemic, most typically between wives of men of about equal status. Correspondingly, when men had disputes it was often about the seating places of their wives. Why was this so? Given their lack of ascribed status positions in the public sphere and due to the gendered seating order, the church space as a social arena became especially important for women. Gathered together in a section apart, women could claim, compete, and manifest their relative status face to face, on their own terms and, in so doing, compete for familial status. Thus, in the church space, women’s competition for status was not necessarily related to the status of male relatives. Churching provides an illustrative example. By the time of reformation, churching had developed from a purification ritual to the honouring of a wife who had recently become a mother. To be one of the woman’s followers during the ceremony or to sit down on the bench reserved for women about to be churched was a source of prestige.55 This kind of associated and transmitted prestige stemmed, however, from the honoured wife and mother’s successful fulfilment of expected marital norms rather than from personal ambition. A legitimate productive sexual relation with a man was still the main basis for female status. The opposite was not the case for men to the same extent, according to the patriarchal logic of the double standard and men’s legal superiority and rank in the public sphere. This, however, did not make male status unsusceptible to sexual allusions. On the contrary, while women could derive their status from male relatives, men could in a reversed way lose status and prestige by allusions to their wives’ sexual standard and domination. An illustrative example is given from the intensifying debates about rank and precedence taking place within the estate of nobility during the second half of the seventeenth century. As background, in a time of expanding state apparatus and military sector, the small hereditary aristocracy holding a monopoly on all public offices could not meet the increasing demand for qualified functionaries and officers. Consequently, a great number of commoners were recruited and ennobled by qualification instead of ancestry. By the end of the century, newly ennobled families accounted for 80 per cent of the estate. The House of Nobility was however still dominated by the old hereditary nobility. In the following disputes, representatives for the lower and ennobled aristocrats complained that the exclusive privileges by birth of a few counts and barons caused disorder and duels when youngsters from these families demanded precedence. Service not ancestry should be the ground for rank and precedence

54 Asplund, Rivaler och syndabockar, pp. 84–94. 55 Sandén, ‘Kyrkan, kvinnorna och hierarkiernas dynamik’, pp. 643–60.

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according to the lower classes of the nobility.56 At a meeting in the House of Nobility, Colonel Örneklo, who had been made lesser nobility of the third class, argued that the rank based on his service should also include his wife, so that she would be able to benefit from the status bestowed on her husband. In claiming rank for a wife, he continued, ‘måste man se till tjänsten’ (the service should decide). This somewhat ambiguous formulation gave the high nobility a golden opportunity to strike back in defence of their hereditary privileges. ‘Service’ was immediately interpreted as referring to Örneklo’s wife and not to himself, with the implication that the only ‘service’ a wife could provide was of sexual nature, that is: the better the sexual service provided, the higher the rank. Count Sparre took the word and said: ‘Thanks to you, Örneklo, pussy finally has got itself a brave champion’, insisting that his words should be written down in verbatim by the clerk. Accompanied by thundering laughter, the proposer was dismissed and ridiculed as the submissive errand boy of his wife. It was said that he didn’t dare to go home to his wife unless he acquired her rank.57 To be the spokesman for female status in an all-male congregation had its obvious risks. A cultural stereotype of the wife greedy for rank manipulating her husband for her own purposes emerges in these disputes, becoming even stronger in satirical pamphlets and plays in the eighteenth century.58 Thus from a male perspective, female status competition could be a trifling and even ridiculous matter as long as it was not transferred into a conflict between men. But even then, as it seems from the seating order dispute above, the primary task of the husbands was to restrain it to accepted practices.

Confirming Friendship — Social Drinking across the Borders of Status and Profession Drinking together was a central part of early modern male sociability. Drinking parties were thus one of the primary scenes of both status and honour conflicts. Sharing a stoup of wine or beer confirmed mutual respect and friendship. Correspondingly, a refusal to drink with someone implied disrespect and was socially demeaning. Thus, drinking together in an honour-based and strictly stratified society could easily evolve into a highly charged situation.59 An illustrative example is given by a confrontation at a dinner party in the residence of the local bailiff and innkeeper in Bollnäs, Lars Persson Werwing, 56 Englund, Det hotade huset, pp. 153–72. 57 Englund, Det hotade huset, p. 158; Sveriges ridderskaps och adels riksdagsprotokoll, xiii, 1680 20/11, pp. 178–79. 58 Liliequist, ‘Laughing at the Unmanly Man’, pp. 233–35. 59 Hyltén-Cavallius, Wärend och wirdarne, ii, 445–46; Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order, pp. 125–26.

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taking place in 1681.60 Captain Lieutenant Simon Båge and curate Mr Samuel Gestrinius had been invited to dinner as personal friends of the bailiff. At the dinner table, they first confirmed their friendship and good intentions. After dinner, the student Jonas Lundberg, living in the house as tutor for the bailiff ’s son, joined them. According to the curate, the friendly atmosphere changed when the captain lieutenant started joking about the curate’s big red beard. The curate immediately took offense and when the captain lieutenant proposed that they should drink to each other as brothers, he declined. ‘We are brothers in spirit, a good friend I am and a good friend I want to be, but you have to excuse me for this toast’. ‘Do you despise me?’, the captain lieutenant replied. ‘I have drunk to many brave men, who do you think you are, God save us from all red-beards, in the pulpit we have to pay you respect, but even there you ought to keep your sermons short enough.’ Before the representatives of the consistory, the captain lieutenant claimed that the curate had started joking about his beard himself. He had only joined by proposing in jest that the curate should cut it off or have it burnt to grow a new and more beautiful beard. When he noticed that the curate took offence, he had proposed to drink to their health as a gesture of reconciliation. The student for his part took offence at not being included in the toast and for being disrespectfully addressed by the captain lieutenant as ‘du, karl’ (thou, man). This disrespectful treatment was immediately remarked on in reproachful words by the curate. ‘You should not despise a student, because students could become able and brave men, even generals, and if I had been a student, I should not have been so patient… I should have hit you at once.’ Now it was the captain lieutenant’s turn to take offence, this time for being labelled by the curate as less good than a student. The conflict had by now escalated beyond verbal affronts. The student rose from the table and slapped the captain lieutenant in the face. The captain lieutenant slapped him back and so they continued to exchange boxes on the ear nine times until the student left with a black eye. In the next moment, the curate lost his temper and slapped the captain lieutenant in the face as well. The captain lieutenant could only barely be held back from taking revenge. With this, the confrontation had ended, but the conflict was later taken up first in a court martial and then at last before the consistory. How should this confrontation be understood in terms of status, honour, and gender? First, the conflict arose between three persons of different status and estate. According to the more extensive orders of precedence issued at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a captain lieutenant was clearly ranked higher than a curate.61 In terms of estate neither the captain lieutenant nor the curate nor the student seem to have been of noble birth. The captain

60 Uppsala, Swedish National Archives, Uppsala domkapitel, Handlingar ordnade efter pastorat E5A: 29, Bollnäs 9/8 1681. 61 Captain lieutenant rank 136, curate rank 173, Sammandrag af Kongl, ed. by Sack, pp. 29 and 36.

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lieutenant was however by his office considered equal to a nobleman. Maybe his superior status position made him feel free to joke about the curate’s beard. According to the curate, the captain lieutenant had made jocular allusions to his beard not just once but hundreds of times during the dinner. A priest’s beard was not just a trifling matter in the seventeenth century, something that the captain must certainly have been aware of. He himself was like other military officers, shaven with the possible exception of a small moustache. A large beard was by contrast the very pride of a priest. This was equally true for the whole clergy down to the lowest church official. Or at least it should have been. In 1676, the churchwarden Erik Tomasson was brought before the consistory in Åbo (Turku) for having cut his beard. With this peculiar deed, he had not only made a fool of himself but also gave offence in God’s congregation. His only defence was that it would grow again.62 Allusions to a priest cutting off his beard were certainly a laughing matter. From the priest’s point of view, however, it was most of all deeply humiliating. The vicar Erich Hoffnerus complained bitterly, after having had his beard torn off in an assault, that this outrageous deed had left him deformed and dishonoured in full view of his congregation.63 No wonder, then, that the curate took offence. The beard was his badge of honour just as the rapier was that of a nobleman and military officer. In the next move, the curate replied by refusing to accept the toast. Priests were in general unwilling to drink to others on first-name terms and even explicitly forbidden to do so with farmers, so as not to endanger their position of reverence to their congregation and local society.64 It was even argued that the clergy stood above worldly ordinances of rank.65 In this context, however, the vicar’s refusal could only be perceived by the captain as a grave insult, only barely wrapped up in Christian terms of friendship as something purely spiritual. The duty and right to defend one’s honour, with violence if necessary, was claimed as the hallmark of nobility. This was in fact acknowledged by the law as well. Challenges and fights over honour between noblemen or their ‘equals’ (high-ranked military officers and civil servants), were labelled duels and the object of special legislation. When practised among soldiers, lower officials, and the peasantry, such acts were punished according to ordinary law as simple assaults and fights.66 Thus, to be ‘satisfaktionsfähig’ (qualified to fight a duel) was also a matter of status, even though the logic of honour and manliness was the same. The one who did not accept a challenge was an

62 Von Platen, Svenska skägg, p. 57. 63 Marieberg/Stockholm, Swedish National Archives, Gävleborgs renoverade domböcker 17, Norrelva 22/11 1667. 64 Malmstedt, Bondetro och kyrkoro, pp. 90–92. Cf. Murenius, Acta visitatoria: 1637–1666, p. 127 n. 2. 65 Lang, Är det christeligit. 66 ‘Kungl. Maj:ts Placat och Förbud angående allahanda Dueller, och otwugne Slagsmåhl Stockholm den 23 December 1662’, in Kongl. Stadgar, ed. by Schmedeman, pp. 326–27.

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unmanly coward among nobles and commoners alike. Still, challenges and fights over honour were especially associated with the nobility and the military estate, taken in a broader sense.67 Never tolerating any kind of insults, always demanding satisfaction, and constantly seeking violent revenge: those were the characteristics of both cavaliers and soldiers, according to the bishop Andreas Rydelius (1671–1738).68 Students were also mentioned in the same context. Students constituted a corporation of their own with special rules of conduct, rites de passage, and hierarchies. In Uppsala as in other university towns, students were notorious for their nightly rampages and violent confrontations in the streets with town guards and soldiers. Internal bullying rituals and endemic fights over status and honour were further characteristics of the students’ strong esprit de corps.69 A telling example of the touchiness about social status is the confrontation in 1657 between the student Zacharias Betelius and the prominent burgher and member of the town council of Uppsala, Rolof Kahle. According to Kahle, he had met Betelius standing with his sword at his side in the street and greeted him by raising his hat. Betelius, however, immediately went up to him and asked: ‘Are you too good to raise your hat for a student?’ ‘I did so’, Kahle objected, but Betelius was not satisfied. ‘You should not do it half-way but take it off completely in full reverence. I shall teach you, you big, fat devil, how you should show respect for an honest student, you are a “skinnbracka” (skin breeches derived from bracca, a most degrading nickname for a burgher cf. philistine)’. When Kahle objected, Betelius snatched his cane (a civil servant’s status symbol corresponding to the student’s and nobleman’s sword), exclaiming ‘I’m too good for you to beat you up, I leave that to the “penaler” (first year students, lowest in status)’.70 Leaving, the insulting words ‘You are welcome, you “badett” (a person who had been suffering a public whipping which was of course most shameful)’ were shouted at Kahle through the window in a nearby house, indicating that his humiliation had been witnessed and would soon become common knowledge.71 Thus, the student’s violent action came as no surprise. What is surprising, however, is that the exchange of boxes on the ear did not escalate into a duel. Employed as a tutor and accommodated in the bailiff ’s house, the student was hardly wearing a rapier. Age difference and the horizontal logic of honour could also have been decisive in the captain lieutenant’s decision not to challenge the student. More important, however, was that the student had not acted on his own but at the instigation of the curate: that was the 67 For challenges between soldiers and peasants see Liliequist, ‘Violence, Honour and Manliness’, pp. 182–85. 68 Rydelius, Nödiga förnufts-öfningar, pp. 306–07. 69 Geschwind, Stökiga studenter, pp. 120–57. 70 For the cane as a symbol of authority, see Carlsson, ‘Staven’, pp. 1–8. 71 Geschwind, ‘Ärlig eller oärlig’, pp. 49–50: Uppsala Universitet, v: (1656–1660), ed. by Sallander, 1657 6/5, 27/5.

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captain lieutenant’s firm opinion, and not without good reason. The curate’s priestly status prevented him from challenging someone to fight (and from accepting challenges as well). The curate had, however, not only referred to himself as ‘If I had been a student’ but also added ‘or if there were other students present’ — a clear allusion to the collective honour and esprit de corps of students. For a clergyman to challenge and fight by proxy was not unique. A well-known example is the long-standing controversy between two professors in Uppsala, Johan Messenius and Johannes Rudbeckius. In a board meeting in June 1613 with the archbishop present, Messenius called Rudbeckius ‘traitor’, ‘you scoundrel’, and ‘lousy “jute” (degrading nickname for Dane)’. Rudbeckius replied ‘You can be a traitor yourself, you villain and Jesuit’. This caused Messenius to rush up in anger and challenge Rudbeckius to duel. In the next moment he called his servant to go home and fetch his rapier. Rudbeckius, furious as well, managed to hold his temper, replying that as a clergyman he was unfortunately unable to accept the challenge. However, his younger brother Jacob took to the door and stretched out his hand to Messenius as an assurance that he would fight in his brother’s place. When the servant returned with the rapier, he was accompanied by Messenius’s ‘manhaftiga’ (mannish) wife, notorious for her spitefulness and anger, which made the situation even worse. Eventually, however, the archbishop managed to calm them down.72 Maybe this was also what happened in Bollnäs with the bailiff as mediator? We don’t know since the bailiff had been successfully challenged as a witness by the captain lieutenant and was thus never heard. Eventually the captain lieutenant made a deal with the curate to let the matter rest, but this was soon turned against him. A rumour was spread, much to his dishonour, that he had been in a fight in the bailiff ’s house and received a black eye. A court martial was organized and he was dismissed from service. In an attempt to restore his service and honour he cited the curate and the student before the consistory for defamation, but in vain, so it seems.73

Being on Equal Terms — Status and the Passion for Difference Being of equal status and rank did not necessarily foster a more relaxed attitude in social drinking. On the contrary. Sitting at a table drinking together, one lieutenant said to the other: ‘You, brother, are a cavalry lieutenant and I’m an infantry lieutenant, so I guess we are comrades’. ‘In my opinion you are no more than an infantry corporal’, the other replied. The aforementioned lieutenant pointedly took off his hat and rapier and laid

72 The case is related in Annerstedt, Uppsala universitets historia, i, 160–61. 73 The minutes from the court martial are not preserved, but Båge does not appear in the regiment’s enrolment list for 1682.

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them on the table with the words: ‘The one who has better lived up to that position [lieutenant’s rank] may pick these up’. His antagonist replied by throwing the rapier and hat on the ground, exclaiming: ‘Only a “hundsfott” may pick them up again!’ and hit him on the mouth. Further escalation was, however, interrupted.74 The conflicts between the lieutenants and between the wives in the church both illustrate the principle that rivalry and conflicts flourish most between individuals who are equal or differ very little in social standing. Freud’s ‘narcissism of minor differences’, Girard’s ‘mimetic rivalry’, and Bourdieu’s ‘distinction’ all capture different aspects of this elementary social logic.75 Having this in common, the two cases still differ regarding situation and competition. While the wives contended for the same indivisible status symbol to make a hierarchical difference, the two lieutenants tried to do away with formal equality in a negative way by downgrading each other. By verbal affronts, pushes, and boxing respectively, status competition immediately turned into a conflict of honour. In the case of the lieutenants, the sphere of personal integrity underlying the notion of honour was extended to material properties with a strong status value. The hat and the rapier were both personal goods and status symbols. Instead of picking them up and acknowledging the challenge, the second lieutenant demonstrated his antagonist’s alleged subordinate status by throwing them away. Material objects could also be handed over to an antagonist as a pledge and assurance to fight. Boxed on the ear, a barber-surgeon took off a bloodstained bandage from an injury acquired in an earlier duel, cut it in two pieces, and gave one to his antagonist with the words: ‘I will take revenge tomorrow’.76 While marking differences seemed to have been a natural and desirable thing, friendship had to be continuously confirmed and demonstrated. Social drinking was not just easy socializing but could turn into a most serious business of turning amity into enmity. This was true among peasants and burghers as well as nobles. However, the way conflicts developed and how honour should best be restored differed. Most likely the overwhelming cases of verbal abuse and honour conflicts were brought before the court. However, as already mentioned, for high and wellborn nobles and their equals (according to the anti-duelling statutes) as well as students and soldiers, to challenge the antagonist to fight was considered a more prestigious way to restore one’s honour. Eventually a great part of these fights and duels turned up in court as well, but not as matters of honour. The fights classified as duels were particularly scrutinized in detail by the higher courts and will be in focus

74 Marieberg/Stockholm, Swedish National Archives, Generalauditören utslagshandling 1714 20/11 nr 21. 75 Blok, ‘The Narcissism of Minor Differences’, pp. 33–56. 76 Marieberg/Stockholm, Swedish National Archives, Generalauditören utslagshandling 1715 22/11 nr 59.

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in the following as the most drastic examples of the fatal consequences of status and honour conflicts.77 Addressing someone as ‘brother’ was the strongest possible indication of friendship across status differences, requiring a more formal agreement usually confirmed by a ‘duskål’ (pledging drinks to each other on first-name terms). Ignoring or denying such an agreement could have fatal consequences. ‘Do you remember’, one captain told another, ‘how we became brothers in Helsinki?’ ‘No, I can’t remember that, “min käre gubbe” (my dear old man)’, the other replied, ‘but we can still be friends and brothers’. The first captain immediately took offence and challenged the other to fight. ‘Old man’ was of course derogatory for a man in his vital years and the patronizing prefix ‘my dear’ made the offence even more grievous.78 To become brothers was however not a less risky matter. In 1719, during the last years of the Great Nordic War, several officers of different rank gathered in the lodgings of Lieutenant Gyllensting at the south-western border to Denmark-Norway. Disguised as peasants, civilians, and in women’s clothes to escape discovery by the enemy, they started amusing themselves with dancing and bumping each other down in jest. Wine was served and spirits were high, and it was suggested that they should all drink to each other as brothers. The officers, one captain, five lieutenants, one ‘Kornett’ (cornet — formerly the lowest rank of commissioned cavalry officer), and one second lieutenant fell on their knees in a circle and passed a wine stoup between them. Each drank to the one standing closest, who replied in kind and then turned to the next in the circle. When the second lieutenant had drunk to the captain and was about to pass him the stoup, the captain asked for a refill. The second lieutenant immediately took offence: ‘Are you considering yourself too good to drink to me as your brother? I am as good as you’. ‘There is too little wine in the stoup’, the captain replied, but this was not accepted by the second lieutenant, who pointedly refused to pass the stoup. From that point, the witnesses’ accounts differ. According to the sutler, the captain had replied: ‘I am drinking to whom it pleases me, and no one can force me to drink to anyone’. This had caused the second lieutenant to take out his rapier with the exclamation: ‘I demand satisfaction’. According to the captain’s account, however, the second lieutenant had by then already whispered in his ear: ‘You are a “hundsfott” if you do not come out with me, I am as honest a man as you’. Thereafter the second lieutenant went outside, continuously challenging the captain in a loud voice in German: ‘Bist du ein erlicher karl, so komt aus’ (if you are an honest man, then come out). Eventually the captain responded to the challenge and soon the second lieutenant fell to the ground, fatally wounded. Bending over him, the captain

77 The most comprehensive and principal study of Swedish early modern duelling is Collstedt, Duellanten och rättvisan. 78 Marieberg/Stockholm, Swedish National Archives, Generalauditören utslagshandling 1711 2/11.

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lamented: ‘It hurts me, my brother, that you have been wounded’. ‘No need’, replied the second lieutenant in his last words, ‘now we are true brothers’.79 The case illustrates once again how the entangled intersection of status differences and honour could in just a second turn high spirits into fatal conflict. In terms of military commanding positions, the captain Anders Lindqvist and the second lieutenant Fredrich Christian von Ahnen represented the highest and the lowest ranks respectively in the drinking company. In terms of acquired status, however, things were more complicated. Von Ahnen was of a noble family of German origin, although not introduced into the Swedish House of Nobility, while Lindqvist had been promoted to captain solely on his merits. According to the privileges of the estates, the highest military grades were reserved for the nobility, but the situation had changed. After the long wars, it had become necessary to recruit commoners even to high positions in the army. A large portion of these careerists were ennobled, perhaps including Lindqvist. Thus the situation in the army followed the pattern of civil society, with large groups of civil servants recruited from outside the nobility, and just as in civil society, merit and ennoblement were confronted with noble birth as a potential source of dispute. The king, Charles XII (1682–1719), made his point clear: when the man is courageous, it doesn’t matter if he is of noble origin or not.80 It may nevertheless have mattered to Von Ahnen in his conflict with Lindqvist. Being of higher status by birth, his lower military rank could have been a continuous source of frustration. From the perspective of Von Ahnen, not even the slightest hesitation from Lindqvist in replying to his toast could be tolerated. Alternatively, Von Ahnen could have nearly emptied the stoup on purpose as a provocation in the very moment when they were about to become equals. Provocations as well as challenges were part of the game. Not only status and honour were at stake, but manliness as well. That is already implied in the standard challenging phrase ‘If you are an honest man, come out and fight’, as well as in the fatally wounded second lieutenant’s last words, ‘Now we are true brothers’. The very point was to have the courage to fight, not to win in a more technical sense. To decline a challenge from a social equal or, even worse, to challenge someone without turning up to fight, implied cowardice not befitting a real man. Honour was in this way transferred into a question of manliness, illustrated in a most vivid way by the fate of the second lieutenant Hans Jacob Crail. After challenging Major Per Lillie to draw swords, he never turned up. Likened to a mama’s boy, he was ridiculed and laughed at in a libellous song composed by his aristocratic peers, for hiding behind his dear mother’s apron.81 Allusions to unmanliness could be a most devastating weapon for questioning male status and honour.

79 Marieberg/Stockholm, Swedish National Archives, Generalauditören utslagshandling 1719 9/4, nr 7. 80 Carlsson, Bonde-präst-ämbetsman, p. 33. 81 Marieberg/Stockholm, Swedish National Archives, Svea Hovrätt, Huvudarkivet EVI a2aa:129 (Liber causarum 100:2, mål nr 10).

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Challenges and provocations could also be a more subtle game of gestures and sounds, as in the rising conflict about matters of warfare between the two captain majors Abraham Ille and Hemming Neiroth, when they visited the latter’s brother. Breaking up from a drinking party, Neiroth suddenly heard a sharp whistle from Ille. He immediately took offence.82 Ille’s explanation that he had whistled for his dog did not make things any better, since no dogs were around. ‘You can whistle after thieves and rogues, but not after an honest man’, Neiroth replied. When Neiroth later entered the house of his brother for dinner, tables were turned. Greeting and drinking to everyone except Ille, Neiroth remained calmly sitting on the chair with hat on head and arms akimbo when Ille reproached him. This arrogant behaviour evoked great frustration and anger. Asked to stand up and threatened with blows on the ear, he remained sitting in the same position. It was not until Ille dismissed him with the words ‘Preserve us from such “bösse Gesellskap”’ that he rushed up in anger and exclaimed, ‘If you are such a stout fellow, come out with me’. In the very same moment, he flicked Ille on the nose, took a rapier in his hand, and went out, waiting for his antagonist. Ille, however, remained indoors with a sardonic smile on his lips, signalling that he considered Neiroth’s challenge not even worthy of reply. Returning, Neiroth was immediately disarmed, but the dispute continued with Ille becoming so affected that he burst out in bitter tears of resentment when the others had left.83 Others were typically seen and heard gnashing their teeth in similar situations of frustration over unresolved disputes and insults.84

Just Joking — Status Competition in Joking Relations Anger and frustration, sardonic smiles and tears of resentment — status and honour conflicts were a highly emotional business, but what unites nearly all the related cases was that they started in an atmosphere of joy and jesting. When reported to the court, the two aforementioned lieutenants both assured the court that they had always been the best of friends. What happened was nothing more than raillery and jesting between two comrades on intimate terms. Raillery (Swedish raljeri) refers to a mode of teasing conversation which could be extended into gestures and physical deeds.85 In a general sense, raillery was part of what Huizinga calls ‘the play-element in culture’ and

82 Whistling at somebody had strong degrading connotations, see: ‘vissla’ in Svenska Akademiens Ordbok SAOB. 83 The case is reported in detail in Hausen, ‘En episod ur den finska landtadelns lif under förra hälften af 1600-talet’, pp. 34–38. 84 Marieberg, Swedish National Archives, Generalauditörens handlingar 1711 12/12: Krigsförhör 31/8 Lars Humble vs Johan Höök; Stockholm, City Archives of Stockholm, Stockholms slottsrätt, Protokoll A1:5 1720 21/7: Ruthenskiöld vs Dahlman. 85 Collstedt, Duellanten och rättvisan, pp. 172–78; Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, pp. 238–42.

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what anthropologists have labelled ‘joking relations’.86 A joking relationship is, according to Radcliffe-Brown, a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism between two persons in which one is allowed to tease or make fun of the other, who in turn is required to take no offence. The relation could also be symmetrical in which both persons tease and make fun of each other without retaliating — a kind of combative jest.87 While both Huizinga and Radcliffe-Brown underline the beneficial effects of joking relations for the ordering of society, early modern raillery had a darker side of escalating antagonism, with potentially fatal consequences. However, to confine the analysis to a strategic game of competition in Bourdieuian terms underestimates the element of playfulness, which was certainly there as well.88 In its most antagonistic form, raillery came close to an outright provocation. Between friends, however, or in a supposed jocular atmosphere, provocations could be play. What would otherwise be considered affronts could in a friendly context be tolerated or responded to in kind, without taking action, as a true sign of friendship. A scene at a tavern in Stockholm in the year 1706 provides a good illustration. Overhearing two royal chamber secretaries bantering each other in a most coarse way, the captain lieutenant Roor reproached them. To treat each other with such coarse jokes was not a decent thing in an ‘honnete’ company. ‘We are good friends, and we understand each other very well’, was the immediate response from one of the secretaries. The atmosphere now grew increasingly hostile, but not between the banterers. ‘Who has appointed you to be my guardian?’ asked the second clerk. ‘I consider anyone who interferes with others’ conversation to be a scoundrel’, he continued, thereby establishing his identity as a man of quality and courage.89 Seen in the light of the legislation against duelling, there was more to the captain lieutenant’s reproachful words than just a remark on inappropriate behaviour. The ordinance of 1682 stated that not only challenges to fight but all kind of insulting words, contemptible shoving and pushing, blows and punches or any threats with canes and hands were strictly forbidden between persons of nobility, military officers, and high-ranking officials.90 An anticipation of the potential dangers of raillery, so it seems. Penalties included dismissal from office, heavy fines, and prison. Formally, then, raillery did not constitute an exception in the eyes of the law. In practice, however, it could be referred to, sometimes successfully, as an attempt to escape or mitigate the legal sanctions

86 Huizinga, Homo ludens, pp. 1–27; Mauss, ‘Joking Relations’, pp. 317–34. 87 Radcliffe-Brown, ‘On Joking Relationships’, pp. 195–96. 88 For an analysis of jokes and duelling as a ‘Wettkampfspiele’ with reference to Bourdieu, see Ludwig, ‘Von Scherzen und Duellen’, pp. 371–403. 89 Marieberg/Stockholm, Swedish National Archives, Generalauditörens handlingar, 15/11 1706 nr 1. 90 ‘Kungl. Maj:ts stränge och alfwarlige Förbud angående Dueller och slagsmål, samt ock Förordning öfwer then Reparation ock förnöijelse som then Beskympfade hafwer at undfå. Stockholm 22 augusti 1682’, in Kongl. Stadgar, ed. by Schmedeman, pp. 767–68.

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of the anti-duelling legislation. Playful joking or hostile provocation — the line was not always easy to draw either for witnesses or for participants. Even in its less antagonistic form, raillery was both playful and charged at the same time. A more precise characterization would be that raillery was a game of more or less disrespectful joking on the sometimes-fragile borderline between friendship and antagonism. In contrast to outright challenging, however, raillery offered different possibilities for responding without losing face. One could choose to either respond in kind, or just accept the bantering and horseplay in a good-humoured spirit without taking offence. The latter seems to have been the strategy chosen by Second Lieutenant Johan Greiffenschütz. According to witnesses, his military colleague the second lieutenant Petter Myrdahl had not only grabbed his shoulder, but also torn his shirt and called him a wretch who had served a ‘futti’ (fots/cunt) regiment. Keeping calm, Greiffenschütz later assured the court that he had not taken offence because he knew that Myrdahl was well-known for his raillery.91 A darker side of raillery appears in the autobiographical notes of Baron Daniel Tilas. Raillery could go wrong in at least three ways. Firstly, in an uncontrolled escalation, turning playful joy into deadly antagonism. Secondly, when raillery was used with malice aforethought to provoke a confrontation, and thirdly when the targeted person refused to play the game in any way. Tilas tells in his diary about a visit to Baron Danckwart, who had been a close friend in his boyhood. After dinner, the host exhorted his male guests to drink, continually refilling their glasses in a slightly provocative way. When Tilas tried to slow down, his former friend and host became more and more importunate. Taking off his wig, he begun to hit Tilas over the arm with the queue in a joking manner. After repeating this a couple of times, Tilas told the host to cease his ‘rude raillery’, otherwise he would throw the wig on the fire. At this point there was no way back. When Danckwart kept on, Tilas grabbed the wig and carried out his threat. Danckwart was given an ultimatum. If he wished to continue his raillery, he had better draw his rapier. A counter-challenge followed immediately but the other guests managed to keep them apart. Some days later, they met again in private, and a new challenge was approaching when Danckwart suddenly took Tilas under his arm and asked if he could not understand a jest. He had no hard feelings towards him, so why should they be enemies? Tilas, who was still angry, eventually accepted a reconciliation.92 A provocation could in this way be both masked and withdrawn as raillery with the words ‘No offence, I’m just joking!’ This was both the strength and danger with raillery. Rather than an open competition with a winner and looser,

91 Marieberg/Stockholm, Swedish National Archives, Generalauditörens utslagshandling nr 15, 27/4 1713. 92 Tilas, Curriculum vitæ, pp. 138–40.

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raillery was a way of testing and confirming the status as friends and social equals. Testing included questioning but a good raillery could also bring status to both parties. In an alleged raillery between the poet and director-general Georg Stiernhielm and Count Clas Tott, Tott asked the widower Stiernhielm if he didn’t want to get married soon. ‘Yes, I do’, Stiernhielm replied, ‘but I’m not as acquainted with beautiful ladies as you are’. The dialogue continued with teasing allusions on the specific ‘skills’ of the two parties in making the right choice of wife so as not to become a cuckold. In this verbal raillery both Stiernhielm and Tott were given rich opportunities to demonstrate their wit.93 As already noted, male to male status competition and conflicts were easily transferred into questions of masculinity. Here the challenge at first concerned the male gaze and the ability to find a chaste wife and avoid the humiliating consequences of cuckoldry. There is, however, already in Tott’s first question a possible breath of insinuation. Male sexual assertiveness and a wish to marry as a natural remedy for sexual urges was taken for granted. Insinuating digs and allusions to purported love affairs, courting adventures, and sexual intimacies were part of the standard repertoire of raillery. A disinterest in romping with the opposite sex, or remaining unmarried too long, could bring a man’s virility into question. This was the painful experience of the dragoon officer Carl Johan Aminoff. As a middle-aged man, he recounts in his memoirs how women continuously approach him. He plays along to a certain degree but since he has promised himself to be chaste before marriage, he rejects his admirers one by one. He doesn’t even make an attempt with the servant girl who makes his bed every morning. The latter seems to have been especially remarkable and a rumour is spread that he is either not able to or interested in having sex with women. This forces him to arrange a scene in which his erect penis is exposed ‘by accident’ to the servant girl. Still a bachelor in his fifties, the rumour emerges again. Eventually it reached his superior Colonel Montgomery, who expressed great displeasure with a man who did not want to be known by the [female] sex. Once again, he arranges a situation in which he can expose his masculine assertiveness and ability to excite a woman without, however, having intercourse with her, as it seems.94 A more straightforward sexual assertiveness could also be played out in action as a game of raillery. As a young cadet, Carl Tersmeden witnessed how Vice Admiral Eric Sjöblad at a dinner began to hug and kiss the hostess as if she had been his own wife. The hostess became most embarrassed and her husband, a burgher and building constructor, more and more agitated over this ‘coarse raillery’. This, however, did not prevent the vice admiral from continuing his advances; on the contrary. After dinner he told the host that he certainly had a most lovely wife but that he should get her used to tolerating raillery from an old boatswain, referring to himself in a jocular mode. Eventually he

93 Stiernhielm, ‘Ett Propert Sambthal och Raillerie’, pp. 247–49. 94 Aminoff, Vardagsslit och sjuårskrig, pp. 328–29.

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did indeed apologize to the wife, but in an exaggeratedly polite manner. The admiral’s behaviour could perhaps better be called romping, but the term raillery indicates that it was as much a demonstration of his superior social status as a proof of masculine assertiveness towards the wife. Sjöblad was at the same time notorious for such behaviour, which may have made it easier for the host and his wife to remain passive.95 There was a competitive aspect of romping as well, sometimes masked as a prank and fuelled by group pressure. Secretary Gustaf Halldin, ennobled as Hallenstierna, recounts how he once relaxed with friends, all with the names of well-known and respectable urban middle-class men in Stockholm, when a girl selling diverse ‘fripperies’ in the street was brought into the room. His friends proved eager to ‘finger the merchandise’, ‘both the visible and the hidden’. The girl wanted to leave but was stopped, and it was proposed in French that someone ought to do the company honour. Halldin was chosen and the others left the room. At first the girl cried but soon became calmer. After a little coaxing and the offer of a ducat in payment, she made herself comfortable. During the act itself, Halldin’s friends opened the door a crack in order to watch, and finally rushed in laughing and ‘babbling’. Sniffling, the girl grabbed her basket and ran off. For the middle-aged Halldin and his friends, the whole thing was a ‘point of honour’ — the ducat was taken from their common purse ‘pour l’honneur du froc’ (for the honour of the frock).96 In terms of gender and status, the participant’s sexual assertiveness was tested and confirmed with the probable effect of increased self-esteemed status and prestige — a triumph of masculine assertiveness in Halldin’s notes on the art of seduction.

Who’s in Charge — Authority and Chastisement in Conflicts Related to the Household In contrast to gatherings for social drinking and joking relations, the household constituted a strictly hierarchical and firm order of superiority and subordination. Cutting through all status groups and professional corporations, the articulation of honour in the household was closely related to the exercise of parental authority. While strictly hierarchical, the generational life cycle of the household provided tensions and grey areas of contested authority. Disputes about reverence, obedience, and chastisement were central issues which could easily slide into matters of honour. The relation between a father and a grown-up son could be especially charged, as in the case of Jacob Johansson and his father.97 Drinking in company at the local inn, the father

95 Tersmeden, Amiral Carl Tersmedens memoarer, pp. 88–89. 96 Hallenstierna, Mina kärleksäfventyr, pp. 89–90. 97 Turku, Finnish National Archives, Vehmaan ja Ala-Satakunnan tuomiokunnan. varsinaisasiain pöytäkirjat, Caa: 23a, Lethala 26/2 1748.

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suddenly ordered his son to take his horse and sledge home. When the son refused, his father immediately hit him over the back with his stick. The father obviously considered this to be appropriate — in court he testified that the son had always shown himself most obedient. According to tradition and the Lutheran Household Table literature, it was a father’s right and duty to chastise his son, but in this case conditions had changed.98 The son had taken over the farm and the father was now living in and maintained by the son. Obviously, the son in his new position as master of the household did not accept the paternal command, especially not in the presence of others. When the father hit him with the stick over the back the situation got even worse. Hitting with a stick was a most explicit sign of chastisement. Being chastised by one’s father was not humiliating as long as the father was the master and the son was living in and had not yet reached majority. Now the tables were turned and what could have been accepted in the past as parental correction had now become an assault. As a son he was, however, still obliged to pay reverence to his father, according to the Fourth Commandment in the catechism, God’s law, and the law code of 1734. Exactly what this implied in terms of obedience was not made explicit. In legal practice, however, a retired father’s violence under the pretext of correction was most often disregarded, while the slightest push or verbal abuse by the son constituted a serious crime.99 With regard to the bystanders, on the other hand, the challenge for Jacob was to demonstrate his new status as an independent master and man of majority. This created a double bind situation of contradictory norms. If he accepted being hit, his humiliation would be even stronger in the eyes of his equals, but if he took action he risked being reported to the local sheriff. Out of these two bad alternatives, he followed his emotional reaction of anger, hit back, and pulled his father’s beard with the words ‘Have you forgotten where you are at home and what kind of man you are?’ Aware of the catch-22 situation, he threw himself into the sledge and drove away, shouting out loudly to everyone, ‘Kiss my ass!’ What was at issue here was not really a competition for the status position as master, but a refusal of the father to recognize his son’s independent position and right to respect as a man of majority.100 Given the firm hierarchical household order sanctioned by law, there was in fact not much room for competing about formal status positions. A son eagerly waiting to take over the farm could question the competence of his father’s ascribed status as master. A retired master and father could, in a corresponding way, interfere in daily practices as ‘knowing better’ how things ought to be done, or as in the case above refuse to recognize the shift in status position. Questioning rather than gaining status is the central issue in most of the conflicts.

98 Liliequist, ‘Reverence, Shame and Guilt’. 99 Liliequist, ‘“The Child Who Strikes his Own Father”’, pp. 40–41. 100 Cf. Toivo, ‘Abuse of Parents in Early Modern Finland’, pp. 262–63.

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In contrast to status differences, the hierarchical father–son relation could never be superseded, either within or outside the hierarchical household order. The following and final case takes us back to the world of play and joy in social interaction.101 To tumble and wrestle with each other for fun was a common amusement at drinking parties. In one such revel, a boatswain told the others that he dared to wrestle with anyone in the company. His father, present as well, immediately accepted. Out on the floor they grabbed each other, saying ‘I am as good a man as you’. After a first takedown of the son, the father tried to sit down on the bench, but the son pulled him up again. This continued four or five times in an increasingly antagonistic atmosphere until they were finally separated. Even then, the son stepped up, stamped his feet, and grabbed his father by the shoulders saying ‘I dare to fight with you, brother’. During the fight, the son consistently addressed his father as ‘du’ (thou) and ‘bror’ (brother). This was the language of equal terms adopted by his father as well at the beginning of the fight. Socially the son was on his own and an independent man, not living in any longer with his father. That wrestling, like raillery, between equals could turn antagonistic was hardly uncommon. Especially not in this case when a son, after years of subordination and chastisement, was given the chance for payback. In contrast, however, to different status positions, the hierarchical father–son relation could never be superseded in the eyes of the law and religion. Consequently the son was sentenced to severe whipping and a public apology.102

Concluding Remarks The focus in this chapter has with few exceptions been on what is defined as negative competition. That is, marking difference through the challenging and questioning of others’ ascribed and acquired positions rather than competing for new positions with higher status. The strategy of negative competition was in line with the kind of horizontal honour that constituted the cultural tenor of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Swedish society, further underpinned by the extensive use of shaming and shameful penalties. In this world, marking differences seems to have been natural and easy, while friendship and the superseding of differences had to be continuously confirmed. The rituals of social drinking provided, however, as much opportunity for provocation as for confirmation. Even play and joy could quickly turn antagonistic, not because early modern people were incapable of controlling their passions, but due to the ambiguous potential of both provocation and confirmation in cultural

101 Lund, Swedish National Archives, Villands häradsrättsarkiv, Domböcker vid ordinarie ting AIa:38, 19/5 1752. 102 Vadstena, Swedish National Archives, Göta Hovrätt, Huvudarkivet, Brottmålsutslag BIIa:56, 13/10 1752.

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forms of socializing like raillery, tumbling, and wrestling. Notions of gender played a crucial role in these games of negative competition, but in different ways for men and women. While women could gain status from their male relatives, men could lose both status and manliness from alleged submissive relations to wives and mothers, as well as from allusions to cowardice and impotence. Status appears in many of the studied examples as a thin varnish of social pretensions and ascriptions that could easily break down into questions of honour and notions of gender. Still, status differences, especially minor ones, were the igniting spark that set it all off.

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Jarrick, Arne, and Johan Söderberg, Odygd och vanära: folk och brott i gamla Stockholm (Stockholm: Rabén Prisma, 1998) Kane, Brendan, The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541–1641 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Liliequist, Jonas, ‘Peasants against Nature: Crossing the Boundaries between Man and Animal in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Sweden’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1 (1991), 393–423 ———, ‘Violence, Honour and Manliness in Early Modern Northern Sweden’, in Crime and Control in Europe from the Past to the Present, ed. by Mirkka Lappalainen and Pekka Hirvonen (Helsinki: Publications of the History of Criminality Research Project, 1999), pp. 174–207 ———, ‘Manlighetens flytande gränser. Om manlighet som analytiskt begrepp i historiska analyser’, Scandia, 74 (2008), 83–103 ———, ‘“The Child Who Strikes his Own Father or Mother Shall Be Put to Death”: Assault and Verbal Abuse of Parents in Swedish and Finnish Counties 1745–1754’, in Morality, Crime and Social Control in Europe, 1500–1900, ed. by Satu Lidman and Olli Matikainen (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2014), pp. 19–42 ———, ‘From Honour to Virtue: The Shifting Social Logics of Masculinity and Honour, in Early Modern Sweden’, in Honour, Violence and Emotions in History, ed. by Carolyn Strange, Robert Cribb, and Christopher E. Forth (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 45–67 ———, ‘Laughing at the Unmanly Man in Early Modern Sweden’, in Laughter, Humor, and the (Un)making of Gender: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, ed. by Jonas Liliequist and Anna Foka (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 229–48 ———, ‘Royal Authority and the Taming of the Aristocracy: The Historical and Political Context of Two Paintings in the Gallery of Charles XI’, in The Gallery of Charles XI at the Royal Palace of Stockholm – in Perspective, ed. by Linda Hinners, Martin Olin, and Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 2016), pp. 73–85 ———, ‘Berättelsen om drottning Margaretas märke: Känsla, kön och politik i den svenska propagandan mot Danmark under 1500- och 1600-talen’, TEMPtidsskrift for historie, 16 (2018), 100–23 ———, ‘“Du ljög som en tjuv och skälm” Okvädande inför rätta i 1600- och 1700-talens södra och mellersta Norrland’, Oknytt: Tidskrift för Johan Nordlander-sällskapet, 1.2 (2020), 4–39 ———, ‘Reverence, Shame and Guilt in Early Modern Northern, Central and Western European Cultures’, in The Routledge Companion to Cultural History in the Western World, from 1250 to the Present, ed. by Alessandro Arcangeli, Jörg Rogge, and Hannu Salmi (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 249–55 Lindstedt Cronberg, Marie, Synd och skam: ogifta mödrar på svensk landsbygd 1680–1880 (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1997) Ludwig, Ulrike, ‘Von Scherzen und Duellen. Wettkampfspiele als Typus von Ehrenkonflikten im schwedisch-pommerschen Offizierskorps’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 38 (2011), 371–403

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Maclean, Ian, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) Malmstedt, Göran, Bondetro och kyrkoro: religiös mentalitet i stormaktstidens Sverige (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2002) Mauss, Marcel, ‘Joking Relations’, trans. by Jane I. Guyer, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3 (2013), 317–34 Murenius, Boëtius, Acta visitatoria: 1637–1666, utgifna af Kaarlo Österbladh (Borgå, 1908) Nelson, Alvar, ‘Envig och ära. En studie över ett fornsvenskt lagfragment’, Saga och Sed (1944), 57–94 Platen, Magnus von, Svenska skägg: våra manshakor genom tiderna (Stockholm: Fischer, 1995) Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, ‘On Joking Relationships’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 13 (1940), 195–210 Sandén, Annika, ‘Kyrkan, kvinnorna och hierarkiernas dynamik’, Historisk tidskrift, 26 (2006), 643–60 Sandmo, Erling, Voldssamfunnets undergang: om disiplineringen av Norge på 1600-tallet (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1999) Schwerhoff, Gerd, ‘Early Modern Violence and the Honour Code: From Social Integration to Social Distinction?’, Crime, History and Societies, 17 (2013), 27–46 Simmel, Georg, ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’, in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. by Kurt H. Wolff (London: The Free Press of Glenoce Collier-Macmillan Lieutenant, 1950), pp. 307–76 Stewart, Frank Henderson, Honor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) Tlusty, B. Ann, Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001) Toivo, Raisa Maria, ‘Abuse of Parents in Early Modern Finland: Structures and Emotions’, Journal of Family History, 41 (2016), 255–70 Trolle Önnerfors, Elsa, ‘Suum cuique tribuere – Give to Each his Own: Court Cases Involving Swedish Nobility in the Svea Court of Appeal’, in The Svea Court of Appeal in the Early Modern Period: Historical Reinterpretations and New Perspectives, ed. by Mia Korpiola (Stockholm: Institutet för rättshistorisk forskning, 2014), pp. 163–200 Tunefalk, Martin, Äreminnen: personmedaljer och social status i Sverige cirka 1650–1900 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2015) Turner, Bryan S., Status: Concepts in Social Thought (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) Ulrich, Arvid, ‘Livssaker och dödsfångar, bödlar och avrättningar’, Svenska Landsmål och Svenskt Folkliv, 1 (1909), 11–26 Walker, Terry, ‘You and Thou in Early Modern English Dialogues. Patterns of Usage’, in Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2002), pp. 309–42 Wirilander, Kaarlo, Herrskapsfolk: ståndspersoner i Finland 1721–1870 (Stockholm: Nordiska muséet, 1982)

Jonas Li liequist

Practices — Reflections and Concluding Remarks

Of the five chapters in this section, two (Webb and Ameri) focus on female competition. Women’s voices are heard in Liliequist’s study, but the overwhelming number of examples concern male competition and conflicts, and this is also the explicit focus of Morosini’s and Grassi’s studies. The studied practices of Morosini, Grassi, and Liliequist are rather close in time but geographically distant with early modern Sweden in the north, and Italy in the south further represented by Webb’s study on mid-republican Rome, and Ameri’s study even more distant in both time and location. Despite this there are several interesting similarities and parallels to be drawn. A first concerns the problem of male gender bias in both sources and traditional interpretations. In Webb’s study women’s actions only become visible through the eyes and descriptions of male authors and commentators. Further reinforced by a general male bias in interpretation, women’s inclination for conspicuous consumption has either been dismissed as trivialities, a by-product of their husband’s status, or went unnoticed. The situation is both similar and radically different in Marta Ameri’s study. Seals and sealing are typically associated with the management of resources in early economies. When found in female tombs, however, they have often been interpreted as having had a decorative or protective purpose. A closer analysis of the material and iconography of female seals in Shar-i Soktha indicates that they were in fact used for administrative sealing while the far less numerous male seals were not. Thus, female status competition was also about power. Ameri’s study represents a new and expanding branch of archaeological studies challenging the projection of modern (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) gender models on ancient material objects. Consequently, women in ancient societies have been found to be priestesses, warriors, and as in this case, administrators of material recourses. Archaeological methods and perspectives are now entering into medieval and early modern studies as well. A recent study of a sixteenth-century Swedish town demonstrates how

Jonas Liliequist    is Professor Emeritus of History at Umeå University, Sweden. Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 159-161 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126145

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a combination of archaeological and archival sources and methods can make women’s agency become much more visible.1 In a rhetorical perspective Roman male comments on female inclination for jewellery and finery as the insignia of women in which they rejoice and boast are echoed in early modern Swedish public discourse and comments of male aristocrats nearly one and a half millennia later. The rhetoric is sometimes almost verbatim, as when Livy in the supporting speech attributed to Valerius, talks about the universal pain and indignation felt by Roman women when they see the wives of their Latin allies granted the jewellery and ornament denied themselves. The Swedish Colonel Örneklo mobilizes a similar argument for the official ranking of women’s social status in Sweden to end the daily humiliation of not being recognized for one’s worth as in most other countries. Parallels are found in sexual allusions as well. Count Sparre makes a pun on the Swedish word ‘tjänst’ (service/office) with the implication that women’s demand for status was actually about female licentiousness. Livy’s Cato accuses in a corresponding way women who rally against the lex Oppia for not only desiring ‘libertas’ but ‘licentia’.2 The Roman discourse on luxuria, effeminacy, and moral degeneration is besides the topic of Webb’s analysis but would be very interesting to compare with the early modern Swedish debate about the tyranny of fashion, effeminate sparks, and female rule as a threat not only to the manliness of men but the whole nation. Seen from a perspective of female agency on the other hand, there are parallels in the ways women established their own forum for status competition in the absence of access to offices and official marks of distinction. Violence and male honour play a central role in both Liliequist’s and Morosini’s chapters, still there are significant differences. While individual military officers in the royal Swedish army fought duels over matters of rank and honour, Italian captains, condottieri, in service of princes and city-states, contracted soldiers for military campaigns in competition and conflicts with each other. Some of these conflicts ended in challenges to duels as well but only rarely resulted in proper fights, at least in the cases studied by Morosini. In the Swedish cases conflicts seem to have been more instant and momentary whereas the challenges between Italian military captains represented the peak of a long time of rivalry and exchanges of insulting libels. The Swedish and Italian references to honour also had different connotations. The honour of the condottieri aimed at glory and immortal fame gained through victories and competition in a positive sense. When Italian captains could challenge each other with expressions like I am stronger and more courageous than you, the typical rhetoric in the Swedish cases was to question the other’s honour in a negative and downgrading sense. Significant is that challenges to



1 Christina Rosén, ‘A Woman’s Place. Space, Meeting Places and Gender in 16th-Century Nya Lödöse, Sweden’, Acta archaeologica, 90.2 (2019), 167–80. 2 Livy, Ab urbe condita, xxxiv.2.14.

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duel between Italian military leaders were a means to transfer the rivalry into new issues for status competition rather than to end it. Going into details, hats thrown on the floor and the confirmation of challenges by handing over bloodstained personal objects, are much the same. The strong emphasis on the public manifestation of military skills and manly virtues through emotional display, face, and a hardened body with scars, seems however not to have been a prominent theme for status competition in the Swedish army with the possible exception of the spartan ideals of the Swedish warrior king Charles XII (1682–1718).3 Renaissance Italy had after all the reputation of having ‘invented’ the duel in its early modern form and a systematic comparison based on much broader empirical material would be most interesting. Cultural differences grow almost into contrasts when the rhetoric of male-to-male sexual acts in seventeenth-century Lucca is compared with the subtle allusions to a disinterest in sexual relations with women in the case of the Swedish dragoon officer Johan Aminoff. Harshly punished in legal practice but not even mentioned in law, male-to-male sexual relations were but poorly conceptualized in early modern Swedish popular discourse.4 Still the attention to potency, erection, and sexual penetration as a proof of virility and source of male prestige was the same. Behind the strict hierarchical age and status conventions rooted in a long tradition from classical times, the Italian trial records give a glimpse of homosocial gatherings of young men of about the same age having sex with each other alternating between taking the passive and active role. Maybe the silence and absence of popular terms and invectives in early modern Sweden functioned as a covering shield rather than as a reflection of a non-existing practice. Once again, the chapters in this section call for systematic and comprehensive historical comparisons between gender and status competition in northern and southern Europe.



3 Sven Grauers, ‘Karl XII:s personlighet. Försök till en analys’, Karolinska förbundets årsbok (1969), 17–18. 4 Jonas Liliequist, ‘State Policy, Popular Discourse, and the Silence on Homosexual Acts in Early Modern Sweden’, in Scandinavian Homosexualities: Essays on Gay and Lesbian Studies, ed. by Jan Löfström (New York: Haworth, 1998), pp. 5–52.

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Performances

Martha Bayless

Performances: Introduction

The theme of this section is competition within specific cultural practices and genres governed by conventions and/or specific rules like public rituals, ceremonies, games, exemplarity (role-modelling), and other enactments. The suppression of rivalry among women, in the form of competition for men’s favours, was seen as not only virtuous, but foundational in the success of the state in China of the first and second centuries bce. This is the subject of Yiqun Zhou’s contribution, exploring women’s reputation for jealous behaviour, especially as portrayed in elite circles. Zhou takes the examples from multiple texts in which women are either derided for jealousy, which is portrayed as monstrous and corrosive, or praised for putting the benefit of men above their own striving for position in their roles as wives or concubines. Although jealous competition for status was also acknowledged among men, it was framed as fundamentally a woman’s emotion, and the successful suppression of that emotion was credited with allowing the state to prevail on a larger stage. In this way, women’s self-denial was portrayed as a public good, and her performance of lack of ambition could, it was held, be transmuted into the good of the body politic. Skill at board games was regarded as a mark of high-status martial prowess in early medieval northern Europe, as described in Bayless’s contribution. As a tabletop counterpart of war, board games were regarded as an emblem of martial achievement, and literature portrays them as the domain of kings and leaders, almost invariably masculine. These associations held true for the board games preceding chess in early medieval England, Wales, Ireland, Scandinavia, and parts of France. Archaeology complicates the picture, showing that in some Scandinavian periods and locales women were equally associated with board games, and that women might also acquire other emblems of war formerly coded ‘masculine’. In literature, the incursion of women into the realm of board games was associated with the supernatural, and hence usually with feminine wrongdoing. The examples of history, meanwhile, show that although it was typically felt to be improper for women to compete at board games, masculine culture was frequently unsuccessful at keeping them out. Mourning the loss of a woman also provided an opportunity for men to compete for status and display prowess in seventeenth-century China. Epitaphs written by the mourner, originally composed for graves, could be Martha Bayless    is Professor of English and Folklore at the University of Oregon (USA).

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circulated on a wide scale, and became such popular means of self-presentation that they spurred complaints that even lowly pig-butcherers attempted to indulge in the form. A more elite version of the epitaph was elegiac poetry in honour of the deceased, and so private mourning became an opportunity for public performance, both for the bereaved and for the friends who sent him consolatory verses. The composers of elegiac poems often publicly congratulated themselves on their performance, and even declare that the death of the beloved is outweighed by the achievement of the man’s poetry. The state of being a woman, the authors imply, is so lowly that without the benefit of powerful poetry, a woman would have little chance of being immortal; but the achievement of the poetry is that it is a vehicle for immortality — as well as a conspicuous vehicle for men’s public self-promotion. The public performance of piety and gratitude to a saint could not only demonstrate devotional virtue but also establish political and temporal status, as the contribution by Katajala-Peltomaa shows. A number of instances from fourteenth-century Italy, recorded in documents from the canonization processes of two important saints, show how elite women displayed both their care for their families and their political affiliations in the performance of gratitude toward the saints. These rituals might take the form of publicly displayed votive offerings, such as a personally crafted crown of pearls; performances of public devotion such as listening to a special mass while kneeling on bare knees; or public group pilgrimages. These counter-gifts, offered in gratitude for the saint’s intercession, demonstrated the women’s affiliation with the powerful political groups associated with the locale as well as their affiliation with the important saints whose intercession they were publicly celebrating. Six

Yiqun Zhou, ‘Jealousy, Gender, and a Moralist’s Mission in Early China’ Seven Martha Bayless, ‘Early Medieval Board Games: Issues of Power and Gender’ Eight Martin W. Huang, ‘The Social Circulation of Grief: Status Competition, Mourning and Gender in Seventeenth-Century China’ Nine Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, ‘“Just a Humble Petitioner of a Saint?” Devotion as a Strategy for Attaining Prestige in Fourteenth-Century Italian Canonization Processes’

Yiqun Zhou

Jealousy, Gender, and a Moralist’s Mission in Early China

Jealousy arises when people believe that they have lost, or are in danger of losing, the special recognitions, attentions, and treatments that they deserve to receive from another person, due to the presence of a rivalrous third party (regardless of whether this third individual had competitive intentions or not). As an emotion, jealousy comprises mixed feelings of apprehension, bitterness, disappointment, resentment, and anger; frequently it also entails actions that aim to reclaim the deserved special recognitions, attentions, and treatments and to seek redress for the injury believed to have been inflicted. Its inherent spite and pugnacity have rendered jealousy a moral weakness and an ‘unspeakable’ emotion, and there is a salient gender dimension to the limited discourse that is devoted to jealousy and to sexual jealousy in particular.1 Writing about Medea, Giulia Sissa states, ‘Whereas male jealousy is built into the legal and societal sanctions against female adultery, a woman’s jealousy is as inadmissible as her unfaithfulness. Both promiscuity and jealousy are men’s privileges’. Such privileges require ‘women’s compliance with the prohibition to express, and even to feel, jealousy’.2 In a study of Roman love elegy, Ruth Rothaus Caston argues that the male poets presented men and women as having different responses to their jealous feelings, characterizing the male response by restraint and the female response by violence.3 Whereas the specifics of these scholars’ views may be debatable, it is clear that in the ancient societies they studied, men and women were positioned to experience and express jealousy in very different ways, and that it was almost entirely through the eyes of male authors that we see women’s experience and expression of jealousy.



1 On the difficulty of talking about jealousy and the moral opprobrium it has incurred in the Western tradition, see Sissa, Jealousy and Toohey, Jealousy, chap. 1. 2 Sissa, Jealousy, pp. 24–25. 3 Caston, The Elegiac Passion, chap. 4. Yiqun Zhou    is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (and, by courtesy, of Classics) at Stanford University. Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 167-184 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126146

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When we turn to early China, we find similar social conditions surrounding the gendered nature of jealousy both as a lived emotion and as a problem in moral discourse. If anything, the common Chinese practice of polygyny — in which a man married multiple women (one being the principal wife and others being secondary consorts), ostensibly for the purpose of bearing legitimate heirs and ensuring the preservation and prosperity of the patriline, and they all resided in the same household — only heightened the social and legal sanction of male jealousy and aggravated the frequency and intensity of the competition among a man’s co-residential sexual partners.4 It is also not surprising to find that in early China we have no choice but to look at female jealousy as constructed from a male perspective, both in terms of the representation of jealous women and in terms of the moralistic endeavours aimed at harnessing and eliminating the vice of female jealousy. There is one respect in which the early Chinese discourse on female jealousy seems to distinguish itself from its Graeco-Roman counterpart, perhaps partly due to the more serious potential for discord among the multiple female consorts in the Chinese family. I am referring to the tendency in Chinese texts to draw a close connection between the sexual jealousy exhibited by women and the competitive jealousy that men directed toward each other in non-sexual situations. These two kinds of jealousy were regarded as being analogous. Great moral importance was attached to the control of female jealousy and the achievement of peaceful coexistence among wives and concubines, and the unjealous wife/concubine was upheld as a role model for men who aspired to be filial sons and loyal ministers. The exemplary effect that women were expected to exert on men in the regulation of their competitive energies shows the extent to which Chinese thinkers recognized the potential destructiveness of female jealousy and attempted to replace it with a positive moral force that would allow women to claim an important role in the forging of a virtuous polity characterized by harmony, order, and strength. Epitomizing this line of thought about the management of female jealousy was Liu Xiang (c. 79–8 bce), a member of the imperial clan that ruled the Western Han Empire (202 bce–8 ce), a court official, and an eminent scholar. Relevant to this study is one of the texts that Liu Xiang compiled during the reign of Emperor Cheng (r. 33–7 bce), the Biographies of Women (Lienü zhuan, hereafter referred to as Biographies and cited as LNZ).5 A collection of 104 life stories of exemplary Chinese women from high antiquity to the Western Han, the Biographies was Liu Xiang’s response to the malfunction of



4 Concubinage in the Graeco-Roman world normally did not share the major features of Chinese polygyny outlined here and was a much less well-defined institution. On how polygyny accounted for some important differences in the dynamics of gender conflict in ancient China and Greece (tenth–fourth centuries bce), see Zhou, Festivals, pp. 248–50. 5 On the complex textual history of the Biographies and the general attribution of its authorship to Liu Xiang. See Hinsch, ‘The Composition’, Kinney, ‘Introduction’, and Raphals, Sharing the Light, pp. 105–12.

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Emperor Cheng’s harem, which deeply concerned many contemporary court officials. The lack of male heirs dogged the entire reign of Emperor Cheng, who ascended the throne at age eighteen and died heirless at forty-five despite having had two empresses and numerous secondary consorts. The emperor’s tendency to allow his affections to be monopolized by certain women at various stages of his reign was widely seen as the cause of the problem. The situation naturally generated acute anxiety among court officials concerned with dynastic succession, and prompted them to remonstrate with the emperor in memorials that made pointed attacks on female jealousy. It is under these circumstances that Liu Xiang compiled the Biographies and presented it to the throne, aiming to define a code of female conduct for the emperor and his palace women by way of depicting historical exemplars.6 Encompassing a range of qualities associated with women at various life stages and in various kinship roles, the Biographies went far beyond tackling the problem of female jealousy, but it is a major problem addressed in this seminal text that was to inaugurate a two-millennium-long tradition of Chinese didactic writings about female virtue.7 This chapter will examine Liu Xiang’s portrayal of exemplary women whose words and deeds illustrated the perceived link between a household free of the vice of jealousy and a political order thriving on the veneration of virtue. I will focus on this aspect of Liu Xiang’s engagement with the problem of female jealousy in order to highlight what I consider to be most distinctive about the gendered nature of jealousy in early China. To better understand Liu Xiang’s mission in his depiction of unjealous exemplars in the Biographies, we need to begin with a general discussion of gender and jealousy in early China.

Jealousy and Gender in Early China Jealousy: A Female Vice?

In the early Chinese sources, there are three expressions denoting ‘to be jealous’: du妒, ji 嫉, and mao媢. Of the three, du can be regarded as the primary and general term. Whereas ji may also simply mean ‘to resent’, and mao, which is by far the least used of the triplet, mainly refers to male sexual jealousy, du does not have the broader meaning of ji, its agents and its objects can be both male and female, and finally, it may form combinations with the other two terms, resulting in duji 妒嫉and dumao 妒媢, to mean ‘to be jealous’.



6 On the turmoil resulting from Emperor Cheng’s obsessive affection for the Zhao sisters and Liu Xiang’s goal in compiling the Biographies, see Kinney, ‘Introduction’, and Raphals, Sharing the Light, pp. 78–86. 7 On the paradigmatic significance of Liu Xiang’s Biographies, see Hinsch, Women, pp. 125–28; Mou, Gentlemen’s Prescriptions.

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Even readers without Chinese may notice that all three expressions denoting jealousy have a female radical (女). It is tempting to infer that jealousy was perceived as a characteristically feminine trait in early China, despite the fact that both men and women were capable of being jealous (witness the terminological evidence offered by the existence of mao). The most explicit and instructive statement on the specifically female association of jealousy is found in a story that first appeared in the third-century bce Han Feizi and was later included in the Stratagems of the Warring States: The king of Wei gave a beautiful woman to the king of Chu as a gift, and the king of Chu was fond of her. Zheng Xiu, consort of the king of Chu, knowing of the king’s fondness for the new woman, showed great affection for her. Clothes, ornaments, and objects of amusement: of these she chose what the new woman liked and acquired them for her. The bedding in the chambers: of this she chose what the new woman approved of and acquired it for her. She loved the new woman even more than the king himself did. The king said, ‘Beauty is what women depend upon to serve their husbands, and jealousy is in their essence. Now Zheng Xiu knows that I am fond of the new woman but loves her more than I do. This is how a filial son serves his parents and how a loyal minister serves his lord’. Knowing that the king regarded her as being not jealous, Zheng Xiu therefore said to the new woman, ‘The king does love you. However, he loathes your nose. To see the king, you must make sure to cover your nose’. The new woman therefore covered her nose when she saw the king. The king said to Zheng Xiu, ‘The new woman covers her nose whenever she sees me. Why?’ Zheng Xiu said, ‘I know why’. The king said, ‘You must tell me even if it is something bad’. Zheng Xiu said, ‘She seems to loathe the king’s smell’. The king said, ‘How impudent!’ He gave the order for the woman’s nose to be cut off and made sure that this order not be disobeyed.8 The king of Chu’s remarks in the quoted passage consist of a syllogism. The major premise, ‘Beauty is what women depend upon to serve their husbands, and jealousy is in their essence’, has the flavour of being an axiom. Besides defining beauty as the basis of female excellence, it sees women as being locked into inherently competitive relationships with each other. This statement of general assumptions about women is followed by the minor premise: the king’s observation that Zheng Xiu has displayed greater affection toward the new woman than he himself, which deviates from men’s normal expectations for women. The conclusion is that, as a woman who is above jealousy and capable of loving her rival, Zheng Xiu is a paragon of her sex, and such a



8 Han Feizi, Han Feizi jijie (Neichu II), pp. 250–51. Zhanguo ce zhushi (Chu 3), p. 569. Boldface added. There are slight variations between the two versions. The translation here is that of Liu Xiang’s version. All translations are my own.

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woman can exert an exemplary effect comparable to a filial son and a loyal minister. What the three have in common is that they are only concerned with the best interests of the people they serve, the husband, the father, and the ruler respectively, in disregard of what such devotion may cost themselves. The point, and irony, of the story under discussion, of course, is that both the minor premise and the conclusion in king of Chu’s remarks are proven wrong and the conventional wisdom couched in the major premise is affirmed by the horrible outcome. The solicitousness and unselfishness that Zheng Xiu demonstrated toward the new woman turn out to be an ostentatious performance aimed to disarm and gain the trust of those for whom the show is intended (the king and his new beloved), with the sole purpose to set the stage for her next move, the elimination of the beautiful rival. When the right moment arrives, Zheng Xiu strikes, ingeniously laying a trap for the credulous new consort and getting the infuriated, and equally credulous, king to order the mutilation of the poor woman who was only too eager to please him. The fact that Zheng Xiu contrives to have the woman disfigured (rather than any other form of punishment) resoundingly vindicates the truism that the king mistakenly thought had been disproved by Zheng Xiu’s virtuous conduct, namely, that beauty is the most important female quality and that women are naturally jealous. Contrary to the misleading impression that Zheng Xiu conveys to the king, the cunning and cruel way in which she brings about the destruction of her rival exhibits the extreme extent to which women can go when they are driven by the evil passion of jealousy. It is not difficult to find historical records about women committing atrocities against other women because of jealousy. Yijun, who was the wife of Shi Hui, a maternal cousin of Emperor Xuan of Han (r. 74–48 bce), was said to be a jealous woman and to have strangled to death over forty maidservants in her house. Apparently these victims were or were perceived as Yijun’s rivals for her husband’s affection. After being convicted, Yijun met with the death penalty.9 It seems that violence by jealous wives was well within people’s imagination, even considered as common, as attested by an incident that also occurred during Emperor Xuan’s reign. In 67 bce, a maidservant in the house of Wei Xiang (d. 59 bce), chancellor, hanged herself. When Zhao Guanghuan (d. 65 bce), governor of Chang’an (the capital city), learned of this, he suspected that Wei Xiang’s wife had, out of jealousy, had the maidservant strangled to death. Acting on this suspicion, Zhao led a police force into the chancellor’s residence, ordered the chancellor’s wife to kneel below the steps in the courtyard as he questioned her (a humiliating treatment), and arrested over ten members of the house staff for further questioning. Later, a formal legal investigation ordered by the emperor revealed that the maidservant had actually committed suicide after being scolded, flogged, and expelled by Wei



9 Sima Qian, Shiji, xx.1065.

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Xiang himself over an unspecified fault.10 As seen in this incident, when a maidservant died of an unnatural cause, the mistress of the household became a natural suspect, on the assumption that women were jealous and would not hesitate to resort to murder to eliminate any rivals who stood between themselves and their husbands. The ironic fact that in the present case it was the chancellor, not his wife, who actually caused the maidservant’s suicide only underscores the powerfulness of what sounded like a common assumption. The most notorious historical example of female jealousy is that of Empress Lü (241–180 bce), wife of Liu Bang (r. 202–195 bce), the founder of the Western Han dynasty. A passage in the great historian Sima Qian’s (c. 145–87 bce) chapter on the imperial relatives encapsulates it well: In the empress’s late years, her beauty faded and the emperor’s love for her declined, whereas Lady Qi enjoyed his favour, and several times the lady’s son Ruyi came close to replacing the crown prince (Empress Lü’s son). After Gaozu (Liu Bang) had passed away, Empress Lü eliminated Lady Qi and killed the king of Zhao (Ruyi). She only spared those palace women who had not enjoyed the late emperor’s favour and were distant from him.11 Like the Han Feizi story, this account identifies the possession or loss of physical beauty as the ultimate cause of female jealousy. Empress Lü could not but harbour an intense hatred for all her younger and more beautiful rivals, and as soon as her husband had died and she had assumed power, she took ruthless revenge against them while letting off those who had not constituted a threat to her. Also, as in the Han Feizi story, the physical destruction of a rival was the goal of Empress Lü’s revenge. What Empress Lü did to her arch-rival Lady Qi, related in Empress Lü’s biography by Sima Qian, will deeply disturb every unsuspecting reader. According to Sima Qian, the empress had Lady Qi’s hands and feet cut off, her eyes gouged out, and made her deaf and mute, before placing her in the privy and christening her ‘human pig’. The horrendousness of Empress Lü’s action is best indicated by the reaction of her own son, now Emperor Hui (r. 195–188 bce), when he was summoned to view the ‘human pig’. Upon being informed of the identity of the creature before his eyes, the sixteen-year-old emperor broke into a loud sob and then fell ill for over a year. While lying sick, he sent the following message to Empress Lü, ‘That was not a thing done by a human. As Her Majesty’s son, I cannot bring myself to reign over the empire’.12 Indeed, Emperor Hui seems to have suffered permanent psychological damage from his encounter with the mutilated former favourite of his late father, and the gentle-hearted young ruler only reigned for seven years, under the complete domination of his mother, before dying at age twenty-three. The words of protest that Emperor

10 Ban Gu, Hanshu, lxxvi.3205. 11 Sima Qian, Shiji, xlix.1969. 12 Sima Qian, Shiji, ix.397.

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Hui uttered against Empress Lü’s revenge against Lady Qi, that it ‘was not a thing done by a human’, stand as the most poignant condemnation of the dehumanizing effect that the emotion of jealousy could exert on women. The desperation and extremeness of emotions and a tendency to seek physical destruction that we have seen in the anecdotal and historical sources about jealous women may explain why jealousy acquired predominantly feminine associations, although it is clear that jealousy knows no gender, now or in early China. How reliable are such sensational accounts? There are grounds for doubt. Some insights can be gained from the records about Zhai Xuan (d. 7 ce), the eldest son of Zhai Fangjin (53–7 bce), who was Emperor Cheng’s chancellor from 15–7 bce. Zhai Xuan inherited his father’s title of nobility following the latter’s death, and he is described as ‘being versed in the classics and honest in his conduct, a gentleman’.13 In 7 ce, Zhai Xuan’s younger brother Zhai Yi (d. 7 ce), then governor of Dongjun, raised an army and rebelled against Wang Mang (46 bce–23 ce), who had been serving as regent to the three-year-old emperor since the previous year and was well poised to usurp the throne (which he would proceed to do in 8 ce). After Zhai Yi’s rebellion was crushed in late 7 ce, Wang Mang had his entire clan executed. In the edict that Wang Mang issued to condemn the rebels shortly before the final battle, Wang Mang lashed out against the rebels themselves as well as their family members. The accusation of Zhai Xuan goes as follows, ‘He spoke softly and had an agreeable countenance, but he was suave on the outside and jealous inside. The people in his hometown of Runan who got killed by him numbered several dozen’.14 This is a remarkable charge, not only lacking any corroborating evidence but also directly contradicting the laudatory portrayal of Zhai Xuan in the same source quoted above. Granted, the accuser had his ground covered by claiming that Zhai Xuan’s gentlemanly character was merely a deceptive facade. Nonetheless, it is probable that the allegation of Zhai Xuan’s murderous jealousy was fabricated to discredit the rebels and their relatives. True or not, the charge laid against Zhai Xuan would have proven devastating in destroying his reputation. We may have the same doubts about the credibility of the records that portray women as being jealous and cruel. In the case of Empress Lü, it is possible that she indeed persecuted her former rivals and was particularly vengeful toward Lady Qi, but the specifics of what happened might have been embellished to unknown degrees, as part of the agenda to depict her as an unusually strong-willed and heavy-handed ruler, a radical aberration from conventional womanhood.15 In the case of other records about female jealousy,

13 Ban Gu, Hanshu, lxxxiv.3424. 14 Ban Gu, Hanshu, lxxxiv.3436. 15 On the mixed assessments of Empress Lü as an effective ruler and a cruel person in Han historical sources, see Raphals, Sharing the Light, pp. 76–78, and van Ess, ‘The Evocation’. Van Ess argues that Ban Gu portrays the empress in much darker terms than Sima Qian does.

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it is even harder to gauge their truthfulness. What is certain is that women were perceived as being especially prone to jealousy and that the way they took it out on their rivals could be fierce and lethal. There might be much truth to such perception, considering that women were condemned to a zero-sum game in which their relationship with their husbands significantly depended on whether they could manage to retain the men’s affection by way of maintaining an edge over their rivals in physical attraction. The iron rule of aging, of course, would eventually make this a losing battle for all wives, even if we disregard any male tendency for philandering and taste for new sexual partners when they could afford to do so. As is the case with many stereotypes, the jealous woman might not have been a total fabrication. The valid aspect of the image leads us to confront the all-too-realistic causes that lay at the roots of the strong connection between women and jealousy. The jealousy that women acted out might have taken intense forms indeed, but it was not ‘inherent’ to female nature. Instead, women were structurally conditioned to feel and act that way.

Analogy between Male and Female Jealousy While not hesitating to brand jealousy as a feminine vice, our sources also contain numerous references to men being jealous. The third-century bce philosopher Xunzi thus summarizes the harm done by jealous men, ‘When gentlemen have jealous friends, they will not be close to worthy associates. When the ruler has jealous ministers, worthy people will not come’. In their attempts to monopolize their friend’s and ruler’s attention, the men criticized by Xunzi are a country’s ‘trash and evil’.16 Our sources also often speak in the same breath of the problems caused by men and women who have fallen victim to that unsavoury emotion. A good example is ‘Encountering Sorrow’ (Lisao), the long poem ascribed to Qu Yuan (late third century bce), the loyal minister of Chu who committed suicide after having lost the trust of the king as a result of slander by his mean-spirited colleagues. The poem repeatedly refers to the political misfortunes that overtake its noble and faithful protagonist by comparing his situation to the persecution that a beautiful and virtuous palace woman suffers at the hands of her fellow consorts. The same pernicious emotion, jealousy, drives the women and the ministers to dishonourable actions to bring down their superior rival.17 The analogy between male and female jealousy is invoked three times in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, with negligible variations in wording in every occurrence and with a more pessimistic tone than in ‘Encountering Sorrow’. The stronger pessimism stems from the fact that, whereas Qu Yuan envisions enmity and persecution aimed at beautiful women and talented

16 Xunzi, Xunzi (Dalue), p. 284. 17 For an English translation of the poem, see The Songs, trans. by Hawkes.

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ministers by their inferior rivals, the versions in Sima Qian generalize the rivalry and negative feelings to all females and all officials, regardless of individual qualifications. In the chapter on the Houses of the Imperial Affinal Relatives, which abounds with instances of intense competition among the emperors’ consorts, Sima Qian quotes the following observation, prefacing it with the phrase ‘as tradition goes’ (zhuanyue) and declaring it to be a truism: Regardless of whether a woman is beautiful or ugly, she will become an object of jealousy as soon as she enters a man’s household [i.e. marries him]. Regardless of whether a gentleman is worthy or unworthy, he will become an object of envy when he enters the court.18 The same quote, with a variation in one word, is found in the letter of appeal that Zou Yang, the famous man of letters who had been thrown into prison by Prince Xiao of Liang (184–144 bce) because of the slander of several rivals for the prince’s favour, wrote to his patron to defend his own innocence and loyalty. Zou Yang laments his fate as the helpless victim of jealousy: Regardless of whether a woman is beautiful or ugly, she will incur jealousy when she enters the palace. Regardless of whether a man is worthy or unworthy, he will incur envy when he enters the court.19 Finally, we see the same saying invoked in the parallel biographies of the famous doctors Bian Que (d. 310 bce) and Chunyu Yi (c. 205–150 bce), both of whom came to grief because of the jealousy and resentment they aroused. Sima Qian thus observes of the misfortunes that befell the two protagonists: Regardless of whether a woman is beautiful or ugly, she will incur jealousy if she takes up her position in the palace. Regardless of whether a gentleman is worthy or unworthy, he will incur suspicion when he enters the court.20 A closer examination of the oft-repeated analogy conveys the impression that jealousy was seen as an inherently feminine vice that unfortunately was also widely shared by men. In both ‘Encountering Sorrow’ and Records of the Grand Historian, the analogy is apparently built on the basic assumption that women are jealous of each other by nature, such that it can be invoked to facilitate the understanding of the presumably less entrenched phenomenon of jealousy among men. A few more examples will make this clearer. In a passage attributed to Shen Buhai (c. 400–337 bce), who served as chancellor of the state of Han from about 354 bce until his death, the speaker advises rulers on how to manage their ministers: It is not difficult for a jealous wife to destroy a family, and it is not difficult for an unruly minister to destroy a state. When a wife has her husband 18 Sima Qian, Shiji, xlix.1984–85. 19 Sima Qian, Shiji, lxxxiii.2473. 20 Sima Qian, Shiji, cv.2817.

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to herself, disorder will descend among all of his other consorts. When a minister monopolizes his ruler, all of his other ministers will be hidden from his sight.21 Similarly, Yanzi (d. 500 bce), the famous minister from the state of Qi, is said to have made the following statement, ‘When a minister monopolizes his lord, it is called disloyal. When a son monopolizes his father, it is called unfilial. When a wife monopolizes her husband, it is called jealous’.22 As pointed out by Shen Buhai and Yanzi, both men and women may attempt to monopolize the affections and favours of the person in power (ruler, father, or husband), and they look upon such attempts with concern and condemnation. Shen Buhai describes his male and female culprits as potentially destructive, and Yanzi’s disapproval of the behaviour he references is manifested in his application of the labels of ‘disloyal’ and ‘unfilial’ to the ministers and sons in question — it can be inferred that he would have no better opinion of the criticized wives. Although Yanzi and Shen Buhai saw the same kind of monopolistic behaviour in men and women, they only attached the adjective ‘jealous’ to women. In the quoted passages, they each chose one of the two common terms that meant ‘to be jealous’, du and ji, to describe the objectionable female conduct in question while using ‘unruly’, ‘disloyal’, and ‘unfilial’ for analogous behaviour by men. The fact that Yanzi and Shen Buhai applied the adjective ‘jealous’ only to women while criticizing a vice shared by both sexes points to the primary feminine association of jealousy.

Liu Xiang’s Mission In two ways it can be said that in the Biographies Liu Xiang attempts to critically engage with the conceptions about female jealousy in the Stratagems of the Warring States story. First, Liu Xiang portrays women who, unlike Zheng Xiu, are truly not afflicted with the passion that, as the king of Chu puts it, is in the essence of all (ordinary) women. Whereas Zheng Xiu’s act demonstrates the working of female jealousy at its most vicious, showing her only concern to be the ruination of her rivals and the preservation of her own status, all that Liu Xiang’s paragons think about is the best interest of their husbands. These paragons view other women not as real or potential rivals but as welcome collaborators in promoting the husbands’ welfare. In that they are valued for their virtue rather than beauty and in that they completely rise above jealousy, Liu Xiang’s heroines disprove both of the truisms that are uttered by the king of Chu and affirmed by Zheng Xiu’s action — that beauty is women’s most important quality and that women are inevitably jealous of each other.

21 Shen Buhai, Shenzi zhuzi suoyin (‘Dati’), p. 1. 22 Yanzi, Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu (Inner chapters, Remonstration II), p. 114.

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Second, whereas the king of Chu merely sees an analogy between the conduct of unjealous women on the one hand and that of filial sons and loyal ministers on the other hand, Liu Xiang endeavours to show that the women’s behaviour not only reflects well on their menfolk but also can inspire men to acquit their own social roles in the same spirit of selflessness, collegial cooperation, and dedication to superiors. The exemplary and enabling effect that unjealous women are supposed to exert on men is something unattested in any texts before Liu Xiang. In fact, Liu Xiang is interested in female jealousy not so much in terms of the drama of rivalry that plays out (or can potentially exist) between women as in light of the impact that such rivalry may have on the functioning of the family and the state.

Unjealous Paragons in the Biographies Queen Youshen

The first time the lack of jealousy appears as a virtue in Liu Xiang’s text is in the biography of Youshen, queen of Tang, the celebrated king of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 bce), in chapter 1.23 After briefly noting that Youshen successfully raised the two sons that she bore for Tang, the biography focuses on her accomplishments as her husband’s primary consort. Youshen is said to have exerted such an effective leadership over the other consorts that none of them was jealous and unruly and the good order among the women laid the ultimate foundation for the king’s achievements. Quoting two verses from ‘Fishhawks’, the first poem in the Mao recension of the canonical Book of Poetry (also often translated as Book of Songs and Book of Odes), ‘The quiet and lovely good lady, | a fine mate for the lord’, the narrator comments that the poem is about a worthy woman (xiannü) who is able to create harmony and good will among her husband’s consorts, a description that fits Youshen precisely. The reading that the narrator adopts here of ‘Fishhawks’ is reminiscent of the interpretation presented in the Mao prefaces to the Book of Poetry: ‘Fishhawks’ is about [a wife’s] delight of acquiring a good lady as a match for her lord. Being concerned with recommending the worthies, refusing to allow the lord to indulge in her own beauty, being sad [that] the quiet and lovely lady [is not yet advanced], thinking about the worthy and talented, without any intention to harm the good: such is the meaning of ‘Fishhawks’.24 According to the Mao prefaces, the female virtue extolled in ‘Fishhawks’ marks the correct beginnings of civilisation and lays the foundation for the

23 Liu Xiang, LNZ, i.4a. 24 Mao Heng, Zheng Xuan, and Kong Yingda, Maoshi zhengyi, i.1.5a.

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transformational achievements of the ancient kings.25 So does the biography of Youshen claim that the queen’s success in creating a palace order that is all harmony and not plagued by jealousy eventually leads to the king’s political accomplishments. Although Liu Xiang’s interpretation of ‘Fishhawks’ in the biography of Youshen may be indebted to the Mao reading, the scenario described in this biography does not exactly fit the one conceived in the Mao exegesis. Youshen is lauded for creating perfect harmony and order among her husband’s consorts, but she is not said to have made active efforts to acquire fine female partners for him. For an illustration of precisely the same scenario as depicted in the Mao exegesis of ‘Fishhawks’, we turn to the biography of Fan Ji. Fan Ji

Fan Ji was a consort of King Zhuang of Chu (r. 613–591 bce). After a brief report on how Fan Ji had once successfully got King Zhuang to give up his indulgence in hunting, the biography turns to a long exchange that took place between the couple, on a day when King Zhuang came back from court later than usual. Greeting the king upon his return, Fan Ji inquired solicitously whether he was hungry and tired. The king replied that he had been in the company of a ‘worthy person’ (xianzhe) and therefore knew neither hunger nor tiredness. This set off the following conversation centred on the theme of what is true worthiness: Fan Ji: Who was this person whom your majesty described as worthy? King: He was Yu Qiuzi. Fan Ji covered her mouth and chuckled. King: What are you laughing at? Fan Ji: Yu Qiuzi is worthy indeed, but he is not loyal. King: What do you mean by that? Fan Ji: During the eleven years that I, your humble servant, have been waiting upon your majesty in your toilette, I have sent people to Zheng and Wei to seek beauties to be presented to your majesty. Currently, [among the palace women] there are two who are worthier than I, and seven who are my equals. How could it be that I do not wish to monopolize your majesty’s love and affection? As I understand it, the purpose of filling your hall with women is so that you could observe their capabilities. I cannot allow my personal desire to come in the way of public interest; what I want is for you to see more [women] and to know their capabilities. I have heard that Yu Qiuzi has been chief counsellor of Chu for over ten years, but all those he has recommended for office are either his sons and brothers or

25 On the importance of the Mao prefaces in the traditional exegesis on the Book of Poetry, see Van Zoeren, Poetry and Personality, chap. 4.

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other members of his lineage. I have not heard of him advancing worthy people and dismissing unworthy people. This is to deceive the ruler and obstruct the path of the worthies. Knowing that someone is worthy but failing to advance him: this is disloyal. Failing to know that someone is worthy: this is unwise. Didn’t I have good cause to laugh? Pleased with Fan Ji’s reply, King Zhuang passed on her remarks to Yu Qiuzi the next day. Nonplussed and embarrassed, Yu Qiuzi resigned and recommended Sun Shu’ao to replace himself. In three years following the change of chief counsellors, Chu attained hegemonic status among the states. The historical records of Chu, so Liu Xiang tells us, attributed this spectacular achievement to Fan Ji.26 Fan Ji’s long reply to King Zhuang in the above account excellently illustrates the conduct of the ‘virtuous consort’ praised in the Mao reading of ‘Fishhawks’. Her only concern is to surround her husband with worthy mates, and she worries that she may not have exerted her utmost efforts in the pursuit of this open-ended goal and there are still fine candidates out there who should be introduced into her husband’s presence. Her mention of the nine women that she has brought into the palace in eleven years, all of whom are at least as good as herself, should not be understood as a bragging of her own achievements and virtue. Rather, the tallying betrays the eagerness and anxiety with which she has engaged in the constant quest over the years; the numbers seem to provide a degree of self-assurance that she has been diligently working on the goal she sets for herself. Like the virtuous consort portrayed by Mao, Fan Ji preoccupies herself with the identification and advancement of worthy mates for her husband, not with the deepening of his attraction to herself. Liu Xiang does, however, give a bit more complexity to Fan Ji’s selflessness by allowing a glimpse into her inner tension. In asking the rhetorical question ‘how could it be that I do not wish to monopolize your majesty’s love and affection?’ Fan Ji shows that she is not immune to such desire, but has been able to rise above it thanks to her understanding of why it is important for her lord to have access to many fine ladies. The acknowledgement here that a woman’s desire for her husband’s exclusive love is something natural gives Fan Ji’s image greater psychological credibility in comparison with Mao’s virtuous consort (who is only shown anxiously yearning for a prospective ideal mate for her lord). One crucial commonality that Fan Ji’s biography shares with the Mao prefaces on ‘Fishhawks’ and the probably Mao-inspired reading of ‘Fishhawks’ in Youshen’s biography is that they all explicitly relate the generous consort with the king’s success in governance. The Mao prefaces regard the concord among the consorts as the foundation for the king’s transformation of the world; Youshen’s biography states that the perfect order in the palace ultimately

26 Liu Xiang, LNZ, ii.4a–b.

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led to the king’s political achievements; Fan Ji’s biography asserts that Chu’s rise to hegemony was attributable to her. However, there is a notable difference between the claims made in Fan Ji’s story and in the other two cases. The Mao prefaces and Youshen’s biography rest on the hallowed belief that a ruler’s leadership begins in the domestic realm and orderly and harmonious family relationships provide the cornerstone of a good polity. In this conception, there is an intimate link between domestic and political spheres, but how the two are related is sometimes ambiguous. The well-known paternalistic political ideology of early China establishes an analogy between the ruler and the father: the ruler guides and protects his people in the same way the father guides and protects his children.27 But in what way does the conjugal relationship furnish a metaphor for politics? Neither the Mao prefaces nor Youshen’s biography makes that clear, both merely asserting without elaboration that harmony in the king’s harem lays the groundwork for good governance. Fan Ji’s story supplies an eloquent exposition on the missing link. The central analogy in Fan Ji’s speech is between the following two sets of relationships: a husband and his wives, and a king and his ministers. Just as a household will prosper if the wives appreciate and cooperate with each other, a state will not be strong unless the same spirit of appreciation and cooperation prevails among its ministers. The only competition among the wives or the ministers should be their vying to recommend women and men of superior qualities to join their ranks for the benefit of the family and the state. Fan Ji’s image, therefore, provides an aggressive and thorough refutation of the conventional wisdom couched in the thrice-quoted passage in Sima Qian. In the first place, her eager efforts to acquire worthy consorts for her husband over the years disprove the claim about women’s inherently jealous nature in the first part of the prevailing analogy. More importantly, in using her own action as an example to teach the king and the chief counsellor a lesson on the recruitment and appointment of officials, she establishes a new way in which a correlation is posited between women’s domestic conduct and men’s collegial behaviour in politics. The woman in the revamped analogy guides men to model their behaviour on hers, thus transforming her function from providing a heuristic parallel to the conception of male jealousy to enabling the creation of a bureaucracy cured of the problem of jealousy, where every member is constantly concerned with finding the best men to serve with him. Zhao Cui’s Wife

Zhao Cui (d. 622 bce) was a close and loyal companion of Prince Chong’er, the future Duke Wen of Jin (r. 636–628 bce), during the latter’s nineteen-year exile. When the band of exiles took refuge with the Di people, Zhao Cui 27 On the paternalistic political ideology, see Zhou, ‘The Values’, pp. 411–38.

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married Shu Wei, a woman whom his Di host had captured in a war. This union resulted in the birth of Zhao Dun (655–601 bce). Following the conclusion of the exile, Chong’er, the new ruler of Jin, married his own daughter, Zhao Ji, to Zhao Cui, obviously as a gesture of gratitude to one of his most devoted aides and now the chief counsellor in charge of state affairs. This happened while Shu Wei and Zhao Dun were still left behind among the Di people. Some time later, now as the mother of three sons, Zhao Ji asked Zhao Cui to send for Shu Wei and Zhao Dun. Zhao Cui declined and said that he ‘did not dare’. Presumably, it was beyond Zhao Cui’s imagination, and the imagination of most people of his time, for a princess to suggest that her husband’s other family be welcomed into her house. Zhao Cui’s reply that he did not dare indicates that Zhao Ji’s request probably made him both confused and wary. Zhao Ji, however, was quick to make clear what she was up to: she wanted her husband to do the right thing. In the following she explained to Zhao Dun why he should not deny her request: To forget a past relationship after having acquired another favourite — this is to discard righteousness. To love the new and scorn the old — this is to act without kindness. To have toiled together with people in adversity and to abandon them after achieving wealth and status — this is to lack propriety. If you neglect these three principles, how can you lead others? Even I cannot bring myself to serve you as your wife. Does not the Book of Poetry say, ‘When we gather the mustard plant and earth melons, | We do not reject them because of their roots. | While I do nothing contrary to my good name, | I should live with you till our death’? If people shared poverty and hardships with you, then you should never leave them until death, even if they have committed small faults. How much more should this be remembered when one finds himself enjoying someone new and forgetting someone old? The Book of Poetry also says, ‘You feast with your new wife, | And think me not worth being with.’ This is a lament for the person who has been abandoned. Please welcome them back, and do not cast aside the old because of the new.28 The arguments Zhao Ji makes in her speech show that she had no concern for her personal interest when she urged Zhao Cui to fetch the family that he had had during his exile. She was first and foremost worried about the moral correctness of Zhao Cui’s conduct. As she saw it, Zhao Cui’s failure to follow her suggestion would make him unrighteous, unkind, improper, and thus unfit to be a leader, such that even she herself could not accept him as a husband, who was supposed to lead the wife in the conjugal relationship. Moreover, instead of regarding Shu Wei as a threat to her own status, Zhao Ji exhibited keen sympathy for the woman who had shared hardships with Zhao Cui when he was trapped in barbarian land. While Zhao Ji sounded 28 Liu Xiang, LNZ, ii.6a–b.

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harsh and firm when laying out for her husband the consequences of his inaction for his image and status as a leader and head of household, she came off as sentimental and compassionate when she quoted a classic poem, the mournful lament of an abandoned wife, to exhort him to understand what sufferings Shu Wei might be going through to have lost her husband. Zhao Ji’s concern for moral rectitude and her ability to empathize with another woman underscored her selfless request. We continue with Liu Xiang’s narrative. Persuaded by Zhao Ji’s speech, Zhao Cui sent for Shu Wei and Zhao Dun. Thereafter, Zhao Ji, observing Zhao Dun’s superior qualities, had him designated as Zhao Cui’s heir, bypassing her own three sons. She also had Shu Wei exalted as the primary wife, while placing herself in a lower status. Zhao Ji’s promotion of Zhao Dun over her own sons shows that she was single-heartedly devoted to the best interests of the Zhao family. She wanted the most competent heir for the family, and she thought that it would be in keeping with Zhao Dun’s new status as heir to elevate his mother’s status accordingly, even if it meant great sacrifices on the part of her own sons and herself. Driven by her concern for moral rectitude, her compassion for another woman, and her commitment to the best interest of the family, Zhao Ji conducted herself with utmost magnanimity and showed no consideration for her personal welfare when handling her relationship with a potential rival. Liu Xiang’s narrative offers no insight into how Zhao Ji felt about the implications that the dramatic changes in the household would have on the emotional bond between herself and her husband. For Zhao Ji (as for Fan Ji, discussed above), the importance of this emotional bond is obscured by the considerations that she gives to her obligations to her husband, which require that she think about him first and foremost in the roles of a political leader and the head of the family. In her biography Zhao Ji is praised for ‘not being jealous of her husband’s secondary consort’. If Liu Xiang had made Zhao Ji state her position on whether a wife should desire her husband’s full affection, she probably would have said that many other social relations and obligations must take precedence over the feelings between the couple. Thanks to her ability to rise above sexual jealousy and to act with a keen awareness of the impact of her conduct on ‘bigger things’ in both domestic and public domains, Zhao Ji won a place in Liu Xiang’s gallery of ‘The Worthy and Sagacious’ (the title of the second chapter of the Biographies).

Conclusion Liu Xiang’s eulogistic portrayal of the unjealous female paragons is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we may see in it an exacerbated form of what Giulia Sissa calls the exercise of the male prerogatives of promiscuity and jealousy and the simultaneous prohibition for women to express, and even to feel, jealousy. On the other hand, the bountiful, even extravagant, praises bestowed on the

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generous wives, in which they are credited with inspiring men and enabling the creation of a virtuous polity, seem to endow them with a high level of influence and agency. By repudiating female jealousy with noble gestures and high-flying rhetoric, Liu Xiang’s exemplary women garner the maximum amount of recognition and reward possible in a society like early China. Liu Xiang’s engagement with the problem of female jealousy in his monumental work, which can be summarized in terms of the suppression of the potentially vicious status competition among women in the family on the one hand and the conferral of both domestic status and public honours on conforming women on the other hand, gives us a good glimpse of the negotiation and co-optation frequently seen in pre-modern Chinese gender dynamics.

Works Cited Primary Sources Ban Gu, Hanshu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962) Han Feizi, Han Feizi jijie, annotated by Wang Xianshen (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1998) Liu Xiang, Lienü zhuan jiaozhu (LNZ) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936) Mao Heng, Zheng Xuan, and Kong Yingda, Maoshi Zhengyi, Shisanjing zhushu edition (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980) Shen Buhai, Shenzi zhuzi suoyin (Hong Kong: Shangwu, 1993) Sima Qian, Shiji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959) The Songs of the South: An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets, trans. by David Hawkes (London: Penguin, 1985) Xunzi, Xunzi, annotated by Yang Jing (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1996) Yanzi, Yanzi chunqiu jiaozhu, annotated by Zhang Chunyi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2014) Zhanguo ce zhushi, annotated by He Jianzhang (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990) Secondary Studies Caston, Ruth Rothouse, The Elegiac Passion: Jealousy in Roman Love Elegy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Hinsch, Bret, Women in Early Imperial China (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) ———, ‘The Composition of the Lienüzhuan: Was Liu Xiang the Author or Editor?’, Asia Major, 3rd ser., 20.1 (2007), 1–23 Kinney, Anne Behnke, ‘Introduction’, in Exemplary Women of Early China: The Lienü zhuan of Liu Xiang, ed. and trans. by Anne Behnke Kinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. xv–li Mou, Sherry, Gentlemen’s Prescriptions for Women’s Lives: A Thousand Years of Biographies of Chinese Women (New York: Sharpe, 2004)

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Raphals, Lisa, Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) Sissa, Giulia, Jealousy: A Forbidden Passion (Cambridge: Polity, 2018) Toohey, Peter, Jealousy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) Van Ess, Hans, ‘Praise and Slander: The Evocation of Empress Lü in the Shiji and the Hanshu’, Nan Nü, 8 (2006), 221–54 Van Zoeren, Steven, Poetry and Personality: Reading, Exegesis, and Hermeneutics in Traditional China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) Zhou, Yiqun, Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) ———, ‘The Values of the Book of Songs and the Virtues of Leaders’, in The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs: Foundational Texts Compared, ed. by Fritz-Heiner Mutschler (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), pp. 411–38

Martha Bayless

Early Medieval Board Games Issues of Power and Gender

Board games had a singular status and meaning in the northern Europe of the earlier Middle Ages (roughly 500–1200 ce). Regarded as an elite occupation, assigned venerable origins, and associated with power, they were bearers of prestige to a degree that is difficult to apprehend in the present day, when they are regarded merely as a children’s amusement or the trivial pastime of young adults. Instead, as a peacetime entertainment that mimicked the conflict or competition of battle, board games occupied the space between war and peaceful festivity, partaking of both. In accordance with these associations, they were a gendered phenomenon: being high-status and martial, they were conceptually the province of high-status men. The playing pieces were conceived of as male warriors, and the literature of gaming portrays these board games as the province of men, a contained but potent battlefield for status; what is more, the reward of the conflict was frequently women. This study will identify the themes associated with board games in medieval narrative, trace the relationship between early medieval board games, masculinity, and status competition; and, finally, discuss instances in which women gain a place in both the narrative and the historical record of board games. Three board games could boast of widespread popularity in the early medieval north; all three were competitive games (unlike, for instance, some modern board games which are cooperative), and two were explicitly modelled on war.1 The first of these games was known as alea or tabula or, as early as the fourth century ce, alea i.e. tabula. This last rather clumsy epithet was necessary to distinguish this particular board game from the gambling games known as alea, ‘dice’, or from the more generic term tabula, ‘board game’. Alea i.e. tabula was a race-game played with counters and dice; its descendant survives as modern backgammon. Its origins predated the northern Middle Ages, the

1 On the question of the origin and descent of board games in northern Europe see Hall and Forsyth, ‘Roman Rules?’ and Hall, ‘Board of the Kings’. On the popularity of board games see e.g. Solberg, ‘Pastimes or Serious Business?’ Martha Bayless    is Professor of English and Folklore at the University of Oregon (USA). Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 185-207 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126147

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game being a descendant of the Roman game duodecim (XII) scripta. In the later Middle Ages this family of games became known as tables in English, or its analogues in various languages.2 The second game was known as hnefatafl (‘the board game of the fist’) in Scandinavia, generically as tæfl (‘board game’) in Anglo-Saxon England, as tawlbwrdd (‘tafl-board’) in Wales, and as brandub (‘raven-black’) in Ireland; it is unclear what it was called in Latin.3 This was a pursuit game or ‘hunt-game’, on the order of Fox and Geese, but nevertheless characterized as a war-game, a result of viewing the important central playing piece as a king. The two opponents worked with an uneven number of pieces in a 2:1 ratio, although the total number might vary. One side had the single king-piece and a small number of other pieces; the opposing side had twice as many pieces but no king. This meant that, for instance, there might be five pieces on the king’s side (four ‘men’, plus the king) and eight ‘men’ on the opposing side, or eight ‘men’ and a king vs sixteen ‘men’, and so forth. The player with the king-piece tried to get the king to safety by moving him to one of the corners of the board; the other side attempted to capture the king. The third game was called gwyddbwyll in Welsh and fidchell in Irish, both of which translate to ‘wood-sense’ or ‘wood-cleverness’. It is not clear what the Latin name of the game might have been, nor whether the game was known in England or in Scandinavia, although what is known of the game is not incompatible with many surviving gaming sets from those areas. This was a war-game pure and simple, between two sides of equal numbers. ‘Wood-sense’ may well have been the same game as the Roman latrunculi — although the term denoting the pieces, latrunculi, later came to mean ‘robbers’, it originally had the meaning of ‘little soldiers’.4 It is no longer precisely clear how the pieces were moved or how victory was achieved. Chess, which was to become so popular later in the Middle Ages, had reached Europe by the late tenth century, but did not really explode upon the scene until the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. At that later period it came to eclipse both hnefatafl and ‘wood-sense’, to such a degree that in the latter case the very names of ‘wood-sense’, gwyddbwyll and fidchell, came to denote chess.5 The period in which chess was predominant was

2 On alea i.e. tabula and Roman board games generally see Austin, ‘Roman Board Games’; Schädler, ‘XII Scripta, Alea, Tabula’; Murray, A History of Board-Games Other than Chess, p. 31; Mulvin and Sidebotham, ‘Roman Game Boards from Abu Sha’ar’; Trifilò, ‘Movement, Gaming, and the Use of Space in the Roman Forum’; Purcell, ‘Literate Games’; Bayless, ‘Alea, Tæfl, and Related Games’; Murray, ‘The Medieval Games of Tables’. 3 On this game see Bayless, ‘Alea, Tæfl, and Related Games’. 4 On ‘wood-sense’ see MacWhite, ‘Early Irish Board Games’; Sterckx, ‘Les jeux de damiers celtiques’. On latrunculi see for instance Olson, ‘Roman Glass Gaming Pieces or Jewels’. 5 Eales, Chess, pp. 39–51 and ‘The Game of Chess’; Murray, A History of Chess; Kluge-Pinsker, Schach und Trictrac; Adams, Power Play; Grandet and Goret, Échecs et Trictrac.

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culturally distinct from earlier periods, however, and whether the game was a marker of warrior prowess or a frivolous distraction became a matter of debate.6 Arguably the game too, with its powerful queen, was of a somewhat different nature than earlier games, and with a change of game or a change of culture or both, it became common for women to play chess; indeed, ‘the board was regarded as one acceptable point of contact between sexes’.7 In any case, the symbolic and literary aspects of chess have been widely explored in scholarship. The cultural situation I mean to address here is a ‘pre-chess’ or ‘extra-chess’ culture. In this cultural environment, narratives used board games to reflect situations of prowess and conflict and to denote competition and status; thus board games carry thematic and symbolic weight in the many stories in which they appear. Two general strands of meaning can be discerned, in both of which expertise at board games serves as a mark of power. In the first type of narrative, board games serve as miniature wars and the player who prevails can claim a victory akin to that achieved in battle, proving himself an accomplished warrior, fit for political leadership. Success at the game translated directly into high status, and in turn high status was signalled by the game. In the second type of narrative, board games are supernatural and otherworldly, a characteristic of mythological figures or of folk from the otherworld — power of a different sort. This is not the power of earned rank but a more numinous, unearthly power; and the association of board games with that power bestows an extra dimension on those who demonstrate their skills in more earthly narratives.

War and Masculinity in Board Games Of these two possible aspects of board games, the first, in which a board game forms a miniature war, is predictably masculine, and is associated with high-status masculine power. This is evident even in board-game vocabulary: the playing pieces are often called ‘men’ or (as in latrunculi) ‘little soldiers’; further, in both Welsh and Old English the key piece in the centre of tæfl was characterized as a king. The association between board games and war was popularized by Isidore of Seville, whose encyclopaedic seventh-century Etymologiae became a key reference book for the Middle Ages. The title of



6 Orme, ‘Games and Education in Medieval England’. 7 Taylor, ‘Chaucer’s Knowledge of Chess’, p. 299; see also Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen; Murray, A History of Chess, pp. 435–36; Hall, ‘Jeux sans frontières’, p. 194. The cultures of medieval northern Europe inherited associations of board games and martial prowess which they transferred to chess, as well as expanding upon the associations by adding the possibility of flirtation and love. In the riddarasögur, the later medieval/early modern Norse romances, for instance, chess retains a warlike aspect: in both Vilhjálms saga sjóðs and Sigurðar saga þogla, a chess set brings victory to the owner.

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book 18 of the Etymologiae, On War and Games (De bello et ludis), encapsulates the correspondences — even the equivalence — of war and games, and in the book Isidore treats a sequence of activities that embody ludic conflict, including wrestling matches, gladiatorial contests, and chariot races. Another of these is theatre, which Isidore similarly regarded as a spectacle of conflict that took place inside a building. The final item in his list is the board game: a miniature theatre, a re-enactment of conflict that could be contained not only within a building but on a tabletop. Isidore even assigns tabula an origin in the thick of war, as if the game gave soldiers a way to practise conflict even when the larger conflict was in abeyance: DE TABVLA. Alea, id est lusus tabulae, inventa a Graecis in otio Troiani belli a quodam milite Alea nomine, a quo et ars nomen accepit.8 (ABOUT TABULA. Alea, that is, the game of tabula [or: that is, the board game], invented by the Greeks in the inactive periods of the Trojan war by a soldier by the name of Alea, from which the activity also took its name.) Tabula, then, was regarded as a game that originated among men, in a theatre of war. Later centuries provided numerous examples of the correspondence between board games and the practice of war. In the Welsh Dream of Rhonabwy (Breudwyt Ronabwy), King Arthur and the hero Owein play a game of gwyddbwyll while their followers battle and destroy each other.9 It is only when King Arthur crushes the gwyddbwyll pieces that the conflict is quelled. In the Irish tale The Death of Fothad Canainne (Reicne Fothaid Canainne), a warrior takes his valuable fidchell set into battle — it is as if the battle and the game are equivalent.10 In the Welsh Peredur, the magical game-pieces play each other like miniature men, giving a shout when they win.11 Many texts depict skill at the board game as the mark of masculine prowess. In Orkneyinga saga, Kali Kolsson, later earl of Orkney under the name Rögnvaldr, proclaims that he has all the attributes of a leader: knowledge of runes, reading and writing, skiing, shooting, rowing, skill at the harp and at poetry, and — first in the list — skill at tafl.12 In Ireland, laws determined the skills foster-parents must teach their foster-children, who were required to be educated according to rank. According to an early law code, the education 8 Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX, ed. by Lindsay, ii, xviii.60. 9 The Welsh is edited by Richards, Breudwyt Ronabwy, and is translated as Rhonabwy’s Dream by Sioned Davies, The Mabinogion, pp. 214–26. 10 Reicne Fothaid Canainne, ed. and trans. by Meyer; a shorter prose version is edited by Hull, ‘The Death of Fothath Cananne’. For more examples of violence expressed via board games, see Niehus, ‘Die Brettspiele’, p. 237. 11 Historia Peredur vab Efrwac, ed. by Goetinck, p. 66, ll. 23–27; translated as Peredur son of Efrog in The Mabinogion, trans. by Davies, pp. 65–102. 12 Orkneyinga saga, ed. Finnbogi Guðmundsson or ed. by Sigurður Nordal; the English translation is Orkneyinga saga, trans. by Hermann Pálsson and Edwards, chap. 58, p. 108.

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of a son of a king or noble involved education in horsemanship, swimming, spear-throwing, and the board games fidchell and brannuigecht.13 Similarly the Fragmentary Annals of Ireland describe the life of kings: it was customary for the kings to have cubicles of yew about them, that is, a partitioned place, for their bars and cases of silver and their cups and goblets to give service at night, and their brandub and fidchell games and their bronze hurley-sticks to use by day.14 In the great Irish epic the Táin Bo Cuailgne, Ailill, the king of Connacht, who is central to the narrative, spends one-third of every day playing brandud and fidchell.15 There is a parallel in the Vita of St Liguid, of the late eighth or early ninth century: when the saint enters the king’s court, the king is playing a board game, and the text says, ‘In ipse autem hora rex ille ludo regali aleam suam sua manu componebat, sicut regibus mos est’ (At that time of day the king was setting up his board game with his own hands for the royal game, as is the custom for kings).16 Here again there are parallels in medieval Wales. Tawlbwrdd sets were a symbol of power, granted by the king to officials on assumption of their office. When he took office, the chancellor was to be granted a tawlbwrdd, a gold ring, and a harp from the king. The judge of the court received a tawlbwrdd from the king and a gold ring from the queen, and he could never pass these on to others, either by sale or by gift. The head of the royal retinue also received a tawlbwrdd from the king and a gold ring from the queen.17 The high-status masculine associations of the game appear in other realms. The identification of the central piece in tafl as a king, as in the Old English term cyningstan (‘king-stone’) and the Welsh term for the piece, brenin (‘king’), naturally suggests masculine power.18 Most king-pieces are abstract, but some Scandinavian examples are designed as a man clutching his beard, which also draws attention to masculine attributes.19 Perhaps the most explicit association occurs in an amber gaming piece from a boat burial from Gloppen, Sogn og Fjordane, Norway, now in the Bergen Museum, which is shaped like a phallus.20

13 Kelly, Early Irish Farming, p. 452; Corpus iuris Hibernici, ed. by Binchy, v, 1760, ll. 33–34. 14 Fragmentary Annals of Ireland, ed. by Radner, Annal FA 4, 583 K1. 15 Táin Bó Cúalnge, trans. by O’Rahilly. 16 Vitae sanctorum Hiberniae, ed. by Heist, p. 137. 17 ‘Gwerin Ffristial’, p. 191. 18 The word cyningstan appears in an eleventh-century glossary; see Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies, ed. by Wright and Wülcker, i, 151, and Page, ‘Old English Cyningstan’. For the use of brenin see Lewis, ‘Gwerin Ffristial a Thawlbwrdd’, p. 194. 19 McLees, Games People Played, p. 58, figs 23 and 24; Hall, ‘Jeux sans frontières’, pp. 199–201; McKinnell, Meeting the Other, p. 123 n. 75. 20 This intriguing piece (B 5150) is described by Solberg, ‘Pastimes or Serious Business?’, p. 267, without further bibliography.

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With the king-piece of the game representing the king in the external world, there has also been an attempt to correlate hnefatafl with early Scandinavian social structure, an effort that is complicated by the fact that social structure was not fixed and static, nor did it necessarily conform to the idealized version presented in sources; what is more, a board game cannot reflect social stratification with any degree of nuance. The fact that the pieces in hnefatafl were most often characterized as a king and his followers demonstrates, of course, that such a social system was both fundamental and easily recognizable. In this regard it is worth noting the greater gradations of status in the extraordinary Alea evangelii, the ‘Gospel game’ that, according to its accompanying description in manuscript, was brought by Dub Innse, bishop of Bangor, from the court of Athelstan in England to Bangor, Co. Down, in Ireland, in the first half of the tenth century. The instructions for the game are more elaborate than for any other medieval game predating chess, and it is not clear that the Alea evangelii was actually ever played; the manuscript description merely presents the arrangement of the pieces as a complicated numerological allegory. However that may be, the description of the game calls for pieces known as ‘duces et comites, propugnatores et impugnatores, ciuitatem et ciuitatulam’ (dukes and counts, defenders and attackers, city and town).21 It may be that the possibilities of multiple ranks, both in refined gameplay and in the representation of rank and society, added to the appeal of Alea evangelii, and that the same applied to chess, with its kings, queens, bishops, knights, and so forth, when it came upon the scene; in other words, that both Alea evangelii and chess satisfied a desire for the game to correspond in more detail to the ranks of society. The pre-existing games exemplified this in a cruder fashion. Alea i.e. tabula set equal competitors against each other; in ‘wood-sense’, as in the Roman latrunculi, two armies fought each other, with the player in the position of commander of armies. Hnefatafl brought the idea of the king to the forefront, most explicitly in the Old English and Welsh versions, with the king-piece specifically called ‘king’. In the world of hnefatafl, rank is simple: you are either a king, or a soldier and servant of the king. The category that might find it least plausible to imagine themselves in either of these roles is clear: women have no role in the game.

Board Games and the Supernatural The above examples, merely a few out of a great number, should serve to illustrate the role of board games in the martial and masculine tradition of competition. In the alternative tradition, board games belong to the realm of the gods or supernatural beings. The most prominent reference is undoubtedly that from the Old Norse Voluspá, detailing the creation of the world, where 21 Robinson, The Times of Saint Dunstan, p. 173.

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the game of tafl is played by the Æsir, the higher-order supernatural beings, in the early days of creation: Hittoz æsir á Iðavelli þeir er horg ok hof hátimbroðo Afla logðo auð smiðoðo tangir skópo ok tól gørðo. Teflðo í túni, teitir vóro — var þeim vettergis vant ór gulli — unz þriár kvómo þursa meyiar, ámátkar miok, ór iotunheimom

(Æsir met on Eddying Plain, they who built towering altars and temples. They founded forges, fashioned wealth, moulded tongs and made tools. They played tafl in the meadow, they were merry — for them there was no want of gold — until there came three ogres’ daughters, of redoubtable strength, from Giant Realms.)22

Tafl will also be a key element of the reconstruction of the world after Ragnarok, the destruction of the world: Þar muno eptir Undrsamligar gullnar toflor í grasi finnaz, þærs í árdaga áttar hofðo.

(There will once more the miraculous golden tafl-pieces be found, in the grass, those that in the old days they had owned.)23

From the very origin of the world, then, the board game has had a prominent role. In the Irish tradition the board game was similarly assigned a divine origin: the god Lugh was said to have invented fidchell.24 In many other narratives a board game is a sign of the otherworld or the supernatural realm. The Irish Last Battle of Mag Tuired (Cath Dédenach Maige Tuired) depicts fidchell as the ultimate skill of the supernatural. The god Lugh arrives at the court of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the supernatural inhabitants of Ireland, revealing that he is adept at every important art: he is a builder, a smith, a champion, a harper, a warrior, a poet and historian, a sorcerer, a physician, a cupbearer,

22 Voluspá 7–9, in The Poetic Edda, ed. and trans. by Dronke, ii, 8–9, with ‘chequers’ altered to ‘tafl’. 23 Voluspá 58, in The Poetic Edda, ed. and trans. by Dronke, ii, 23, with ‘chequers’ altered to ‘tafl-pieces’. 24 Lebor gabála Érenn, ed. by Macalister, pp. 128–29.

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and a brazier. After this litany of expertise, the king challenges him by having many fidchell boards brought to him, and when Lugh wins at fidchell he is finally admitted to the court.25 Similarly in the Welsh Dream of the Emperor Maxen (Breudwyt Maxen Wledig), the presence of men playing a gold and silver gwyddwbwyll set is one of the indications that the emperor Macsen has entered a magical realm.26 In other tales the realm is characterized by sets that play themselves without human intervention, such as in the Welsh Peredur vab Efrawc, or the magical self-playing gywddbwyll board that forms one of the Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain.27 A mysterious origin is also assigned to the board game given by Caílte to St Patrick in the Dialogue of the Ancients (Acallam na Senórach): when Patrick decides to play a board game with the king of Connaught, they find three of the playing pieces missing. Caílte goes to a standing stone on top of a fairy mound, where he finds and takes three playing pieces of gold and three of silver from the grave of Goll mac Morna, a figure of Irish legend, but, asserting his power, refuses to bring the rest of the set.28 The supernatural power of board games is not restricted to the otherworld or the pagan gods, but was claimed by the Christian God as well. In an address to the Virgin Mary, for instance, the Irish poet Blathmac describes Jesus as the king of the heavens who has positioned the stars as on a fidchell-board: ‘is a lám ro·sert indib | in fidchill do chainrindib’ (it is his hand that has strewn in them the fidchell-board of beautiful stars).29 Here fidchell is mapped onto the cosmos; God is both in control of the game and takes the central king position. Examples of both of these themes, the martial and the supernatural, could be multiplied many times. In both instances the great majority of these games are played by men. In a number of cases, moreover, the men are playing the games to gain possession of women. A striking instance of this combines the martial and the supernatural themes. This is The Wooing of Étaín (Tochmarc Étaíne), a tale set among the Túatha Dé Danann.30 Midir, the son of one of the chief gods or otherworldly beings, who has pursued Étaín through a series of episodes of transformation, comes to be playing a series of fidchell games against Étaín’s current husband, the king. The series of games serves as an origin story for Ireland: in the interval between games, much of the landscape is created, with stones cleared and forests planted.

25 Cath Maige Tuired, ed. and trans. by Gray. 26 The Welsh is Breudwyt Maxen Wledig, ed. by Roberts; an English translation is available in Mabinogion, trans. by Davies, pp. 103–10. 27 Historia Peredur vab Efrawc, ed. by Goetinck; English translation in The Mabinogion, trans. by Davies, pp. 65–102. For the Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain, see Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, Appendix III. 28 The Dialogue of the Ancients of Ireland, trans. by Harmon, pt IV, pp. 180–81. 29 The Poems of Blathmac, ed. by Carney. 30 ‘Tochmarc Étaíne’, ed. and trans. by Bergin and Best; English translation also in Early Irish Myths and Sagas, ed. by Gantz, pp. 37–59.

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The games end with Midir winning Étaín. The game corresponds to the creation of the land, and victory in the game is tantamount to victory over the woman, which is equal to winning something like sovereignty herself. A similar motif appears in the Welsh Life of St Cadog, where King Arthur, in the midst of playing a board game with his knights, assists in the abduction of Cadog’s mother by the king, later to be Cadog’s father: this abduction is considered heroic rather than otherwise, forming a legend that gives Cadog’s birth the imprimatur of King Arthur.31 In the Táin Bó Cúailgne, the husband of the great queen Medb, Ailill, plays fidchell with Medb’s lover Fergus, while the two trade insinuations about the affair, so that the game parallels their own competition for the queen.

Women in the Martial Realm The examples in which board games represent masculine power, whether that of mortal kings or of male figures from the otherworld, could be multiplied almost infinitely. But despite the preponderance of masculinity in these tales, there are a few instances in which women make their way into the narrative. In literature these are, interestingly and fittingly, overwhelmingly of the supernatural rather than the martial type. The instances show that, in narrative, women cannot be kept out of the realm of board games; but the key element is that when they do play, or become otherwise involved, it denotes that something is somehow wrong — something supernatural, evil, or both. In the Voluspá, the creationary game of tafl is interrupted by three ominous supernatural females — þursa meyiar or ‘ogre’s daughters’ — who seem to put a stop to the idyllic construction of the world. In the Irish Cattle-Raid of Froech (Táin Bó Fraích), Froech plays fidchell with the extraordinary queen Medb, hoping to win the hand of her daughter.32 Medb’s playing of fidchell is one of many ways in which Medb displays the prowess of a man, a fact that is at the centre of Irish epic, and that is arguably credited with devastating Ireland. A number of further instances appear in the Irish Adventures of Art Son of Conn (Eactra Airt meic Cuind). Early in the tale, Art plays fidchell with a druid, who points out the parallel between a crucial move of the game and Art’s circumstances, an example of both the game’s connections with otherworldliness and with the workings of real events. Later the stepmother from the otherworld plays fidchell with the son of the king, helped by the invisible hands of otherworldly beings, and as a consequence sends him on a series of quests which seem designed to kill him. In the end, though, he emerges victorious, wins a bride, and sees

31 Vitae sanctorum Britanniae et geneaologiae, ed. by Wade-Evans, p. 26. 32 The Romance of Froech and Findabair, ed. and trans. by Meid and others. An English translation is also in Early Irish Myths and Sagas, trans. by Gantz, pp. 113–26.

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the evil stepmother banished from Ireland, along with the famine she has caused.33 The game is therefore bound up in both supernatural threat and sexual politics. The evil stepmother who becomes involved in a board game with her stepson is a recurring motif: it also occurs, for instance, in How Ronan Slew his Son (Fingal Rónáin), where the maidservant plays fidchell with the son on behalf of the stepmother.34 It is further seen in Grettis saga, in which Thorbjorn Ongul is a harsh man who has never gotten along with his troublesome stepmother. Finally she sees him playing tafl and shouts at him about his laziness; she drives a tafl piece into his eye, whereupon he beats her so badly that she later dies.35 Here tafl is the focus for a conflict that had been long simmering; it is as if it cannot take its fullest form unless symbolically expressed through the tafl game. There is, furthermore, also an exception to the practice of regarding the board game pieces as male warriors. This occurs in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks (The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek), in which tafl games are the subject of several riddles. The occasion is an exchange of riddles between the king and a man named Gestumblindi, who in this instance is Oðin in disguise, so that once again we are operating in the realm of the supernatural.36 The riddles seem designed to characterize the game using images across the span of creation, and so in turn it is characterized as an animal, then using masculine imagery, and finally using feminine imagery, as part of a sequence of riddles characterizing various items as feminine. The riddle using animal imagery characterizes a tafl piece as a horned beast.37 The masculine tafl riddle describes men riding together, and the answer is that the scenario is two (male) mythological figures playing tafl.38 In the third of these riddles, the tafl pieces are depicted as women attacking and defending their lord: Þá mælti Gestumblindi: ‘Hverjar eru þær snótir, er um sinn drottin vápnlausan vega; inar jarpari hlífa um alla daga, en inar fegri fara?

33 ‘The Adventures of Art’, ed. and trans. by Best. 34 The Irish is in Fingal Rónáin and Other Stories, ed. by Greene; English translation in ‘How Ronan Slew his Son’, trans. by Meyer. 35 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Jónsson; English translation in Grettir’s Saga, trans. by Byock and Poole, chap. 70. 36 Saga Heiðreks Konungs, ed. and trans. by Tolkien; the verse riddles are also edited by H. M. Burrows in Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, ed. by Clunies Ross, pp. 367–487. 37 Saga Heiðreks Konungs, ed. and trans. by Tolkien; Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, ed. by Clunies Ross, no. 73, pp. 440–41, with a useful discussion of the vocabulary of hnefatafl. 38 Saga Heiðreks Konungs, ed. and trans. by Tolkien, no. 55, p. 37; Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, ed. by Clunies Ross, no. 79, p. 446.

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Heiðrekr konungr, hyggðu at gátu!’ ‘Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar; þat er hnettafl; inar døkkri verja hnefann, en hvítar soekja.’ (Then said Gestumblindi: ‘What women are they warring together before their defenseless king; day after day the dark guard him, but the fair go forth to attack? This riddle ponder, O prince Heidrek!’ ‘Your riddle is good, Gestumblindi,’ said the king; ‘I have guessed it. This is the game of hnefatafl; the darker ones defend the hnefi, but the white ones attack.’)39 In this particular version, based on the main manuscript, the king is defenceless; in the other version it is the women who are weaponless.40 Both constructions were clearly plausible to contemporary scribes. In defence of the reading that it is the lord who is weaponless, however, is the fact that the women are clearly warring (and therefore should have weapons), and that riddles commonly contain paradoxes and reversals of conventional ways, so for the lord to be weaponless and the women to be acting as warriors is in keeping with the mode of riddles. This characterization merely reinforces the usual status of women, however, as the opposite of warlike — and perhaps as a gender not conventionally associated with hnefatafl. The game here is discussed in a supernatural context, with things not as they seem: Gestumblindi is not really Gestumblindi, but Oðin, and the women warriors are not really women warriors, but game pieces. So we might conclude that supernatural women can be warriors — a theme that may be familiar from other texts — and that, conversely, any woman who serves as a warrior must be supernatural. A board game as a mark of evil and otherness is also seen in Geffrei Gaimar’s Anglo-Norman History of the English (Estoire des Engleis). When King Edgar sends an envoy to inspect the dangerously beautiful potential wife Elstruet/

39 Saga Heiðreks Konungs, ed. and trans. by Tolkien, no. 56, pp. 37–38; see also Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, ed. by Clunies Ross, no. 66, pp. 430–31. 40 Burrows explains the grammar behind these variations: ‘vápnlausar “weaponless”: The main ms., 2845, reads vápnlausan m. acc. sg., agreeing with dróttin, meaning it is the lord who is weaponless. The other mss agree on the f. nom. pl. form, however, supported by the solution in the H redaction, and this is also culturally more plausible, since women did not normally carry weapons while a lord normally would’ (Burrows in Poetry in Fornaldarsögur, ed. by Clunies Ross, p. 431). However, as explained above, riddles generally contradict expectations and ‘culturally plausible’ readings.

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Ælfthryth, he finds her playing a board game with her father, which, says the text ominously, the father had learnt from the Danes, England’s enemy: Orgar juout a un eschés, un giu k’il aprist des Daneis; od lui juout Elstruet la bele, suz ciel n’out onc tel damesele. E Edelwolt mult l’esgardat: trestut un jor i demorat, tant l’esguarda, vis e colur e cors e mains, la bele flur, k’il quidat bien ke ço fust fee, k’ele ne fust de femme nee. E quant la vit de tel bealté, tant par en fu enluminé k’il purpensat en son corage, u turt a pru u a damage, ne dirrat mie a son seignur la verité, cel traïtur. (Orgar happened to be playing chess, a game which he had learnt from the Danes. The beautiful Ælfthryth — there was no young woman to equal her in the whole world — was playing with him, and Æthelwald spent a great deal of time looking at her — in fact the whole of one day. He stared at her for so long — her face and her complexion, her body and her hands — in the full bloom of her beauty that he convinced himself she must have been a fairy and not someone born of woman. Beholding such beauty so inflamed his passion that, traitor that he was, he made up his mind that, whatever the outcome, good or bad, he would not tell his lord the truth.)41 Given the circumstances, it is no surprise that this board-game-playing woman inspires treachery and betrayal. With her skill at a Danish board game, coupled with a beauty that classes her with the fairies, she is effectively otherworldly herself.

Women and Board Games in Real Life In real life, many women, like Ælfthryth and the evil stepmothers in the stories, must have played board games. But the legitimacy of this practice is steadfastly resisted in narrative. When women play, in the stories, they are

41 Geffrei Gaimar, L’Estoire des Engleis, ed. by Short, ll. 3652–68, pp. 200–01.

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menacing and otherworldly; as we see, their playing of the board game is meant to demonstrate that they desire power it is wrong for them to have. If women in real life played board games in an unmenacing, virtuous, and socially acceptable way, it is of course less likely that this would turn up in any accounts. Some suggestions of the practice have nevertheless turned up in historical and archaeological sources. The most complex association between women and board games is found in archaeological contexts. The presence of board games in male burials is well established; in Viking-era Scandinavia, for example, high-status male graves were so frequently furnished with a board game, among other male-associated accoutrements such as weaponry, that it has been asserted that board games ‘can almost be considered part of the necessary funerary equipment’.42 But what precisely this may denote requires several caveats. Being buried with gaming pieces does not inevitably mean that one played the game in real life; like many grave goods, they might have served as signifiers as much as indications of real-life pastimes. Moreover, the gender distribution of gaming supplies is not straightforward. One group of burials suggests that women in the early period were buried with gaming supplies in equal numbers to men, and later ceased to be associated with gaming supplies; the other group shows exactly the opposite. The first study tabulates Norwegian burials from the late Roman period to the Viking age. This identified eighty-five burials containing gaming pieces from the Late Roman/Migration period, and a further fifty-six from the Merovingian/Viking period (from the sixth to the eleventh centuries), with a striking gender difference between these two periods. The study finds that the Late Roman/Migration period saw gaming supplies appear in the graves of men and women in nearly equal proportions, but with the advent of the Merovingian/Viking period, women’s burials came to constitute only 3–5 per cent of those with gaming supplies.43 The second study complicates this picture. This study finds that the gender and period pattern described above applied only to Norway and to early Birka in Sweden. Other parts of Scandinavia saw a different and opposite pattern; there, graves of the late Roman, Migration, and Vendel period containing gaming pieces were mostly those of adult males, but in the Viking period female graves come to be furnished with gaming pieces as well, to the point that gaming pieces became ‘gender-neutral’.44 The reason for these changes, in whichever direction, must be the subject of guesswork, and this guesswork relies on assumptions about burial practices which may themselves be based on uncertain stereotypes. For instance, perhaps gaming pieces were associated broadly with elite culture in some periods,

42 Whittaker, ‘Game-Boards and Gaming-Pieces’, p. 105. 43 Solberg, ‘Pastime’, p. 266. 44 Rundkvist and Williams, ‘A Viking Boat Grave’, p. 87.

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and thus were applicable to both men and women, whereas in other periods gaming pieces became associated principally with prowess in warfare. Or perhaps a cultural shift took place in which women were discouraged from playing board games, and the association of board games with masculinity is a result rather than a cause of that shift. Perhaps the inclusion of gaming pieces in burials was not a reflection of whether the deceased played board games, but whether he or she held a certain office or position, and thus the change is a reflection of a change in social structure rather than an indication of the actual practice of game-playing. Many further suggestions could be made, but in the state of our present knowledge the evidence simply does not allow a conclusion. At least one important question remains, especially for the periods in which it is atypical for female burials to be furnished with gaming supplies. Were these unusual women buried with gaming supplies because their role gave them some kind of power or identity, represented by board games, irrespective of gender?45 Or were they buried with gaming supplies as a part of being considered ‘honorary men’? One case that brings these questions into focus is that of the Birka ‘woman warrior’ burial. This grave, labelled Bj.581, in the Viking settlement of Birka, Sweden, was furnished with a variety of weaponry and martial items associated with warrior masculinity: a sword, spear, axe, battle knife, and arrows, two shields, and two horses.46 Based on the character of the grave goods, for many decades it was assumed that the person buried in the grave was a man, but when an osteological analysis was conducted, it transpired that the person in question was actually female.47 The dead woman was seated, as was the practice for many graves of the period, and had in her lap a bag of gaming pieces, with the gaming board propped up next to her. As the authors of a study of the grave note about board games in graves: They particularly occur in relation to military leaders; for example, being present in most of the larger boat graves […] where they are employed symbolically, such as boards laid out with pieces in play […] The presence of a full gaming set and board in Bj.581, and their deliberate placement in direct proximity to the body, suggests a potential command role, in addition to the high status implied by the quality of the military equipment. It cannot be definitively proven what the inclusion of these objects means — whether this woman literally served as a warrior, or whether the objects were more of a ceremonial or proxy nature, or perhaps other options that cannot be

45 This has been, for instance, posited by Gardeła, ‘Warrior-Women’. 46 Arbman, Birka; Thålin-Bergman, ‘Die Waffengräber von Birka’. 47 Hedenstierna-Jonson and others, ‘A Female Viking Warrior’. These results were initially called into question ( Jesch, ‘Let’s Debate Female Viking Warriors’), but have since been thoroughly and persuasively documented: see Price and others, ‘Viking Warrior Women?’.

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recovered from history. What we can say for certain is that in ‘warrior’ graves such as this one — graves furnished with weapons and objects of war — a board game is a conventional part of the assemblage, and the assemblage is coded ‘martial’ and ‘masculine’ even if the inhabitant of the grave is not literally male. Whatever the truth of this particular grave, in certain circumstances, particularly in wartime, unconventional women have been adopting a masculine equipage for centuries.48 Indeed, as the authors of a study on the Birka grave note, ‘Given the enormous numbers of buried individuals from this period that have been sexed only indirectly using associated artefacts, it is even possible that female warriors will eventually appear in some quantity’.49 This would not alter the standard contemporary conception of the roles and attributes of men and women, but is merely an instance of a person of one gender crossing over into the conventions and associations of the other. This is as opposed to a distinct rearrangement of the possibilities of gender: if, for instance, board games began to be a standard accompaniment principally to female-associated grave goods.50 Thus the most that can be said about the complex archaeological picture is that in some periods and places, women were associated with board games in real life as often as with men, but that this did not always hold true, and that when board games were principally associated with only one gender, that gender is male. It is notable, though, that we do have at least one account of a woman who played a board game in real life, and was censured for it. The narrative appears in Gregory of Tours’s sixth-century History of the Franks, and concerns a rebellion against the abbess of the convent in Poitiers, one in a series of gender-related events that culminated in revolt, kidnappings, and murder. Among many other incidents, a nun named Clotild charged that the abbess of Poitiers kept a man in the nunnery dressed in women’s clothing, and that furthermore the abbess kept eunuchs, as if she presided over the imperial court. Surprisingly, both these charges had an element of truth, although the abbess herself was not implicated. On the first count, a man was located who did indeed habitually dress in women’s clothing, and who responded that he did this because he was impotent — a situation with great potential for historical gender analysis, though not directly relevant to board games. This man lived in the area but had never met the abbess, and thus the abbess was exonerated from the charge. On the second count, one of the monastic servants was indeed a eunuch, but it emerged that he had been castrated as a boy by a physician seeking to cure pains in the boy’s groin, and that the abbess knew nothing of this.

48 See, for example, Dugaw, Memoirs of Scandalous Women and Warrior Women and Popular Balladry. 49 Price and others, ‘Viking Warrior Women’, p. 194. 50 On these issues see Petré, ‘Male and Female Finds’.

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Further accusations charged that audacter contra suam regulam…diversi eorum in balneo lavarent incongrue, ad tabulam ipsa luserit atque saeculares cum abbatissa refecerent, etiam et sponsalia in monasterio facta sint; de palla olosirica vestimenta neptae suae temerariae fecerit; foliola aurea, quae fuerant in gyro palla inconsulte sustulerit et ad collum neptae suae facinorose suspenderit; vittam de auro exornatam idem neptae suae superflue fecerit, barbaturias intus eo quod celebraverit.51 (audaciously counter to the rule […] various men had washed in the baths inappropriately, that she had played tabula, and secular people had dined with the abbess, and even a betrothal had been conducted within the convent; out of a silk cloth she had irresponsibly made clothing for her niece, and, ill-advisedly, the golden leaves on the edge of this cloth she had taken and scandalously hung around her niece’s neck; she had made for her niece a fillet ornamented with gold, because she had celebrated the barbaturia there.)52 The distinctive theme of these charges is that they all involve gender violations. There are naked men in the place (the baths) where the nuns commonly removed their clothes; the abbess had indulged in worldly dining and parties, in ceremonies relating to marriage, and in turning the sacred cloths into decorative garments, and in kitting out her niece with flashy ornaments. The abbess defended herself by arguing that she had merely let the monastery servants use the baths in place of the nuns while the mortar of the baths was still new, raw, and odorous; that she was merely providing for her orphaned niece; that a nun of noble birth had given her a present of a silk mantle, and she had used part of it for her niece, but used the other part as an altar cloth; and that the gold fillet had been purchased by the niece’s betrothed. Thus none of these actions was as it had appeared, but all had been interpreted as typically feminine frivolity and sexual license. The last charge is the most intriguing, and depends on the vexed question of the exact meaning of the term barbaturia. Some have understood it as ‘necklace’, and interpreted the line to mean that the cloth was made into a necklace or ornamental collar; elsewhere it has been interpreted as barbaloria, ‘masquerade’.53 The term barbaturia, however, traditionally involved beards, and was the term used for the ritual shaving of the monks.54 It is far from clear what such a beard- or hair-shaving ritual is doing in the convent in Poitiers. It is possible that it is related to a sixth-century practice in the

51 Gregory of Tours, Libri Historiarum X, ed. by Krusch and Wilhelm, xi.16, p. 505. 52 My translation. An English translation is also available in History of the Franks, trans. by Thorpe. 53 Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, trans. by Thorpe; ‘masquerade’ is the understanding in the translation by Brehaut, History of the Franks. 54 See Corradini and others, The Construction of Communities, p. 185.

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convent of St John’s, founded by Bishop Caesarius of Arles, which specifies that the nuns must have short hair, a rule which may have been put in place to distinguish them from long-haired secular kings.55 To cut a nun’s hair short, then, would be the feminine equivalent of the tonsure and clean-shaven practice of the monks: almost a de-sexing. However, it would not be clear why the abbess’s secular niece would be present at a ritual hair-cutting, nor why she would be charged with wearing ornaments to it, unless it were accepted as an occasion of worldly celebration. It is intriguing to think that, like the other charges, this charge may involve gender violations, but the matter is far from clear. The sole charge to which the abbess admitted was that of the board game. She replied: etsi lusisset viventem domna Radegunde, se minus culpa respiceret, tamen nec in regula per scripturam prohibere nec in canonibus retulit. Sed ad iussionem episcoporum repromisit, cervice se inflexa per paenitentiam quicquid iuberetur impleret.56 (she had played in the time of the lady Radegund [the previous abbess], and it could not be very wrong of her, nor was it expressly forbidden, either in the Rule or in the canons. But if the bishops now forbade it, she promised humbly to bow to their decision and do any penance that they might impose.)57 In the first instance, the board game looks like the only charge among these that does not have a gender element. Male ecclesiastics were often also warned against allegedly frivolous pastimes such as board games. In England, for instance, Wulfstan’s eleventh-century Canons of Edgar warned: ‘And we lærað þæt preost ne beo hunta ne hafecere ne tæflere, ac plegge on his bocum swa his hade gebirað’ (And we enjoin that a priest should be neither a hunter nor a hawker nor a player of board games, but occupy himself with his books as his office requires).58 In the eleventh century Peter Damian reproved a fellow churchman for playing a board game; in the twelfth century Orderic Vitalis told a similar story condemning a male cleric who played a board game; and such admonitions could be multiplied.59 However, in the context of so much concern about gender-related violations of norms, and in a circumstance in which the proprieties of a woman in power were being questioned, one does begin to wonder whether the playing of tabula is not regarded here with as much gender-related disapproval as such gaming attracts when women play

55 56 57 58 59

Leyser, ‘Long-Haired Kings and Short-Haired Nuns’. Gregory of Tours, Libri Historiarum X, ed. by Krusch and Wilhelm, xi.16, p. 506. My translation. Wulfstan’s Canons of Edgar, ed. by Fowler, p. 14, no. 65 with parallel text on p. 15, no. 65. Peter Damian, Opusculum XX, ed. by Migne, col. 454. Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. by Chibnall, c.111.

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it in legends and myths. It is distinctive that such activities were associated principally with high-status men. As head of the convent, the abbess had risen to the highest status available to her; but her submission to the authority of the bishops, in agreeing to cease playing the game, formed a demonstration that she was ultimately subordinate to men of higher status. Once again a woman had entered a realm deemed prototypically masculine — had, in merely playing the board game, dared to compete with men in their free choice of activities — and once again this was censured and forbidden to women. The roster of these narratives show that women were almost universally condemned when they appeared playing board games; and they also show that despite condemnation, women ventured into the realm of power and play again and again.

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Grandet, Mathieu, and Jean-François Goret, Échecs et Trictrac: fabrication et usages des jeux de table au Moyen-Âge (Paris: Errance, 2012) Hall, Mark A., ‘Board of the Kings: The Material Culture of Playtime in Scotland ad 1–1600’, in Sport und Spiel bei den Germanen: Nordeuropa von der Römischen Kaiserzeit bis zum Mittelalter, ed. by Matthias Teichert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003), pp. 163–96 ———, Playtime in Pictland: The Material Culture of Gaming in Early Medieval Scotland (Rosemarkie: Groam House Museum, 2007) ———, ‘Jeux sans frontières: Play and Performativity or Questions of Identity and Social Interaction across Town and Country’, in Objects, Environment and Everyday Life in Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Jervis, Lee G. Broderick, and Idoia Grau Sologestoar (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp. 189–214 ———, ‘Board Games in Boat Burials: Play in the Performance of Migration and Viking Age Mortuary Practice’, European Journal of Archaeology, 19 (2016), 439–55 Hall, Mark A., and Katherine Forsyth, ‘Roman Rules? The Introduction of Board Games to Britain and Ireland’, Antiquity, 85 (2011), 1325–38 Hedenstierna-Jonson, Charlotte, and others, ‘A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics’, American Journal of Physical Anthropologists, 164 (2017), 853–60 Jesch, Judith, ‘Let’s Debate Female Viking Warriors Yet Again’, online post of 9 September 2017 at [accessed 28 February 2018] Kelly, Fergus, Early Irish Farming: A Study Based Mainly on the Law-Texts of the 7th and 8th Centuries (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1997) Kimball, Justin J. L., ‘From Dróttinn to King: The Role of Hnefatafl as a Descriptor of Late Iron Age Scandinavian Culture’, Lund Archaeological Review, 19 (2013), 61–76 Kluge-Pinsker, Antje, Schach und Trictrac (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1991) Krüger, Jana, ‘Das Brettspiel in der skaldischen Dichtung’, in Sport und Spiel bei den Germanen: Nordeuropa von der Römischen Kaiserzeit bis zum Mittelalter, ed. by Matthias Teichert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003), pp. 87–107 Lewis, Frank, ‘Gwerin Ffristial a Thawlbwrdd’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1941), 185–205 Leyser, Conrad, ‘Long-Haired Kings and Short-Haired Nuns: Writing on the Body in Caesarius of Arles’, Studia patristica, 24 (1993), 143–50 MacWhite, Eóin, ‘Early Irish Board Games’, Éigse, 5 (1948 for 1945–47), 25–35 McKinnell, John, Meeting the Other in Norse Myth and Legend (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005) McLees, Christopher, Games People Played: Gaming Pieces, Boards, and Dice from Excavations in the Medieval Town of Trondheim, Norway (Trondheim: Riksantikvaren Utgravingskontoret for Trondheim, 1990) Mulvin, Lynda, and Steven E. Sidebotham, ‘Roman Game Boards from Abu Sha’ar (Red Sea Coast, Egypt)’, Antiquity, 78 (2004), 602–17 Murray, Harold J. R., A History of Chess (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913) ———, ‘The Medieval Games of Tables’, Medium Aevum, 10 (1941), 57–69

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———, A History of Board-Games Other than Chess (New York: Hacker, 1978) Niehues, Jan, ‘Die Brettspiele des mittelalterliche Irland und Wales’, in Sport und Spiel bei den Germanen: Nordeuropa von der Römischen Kaiserzeit bis zum Mittelalter, ed. by Matthias Teichert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003), pp. 217–43 ———, ‘All the King’s Men? On Celtic Board-Games and their Identification’, in Allerlei Keltisches: Studien zu Ehren von Erich Poppe – Studies in Honour of Erich Poppe, ed. by Franziska Bock, Dagmar Bronner, and Dagmar Schlüter (Berlin: Curach bhán, 2011), pp. 45–60 Olson, Glending, Review of Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 117 (2018), 115–17 Olson, Kelly, ‘Roman Glass Gaming Pieces or Jewels’, Mouseion, 1 (2001), 127–38 Orme, Nicholas, ‘Games and Education in Medieval England’, in Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature, ed. by Serina Patterson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 45–60 Page, Raymond I., ‘Old English Cyningstan’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 3 (1969), 1–5 Petré, Bo, ‘Male and Female Finds and Symbols in Germanic Iron Age Graves’, Current Swedish Archaeology, 1 (1993), 149–54 Price, Neil, and others, ‘Viking Warrior Women? Reassessing Birka Chamber Grave Bj.581’, Antiquity, 93 (2019), 181–98 Purcell, Nicholas, ‘Literate Games: Roman Urban Society and the Game of Alea’, Past and Present, 147 (1995), 3–37 Robinson, J. Armitage, The Times of Saint Dunstan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923) Rundkvist, Martin, and Howard Williams, ‘A Viking Boat Grave with Amber Gaming Pieces Excavated at Skamby, Östergötland, Sweden’, Medieval Archaeology, 52 (2008), 69–102 Smith, Roger, ‘The Long History of Gaming in Military Training’, Simulation and Gaming, 41 (2010), 6–19 Solberg, Bergljot, ‘Pastimes or Serious Business? Norwegian Graves with Gaming Objects c. 200–1000 ad’, in On the Road: Studies in Honour of Lars Larsson, ed. by Birgitta Hardh, Kristina Jennberht, and Deborah S. Olausson (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2007), pp. 265–69 Sterckx, Claude, ‘Les jeux de damiers celtiques’, Annales de Bretagne, 77 (1970), 597–609 Taylor, Mark N., ‘Chaucer’s Knowledge of Chess’, Chaucer Review, 38 (2004), 299–313 Teichert, Matthias, ‘Hnefatafl, Fidchell, Tawlbwrdd. Die altwestnordische Brettspielkultur und ihre inselkeltischen Bezüge’, in Cultural Contacts and Cultural Identity: Proceedings from the Munich Interdisciplinary Conference for Doctoral Students, October 9th-12th, 2013, ed. by Georg C. Brückmann and others (Munich: Utz, 2014), pp. 61–68 Thålin‐Bergman, Lena, ‘Die Waffengräber von Birka’, in Birka: Untersuchungen und Studien, ii:2: Systematische analysen der gräberfunde, ed. by Greta Arwidsson (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, 1986), pp. 4–10

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Trifilò, Francesco, ‘Movement, Gaming, and the Use of Space in the Roman Forum’, in Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space, ed. by Ray Laurence and David J. Newsome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 312–31 Schädler, Ulrich, ‘Latrunculi: Ein verlorenes strategisches Brettspiel der Römer’, in Homo ludens: Der spielende Mensch, iv, ed. by Günther G. Bauer (Salzburg: Katzbichler, 1994), pp. 47–67 ———, ‘XII Scripta, Alea, Tabula — New Evidence for the Roman History of “Backgammon”’, in New Approaches to Board Games Research: Asian Origins and Future Perspectives, ed. by Alexander J. de Voogt (Leiden: International Institute for Asian Studies, 1995), pp. 73–98 Whittaker, Helène, ‘Game-Boards and Gaming-Pieces in the Northern European Iron Age’, Nordlit, 20 (2006), 103–12 Yalom, Marilyn, Birth of the Chess Queen: A History (New York: Harper Collins, 2009)

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Martin W. Huang

The Social Circulation of Grief Status Competition, Mourning, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century China

In this chapter I focus on the question of how grieving and writing about the death of one’s spouse could serve as an effective means of elevating a man’s social standing among his male peers and re/asserting his status as a member of the cultural elite in seventeenth-century China. It looks at the specific strategies deployed by a bereaved husband to turn private mourning of the death of his spouse into an occasion of social networking and public celebration of the deceased female as well as the male mourner himself.

Elegiac Writings Tremendous faith was placed in writing and the written text in traditional Chinese culture.1 The locus classicus on the importance of writing and its associated immortality can be found in the Confucian Classic Zuozhuan (known in English as Zuo Commentary or Zuo Tradition) attributed to the historian Zuo Qiuming (c. 502–c. 422 bce): According to what I have heard, ‘the highest of all is to establish virtue; next to that is to establish achievements; next to that is to establish words.’ Even with the passage of time these glories are not cast aside. This is called ‘never perishing’.2 To come to terms with death, many, especially the educated, appealed to the idea of qiu buxiu (attaining cultural immortality via writing), the belief that

1 For a detailed study of the importance of writing to the Chinese empire in its early centuries, see Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China. 2 Zuo Tradition/Zuozhuan: Commentary on the ‘Spring and Autumn Annals’, p. 1125. Here ‘establish words’, often understood in later ages as ‘authoring writing’, is presented as one of the three ways to achieve glories that would never perish. Martin W. Huang    is Professor of Chinese at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of California, Irvine, United States of America. Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 209-225 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126148

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one could somehow transcend or even defy death with the help of writing because a written text was believed to be able to enable posterity to remember a deceased person almost forever. Such faith in the transcendental power of the written text should not come as a surprise given the relatively secular nature of traditional Chinese society and the Confucian reluctance to deal with the supernatural and the afterlife. Mourning and remembrance of the dead thus often took the form of writing in traditional China. After the death of a man, a very important obligation on the part of his grief-stricken son, if he was from a family of high social standing and considerable wealth, was to seek out someone of high social or cultural standing to write an epitaph to eulogize the father’s Confucian exemplariness. Failure on the part of a son to have such an epitaph written might be deemed by some to be a sign of unfiliality, a serious sin in a society dominated by the Confucian ideology centring on the notion of filial piety.3 An epitaph was usually composed of a biographical narrative about the deceased in prose, with a concluding verse. It was supposed to be inscribed on a slab of stone as part of the grave. However, the text of an epitaph could also be included in the collected writings of its author and circulated as such. When published as part of the author’s collected writings, it could reach a much wider audience, especially during the late imperial period (approximately 1500–1900) when more and more educated men had their collected writings published thanks to the boom in private publishing and the relatively low cost of printing. Many would seek famous people to write epitaphs without intending them to be a component of the actual graves of the deceased. So long as the author was famous or from a relatively rich family, his collected writings were more likely to be published, and the lives of his epitaphic subjects would receive wide exposure as a result. Their ‘immortality’ was thus better secured. For example, several decades after the death of his first wife, the early Qing scholar and poet, Qian Chengzhi (1612–93), sent a request to Huang Zongxi (1610–95), the famous savant, asking him to write an epitaph for her. In his letter of request, Qian made it very clear what he really cared about was that Huang included the epitaph in the latter’s collected writings once he finished writing it.4 Being included in the collected writings of a luminary, such as Huang Zongxi, writings which were sure to enjoy a large readership when published, an epitaph could ensure a much wider circulation. Often people were able to have access to an epitaph only because it was included in its author’s collected writings rather than as a result of its being excavated from a gravesite at a later time. This was especially true during the late imperial period when private printing and publication flourished. The expectation that an epitaph could be circulated as a text written or printed on paper in turn had



3 Yu Zhanghua and Xu Qingping, Gudai zazhuan yanjiu, p. 58. 4 See Qian Chengzhi’s letter, collected in ‘Jiaoyou chidu’ (correspondences with friends) in the appendix, ‘Nanlei shiwen ji fulu’, in Huang Zongxi, Huang Zongxi quanji, xii, 291.

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significant implications for its production: now an author was more likely to write a longer epitaph, as the practical concern that it might be too long to be inscribed on a tablet became less of an issue, and he was more likely to cover those aspects of the life of the deceased otherwise unlikely to be covered when limited space was a concern. Furthermore, the epitaph’s assumed audience was much expanded due to the expectation of its being circulated as a written text on paper. This was a mutually beneficial transaction because the author of the epitaph of a famous person could also have his chance for fame enhanced, thanks to the prestige of his epitaphic subject. By the middle of the sixteenth century, epitaphs became so popular that the neo-Confucian essayist and scholar-official Tang Shunzhi (1507–60) bitterly complained: People even as low as those in the business of butchering pigs and peddling wine, so long as they could afford a bowl of rice, would want epitaphs written in their honour. From prominent officials to those who have passed provincial examinations, everyone would have a collection of his writings published after his death. This has become as necessary as a person needing food when alive and a coffin for burial after death. This never happened in the period of the Three Epochs and was still absolutely rare even before the Han and Tang dynasties. Fortunately, most of these epitaphs and collected works usually go to oblivion pretty soon. Even though many books published in the past are no longer extant, those that do survive are still too numerous. Had all published books been kept, there would not be enough space to shelve them even if the earth could be used as a giant bookshelf.5 Tang’s complaint betrayed an increasingly deep anxiety over the blurring of social distinctions as Chinese society witnessed rapid commercialization at that time, while the popularity of epitaph writing and publishing one’s collected writings were blamed for contributing to such blurring. Consequently, to further stand out among this ‘madding crowd’ (large, frenzied crowd) seeking social status confirmation and elevation, one had to resort to even more ingenious means for social prestige enhancement.6 Here elegiac poetry assumed a unique function.



5 Tang Shunzhi, ‘Da Wang Zunyan’, in Tang Shunzhi, Jingchuan xiansheng wenji, juan 6, 119. Li Le (1532–1618) also complained about the ‘over popularity’ of epitaphs, Li Le, Jianwen zhaji, juan 3, p. 285. 6 Using the term ‘madding crowd’, I have in mind the title of the novel Far from the Madding Crowd by the English writer Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), which the novelist borrowed from Thomas Gray’s famous eighteenth-century poem ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. By alluding to Gray’s poem, Hardy evokes the rural culture that, by his lifetime, had become threatened with extinction at the hands of rapid industrialization. This somewhat parallels the situation of sixteenth-century China that Tang Shunzhi was lamenting, when commercialization had done much to erode the class distinctions at that time.

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Performing a somewhat different function, elegiac poetry was another important genre of Chinese mourning literature, while its circulation began to assume new forms around that same period. Elegiac poetry was also supposed to focus on the virtues of the deceased. However, thanks to its much more lyrical and personal nature, bereaved husbands (occasionally wives) often turned to it to express their personal grief at the losses of their spouses. Here a few words about the general social function of poetry in late imperial Chinese society are in order: composing poetry was a part of basic literary training almost every educated man went through at that time, because its technical requirements were one of the important standards by which one’s command of literary language was measured.7 Almost every educated man was supposed to be a poet to a certain degree, expected to write poems on virtually all social occasions, a birthday, funeral, visiting a place, or a social gathering, for example. Because of its relatively short length and rhythmic formula (thus making it easier to memorize and circulate), and its consequent ‘portability’, poetry performed a special and important function of socializing. It was employed as a means of correspondence, social greeting, recording events, or keeping a diary. Mourning was one of those social occasions when the bereaved was expected to compose poems to express his grief while his friends and relatives also wrote poems to express their condolences. Besides often being included as part of an author’s collected writings, elegiac poems were circulated more often independently thanks to their brevity and portability. Compared with epitaphs, elegiac poetry sometimes saw even wider circulation.

The Deployment of Elegiac Poetry By the late imperial period, the relatively private act of writing elegiac poetry was becoming increasingly an act of public performance in the process of social networking. For example, while still presented as expressions of personal grief, a bereaved husband’s poems were often meant to be circulated among his peers to solicit poetic responses from them, setting in motion a process of exchanges and social networking, whereby the focus was often shifted from the mourned to the mourner (the latter’s literary sophistication, cultural prestige, and social status). At the same time, increasing attention was being paid to the quantity of the literary exchanges generated in the process as an indicator of the social status of both the mourned and the mourner(s). Personal grief was quantified in terms of elegiac writings in order to impress others: the more elegiac writings produced, and the deeper the grief.



7 Unfortunately, the social function of poetry in pre-modern China is a topic few scholars have explored in depth despite its obvious importance. One exception is Hawes’s The Social Circulation of Poetry in the Mid-Northern Song, although it confines itself to the study of eleventh-century China.

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Upon the death of his concubine, the seventeenth-century writer Mao Xiang (1611–93) composed a long eulogy in verse titled ‘A Eulogy in Honour of my Deceased Concubine Dong Xiaowan’ to mourn her. At the end of this eulogy, Mao Xiang profusely congratulated himself for having completed such a brilliant long verse essay in such a short period of time: It was completed within the short span of two days and two nights. It is two thousand four hundred characters long and two hundred forty different rhymes have been employed. There have been no other eulogies by anyone else that are as detailed as this one of mine.8 Note in particular the numerical references here. Mao Xiang declares that he had just composed a long eulogy that had never been attempted by others in the long history of Chinese mourning literature before. Furthermore, he calls people’s attention to the fact that he completed such a difficult long elegiac verse within the short period of only ‘two days and two nights’, an eloquent testament to his poetic talent. It was said that a young girl was willing to marry the widower, the poet Qu Dajun (1630–96), presumably because she had been so impressed by the latter’s elegiac writings on his deceased wife after she had read the elegiac poems he wrote for the latter. That girl, however, died within a few years of marrying him, unwittingly fulfilling her wishes to become the subject of his elegiac writing and turning her own marriage into almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Before marrying him, the girl must have also read the collection of elegiac writings produced by Qu’s friends in honour of his first wife, many of which were the result of the bereaved husband’s persistent solicitation. With great pride Qu comments on this collection this way: This collection was an unprecedented work and I was the first to assemble such a unique book of mourning. It is a book made of various elegiac writings by all the talented and virtuous men around the country to mourn your death. In the genre of poetry, there are poems in the style of ‘songs of music bureau’, ancient style poems [unregulated verse], and modern style poems [regulated verse]; in the genre of prose, there are prefaces, biographies, elegies, epitaphs, and epitaphic essays; works of every genre are presented […] Alas, you were a woman and yet you have been celebrated in so many writings to eulogize you in the nether world! You should have no regret dying so young […] There has never been a book such as this collection. These virtuous and talented gentlemen from all over the country, thanks to my kind words for you, were eager to send me these writings praising you.9

8 ‘Wangqie Dong Xiaowan aici’, in Wu Dingzhong, comp., Dong Xiaowan huikao, p. 47. 9 ‘Fen Daoli ji guwen’, Wengshan wenwai, juan 13, Qu Dajun Qu Dajun quanji, pp. 220–21. This book was apparently no longer extant.

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Qu’s acute self-consciousness and self-congratulatory smugness remind us of the aforementioned Mao Xiang. He is arguing that by virtue of his elegiac act, his deceased wife had attained immortality in the end. However, what had enabled the mourned to attain immortality were his elegiac writings and the large number of condolence writings by others that he was able to solicit. Here the gendered implications of the act of mourning are hard to miss: Qu Dajun believed that being a woman, who would have otherwise had little chance of being immortalized in a literary text, his wife, should be content in death now that she had become the subject of elegiac writings by so many famous male authors (not the least himself). It was the male author who possessed this immortalizing power. A deceased woman was saved from oblivion by her mourning husband and achieved immortality in his elegiac writings as well as in those by others. Mourning, when considered an act capable of immortalizing the dead, was presented mainly as a male prerogative. A woman should be deemed extremely lucky if her husband happened to be a gifted elegiac writer, or even better, who could command enough social prestige to be able to secure endorsement writings from so many well-known writers and who was then able to assemble them into a special book to honour her, exactly as Qu Dajun had done. By giving his wife a chance to be immortalized on such a grand literary scale, Qu Dajun, as a brilliant poet/mourner, also secured his own position in literary history, thus becoming immortalized himself at the same time. Often in his elegiac writings, Qu Dajun appears to have been more concerned with his own image as a brilliant writer/mourner than that of the mourned. Sometimes it was the male mourner himself rather than the mourned female who became the main concern of his elegiac discourse. At the same time, there was a keen sense of friendly competition among many mourning literati husbands when it came to authoring various memorial writings on their own deceased spouses and those of their peers. By ‘literati’ I emphasize that these ‘husbands’ were relatively well educated and well trained in Confucian learning. After Qu’s first wife died, his friend, the poet Chen Gongyin (1631–1700), composed a long poem of more than eight hundred characters to mourn her, in addition to writing an epitaph for her at the request of the grieving husband.10 Later, after Chen’s own wife passed away, in return, Qu Dajun also composed a long poem to mourn his friend’s deceased wife. However, Qu expressed his uneasiness because it was only five hundred characters long.11 What is so remarkable about Qu Dajun is not so much his deep grief over his deceased spouses but his insistence on the importance of expressing such grief in as many different elegiac genres as possible and 10 ‘Wang Huajiang aici’ and ‘Huajiang muzhiming’, in Chen Gongyin, Dulu tang ji, pp. 104–06 and pp. 777–79. It is interesting that in the titles of these two works, Chen identified her by her own name ‘Wang Huajiang’ rather than as the wife of Qu Dajun. Chen’s long poem is presented in her own voice, who is directly addressing her bereaved husband, a very ingenious ‘mourning’ poem worthy of a closer reading on another occasion. 11 ‘Ai Chen gongren shi xue’, in Qu Dajun, Qu Dajun quanji, p. 74.

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the need to produce a large quantity of such elegies, as if there was a direct causal link between the depth of one’s grief and the large number of elegies in various genres one wrote. This acute awareness of friendly competition was mixed with an even stronger sense of social obligation. When a friend suffered the misfortune of the death of a spouse, one was supposed to compose and send poems of condolences to him at short notice. Elegiac poems composed to mourn the death of a friend’s spouse or composing such poems on behalf of someone else almost became a poetic subgenre on its own.12 On the other hand, a mourning husband would also actively solicit such poems and other elegiac writings from as many friends as possible because quantities mattered. Then these writings were often assembled into a book, which was then distributed among friends for them to come up with even more colophons or endorsing poems to further expand this mourning project, perpetuating a social networking process among these male mourners. After the death of his wife, Qu Dajun soon began to solicit poems and other elegiac writings from his friends. Then he carefully assembled them into a book and distributed the copies among his friends to seek more endorsement writings from them.13 This is reminiscent of what Mao Xiang did after he completed his memoir in honour of his concubine: he had it printed as a book and distributed it among his friends, seeking their responses in writing. Most of their responses were reprinted in his Tongren ji (A Collection of the Writings of the Kindred Spirits), a massive collection of the literary exchanges between Mao Xiang and his literati friends.14 Now the memory of his deceased concubine became part of her surviving husband’s large homosocial project of literati networking. While preparing to take the special examination sponsored by the imperial government in the capital, the poet and dramatist You Tong (1618–1704) received the news that his wife had recently died in his hometown. Many of his friends and colleagues sent their condolences to You Tong. Their sympathy for the bereaved deepened even more because the grieving husband could not go back to attend the funeral of his wife at his hometown a thousand miles away. According to You Tong, more than two hundred people paid condolence calls to him at his residence in the capital, including many high officials, his friends, fellow townsmen, and relatives, while many of them contributed elegiac poems, which were collected in a special anthology of elegiac writings You Tong himself later assembled and edited.15 The mourning of You Tong’s deceased wife became

12 Hu Xu, Daowang shi shi, p. 235; see also the relevant poems collected in ‘Taozeng ji’ and ‘Fulu er’, in Qu Dajun, Qu Dajun quanji, viii, 2022, 2030, 2041–42, 2047, and 2075. 13 For example, one of his friends, Huang Sheng, in the foreword to his endorsement poems mentioned that he wrote the poems after receiving the book; see Zhu Zejie, ‘Sanzhong tiyong lei Qingshi zongji yizhu xuba jikao’, pp. 76–80 (especially p. 77). 14 ‘Yingmei an daowang tiyong’, in Mao Xiang Tongren ji, vi.12a–31b; see also various prefaces or postscripts by different people reprinted in the same book, iii.54a–55b and iii.57a–59b. 15 ‘Qizhong caiji wangshi wen’, in You Tong Xitang zazu sanji, viii.21a.

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a big public event among his friends and his fellow examination candidates, and many of them, like himself, were selected and invited by the imperial government to participate in the special examination by virtue of their prestige and reputations. The fact that so many famous and important men paid homage to his late wife must have been an experience You Tong cherished with great pride. In his biography of You Tong, the scholar and poet Pan Lei (1646–1708), one of his special examination fellow participants, mentioned in particular You Tong’s public mourning of his deceased wife and the special anthology of elegiac writings by his peers that he later compiled. This was now considered an important event in You Tong’s life that was worth being celebrated in this otherwise relatively brief biography as evidence of his prestige and fame.16

The Deployment of Other Elegiac Strategies Mao Qiling (1623–1716), another well-known scholar-official from that time, launched an even more ambitious project of mourning and commemoration soon after the death of his concubine, Zhang Manshu. Mao Qiling took her as his concubine under the arrangement of the prime minister, Feng Pu (1609–92). At that time, Zhang was the eighteen-year-old daughter of a local flower vendor. She later died at the age of twenty-four. Besides poems in honour of her, Mao Qiling wrote a series of essays to mourn her: they include a formal epitaph, an alternative epitaph, and an account of her miraculous resurrection; he even wrote a quite long letter addressed to her when she was already dead. All these memorial writings were part of Mao Qiling’s deliberate and carefully choreographed attempt to build up Zhang’s ‘legend’ as a beautiful, talented, and, most important of all, faithful, concubine of humble origin, who died a tragic death out of her faithfulness to her polygamist husband. Except for the letter, which was supposed to be addressed to Zhang directly, Mao Qiling remained quite emotionally detached in his memorial writings, as if he were merely a storyteller telling a moving story about the life of an interesting woman, who, however, was hardly related to him, a deliberate distancing attempt to present the life of Zhang as a ‘tale’. This is a tale for public consumption, whereas his own private emotions as a surviving husband were not a major concern. Zhang is presented in these private elegiac writings not so much from Mao Qiling’s personal perspective as her grieving husband as from the public perspective of a detached storyteller entertaining his audience with a public tale of private pathos. According to Mao Qiling’s epitaphs for her, when the prime minister Feng Pu tried to arrange to have him take Zhang as his concubine, the latter consented despite his much advanced age (he was about fifty-six at that time) because she was so impressed with his literary talent. Such emphases on the 16 ‘You shijiang Genzhai zhuan’, in Pan Lei, Suichu tang wenji, xviii.6b.

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mourners’ own literary talents must have sounded quite familiar by now. Even when her mother, worrying that he was old and poor, began to regret the engagement after they heard Mao’s wife was a jealous woman, Zhang herself never wavered. Although a daughter raised in the humble family of a flower vendor, she was very gifted. She could imitate the singing of all kinds of birds and was very quick at learning needlework. After becoming Mao’s concubine, she proved to be a quick learner of reading and writing as well. She could even compose poetry. She also became quite a good painter and could sing and play the songs composed by Mao Qiling after listening to them only a few times.17 The happy days, however, quickly came to an end when the news came that Mao Qiling’s jealous wife was soon to arrive from the south. Having given birth to no children over the course of the previous three years, Zhang found herself with no alternative but to move out of Mao Qiling’s residence. Others suggested that she should be sent away. In the epitaph, Mao Qiling offers a very dramatic account of how Zhang Manshu responded to the prospect of being forced to leave: Before leaving for his hometown after retirement, Prime Minister Feng said to Manshu: ‘Originally I arranged to have Mr Mao take you as concubine because he had no son. In the past three years, you did not get pregnant and now his wife suddenly is about to arrive from the south. How do you think you would find accommodation for yourself? It is going to be quite impossible. Besides, Mr Mao is advanced in age and is a man of limited means. Xiaoshan [Mao’s hometown] is far away and he is too poor to take care of you […] If you don’t ask to leave yourself, you are doing something quite unwise’. His Excellence really cared about her and myself. He said this only out of his concern for us and nothing more. Manshu was in deep shock after hearing this. She thanked His Excellency but declined in tears, saying: ‘I believed Your Excellency had always instructed us to behave according to ritual propriety. How could you fail to hear the saying that a woman must not marry two husbands?’ At that time, a woman sitting next to her burst into laughter: ‘Really! Then who married you as a wife that you congratulated yourself so much?’ Facing Manshu straight, she said: ‘Mr Mao is not your husband!’ Outraged, Manshu cried: ‘Heaven! If people do not consider me his wife, that is okay. However, I would rather die if I am said to have no husband!’ Then she threw herself onto the ground […] An old female relative of mine in the capital tried to send her away under the false claim that she was acting upon my instruction. Manshu initially refused to believe, but, after being repeatedly told so, she began to believe that I might have indeed given such an instruction. She cried until she almost stopped breathing.18

17 ‘Manshu biezhi shuzhuan’, in MaoQiling, Xihe ji, xcvi.7a. 18 ‘Manshu zangming’, in Mao Qiling, Xihe ji, xcvi.1b–3a.

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Although there was no mention that Manshu was specifically persecuted by Mao’s jealous wife, that her arrival played a role in the former’s tragic death was very plausible. Her beauty, her talent, her loyalty, her humble origin, and, finally, her eventual tragic death all helped create a tale of special pathos that must have reminded people of the popular legend of Feng Xiaoqing, a talented and beautiful concubine persecuted by the principal wife of her husband, which began to see wide circulation among the literati in the first half of the seventeenth century.19 Throughout this epitaph, there is virtually no description of Mao Qiling’s own reactions or his emotions as her husband. There is even no reference to any direct interactions between her and Mao himself, as if he were describing for us someone totally unrelated to himself despite, or precisely, because of the dramatic nature of his narrative. Was Mao himself present when all these things were taking place? The author does not give us much direct evidence confirming this, although everything is told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. All this seems to have contributed to the impression that this was a kind of anecdotal or chuanqi tale one expects to find in a collection of random jottings or biji, a work of semi-fictional and semi-gossip genre popular in late imperial China. That is probably one of the reasons why this epitaph and Mao’s other pieces on Manshu were later selected to be anthologized in the popular xiaoshuo (fiction) collections Yuchu xinzhi (The New Tales of Yuchu) and Yuchu xinzhi xu (A Sequel to the New Tales of Yuchu) compiled by Zhang Chao (b. 1650) and others. Zhang also wrote a set of fifty poems to mourn the death of his own wife, and many of his friends also contributed matching poems. Apparently such daowang networking practice was quite common among the literati at that time.20 In fact, Mao Qiling himself specifically mentioned that there had already appeared a theatrical play and drum-songs based on Manshu’s life story not long after her death.21 The tragic death of his concubine, thanks largely to Mao’s effort, was now being turned into a public spectacle on stage.

19 See Widmer, ‘Xiaoqing’s Literary Legacy and the Place of the Woman Writer in Late Imperial China’, pp. 111–55. 20 ‘Manshu biezhi shuzhuan’ is collected in Zhang Chao, comp., Yuchu xinzhi, juan 13; ‘Manshu zangming’ and ‘Manshu huisheng ji’ are collected in Zheng Shuruo, comp., Yuchu xuzhi, juan 1; here all references are to He Yuchun, comp., Shuohai, pp. 535–40 and pp. 734–37 (all these works are collected and reprinted in Shuohai). Here ‘fiction’, the word often used to translate the Chinese term xiaoshuo, could be sometimes misleading because fictionality was not a hallmark of xiaoshuo in pre-modern Chinese culture, which was instead often defined by its ‘unofficial’ nature in comparison with the official histories produced by the imperial government. Consequently, many pre-modern xiaoshuo works were not necessarily produced as ‘fictional’ but rather as works dealing with those topics or issues usually not considered very important by the Confucian historians and thus ignored in official histories. Xiaoshuo often was characterized by its ‘anecdotal’ and ‘strange’ nature. As the term itself suggests, xiaoshuo (literally, small talk) was a minor discourse, supplementary to official histories. 21 ‘Manshu biezhi shuzhuan’, Mao Qiling, Xihe ji, xcvi.10b.

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If this xiaoshuo-like epitaph by Mao Qiling on Manshu is quite unusual in being so dramatic, then the ‘alternative epitaph’ Mao Qiling wrote for her later is even more remarkable. He inserted into the text proper of this epitaph a large amount of condolence writings by others in the form of notes. These notes were presented in the format of ‘double-column interlineal comment’ (shuanghang jiapi) as in those annotated editions of Confucian classics or commentary-editions of literary works.22 These comments are written and printed in characters much smaller than those of the text proper, giving the epitaph a different typographic characteristic, as if it were a canonical text worthy of careful exegetic annotations. Often in this epitaph the lengths of these notes are several times longer than the paragraphs or sentences they are supposed to annotate. The following is a passage from the epitaph (with the notes in the ‘double-column interlineal’ form being italicized): After she became my concubine, Manshu was determined to study with me. Not long after she started reading, she already began to have her own thoughts about what she read. It did not take her long to learn to paint and write once she took up the brush. Her handwriting was so much like mine, people thought I wrote for her. Ren Chendan, the Supervising Censor, wrote in a biography for her: ‘The Examining Editor [Mao Qiling] is a master of poetry and prose, an excellent calligrapher, and an expert in music. Manshu’s devotion to learning was just like that of the Examining Editor.’ Fang Xiangying, the Compiler, remarks in his poem: ‘Whereas her husband’s literary reputation had been long established throughout the east of the river, Manshu herself was a gifted student of reading and calligraphy.’ Wu Chenyan, the scholar, observes in his poem: ‘Refusing to learn the style of the writing of the famous Madam Wei, she invented her new feminine calligraphic style. How close her writing style was to that of her husband one cannot help wondering | Her handwriting could indeed be mistaken for that of her husband.’ Shi Renzhang, the Reader-in-Waiting, testifies in his poem: ‘As soon as the Madam took up her brush, she wrote in the style of a handsome youth. With such a fine husband, how could she fail to imitate him?’ Zhu Yizun, the Academician for Court Service, writes in his poem in the style of ‘Ye’er music bureau poetry’: ‘With a great gift for music she sang beautifully, and in elegant style she wrote down words of deep love.’23 Most of these notes are quotations of poems on Zhang composed by other important contemporary literary figures or high officials, all of whom were supposed to be Mao Qiling’s friends or acquaintances. Their names (often with their official titles also carefully noted at the same time) literally constitute a 22 For a brief discussion of this form of commentary and annotation as practised by fiction commentators in pre-modern China: Rolston, ‘Formal Aspects of Fiction Criticism and Commentary in China’, pp. 54–55. 23 ‘Manshu biezhi shuzhuan’, in Mao Qiling Xihe ji, xcvi.6b–7a.

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who’s-who list of the cultural elite in the capital, allowing the reader to have a glimpse into the large amount of literary writings devoted to this otherwise humble concubine that had been produced by various important poets, writers, and officials at that time. They served as a compelling testament to Mao Qiling’s own high standing among the cultural elite in the imperial capital and the sensation as well as the public imagination the ‘legend’ of his concubine had stirred up at that time. Each of Mao Qiling’s words about his own concubine in this alternative epitaph needs to be elaborated on, augmented, and authenticated by the poetic testimonies of many others, as if Mao’s first-hand memories of his own spouse had somehow actually been based on these people’s second-hand ‘witnessing’. There was a peculiar power of persuasion associated with Chinese poetry when it came to the formation of this legend of a beautiful but humble concubine who had died a tragic death. With so many poems by so many different poets and with the power of sheer poetic repetitions as a result, this legend somehow managed to acquire a unique romantic authenticity. The process is being reversed here: first-hand personal remembrances of the grieving husband here are authenticated but simultaneously displaced by communal second-hand memories. Many of those who wrote about Zhang might have never met her in person and they were only responding to Mao’s own writings about her. In this alternative epitaph specially designed for public consumption and celebration, Mao had to repeatedly appeal to the authority of these second-hand memories, to reconstruct this alternative life-history of his own concubine. In the process Mao Qiling’s own personal memory became largely devoid of any personal meanings, whereas her image was only meaningful when appreciated in the public context of this poetic chorus of the literati peers of the bereaved husband. By authoring this special epitaph of his concubine, which constantly quotes as ‘comments’ and ‘annotations’ the endorsing poems and writings by his literati peers and friends, Mao Qiling highlights the social and public nature of such a supposedly personal elegiac undertaking — it is now a communal project celebrating literati culture and validating the elite status of each male participant (especially that of the grieving husband himself), whereas the deceased female herself was merely a character in a romantic tale of pathos. This epitaph of a deceased concubine of humble social origin (the mourned) also became a celebration of her husband’s (the mourner’s) high social prestige partly to elevate his own status among his literati peers. As if this were not enough, Mao Qiling had to build up further the legend of his concubine by producing a special book to honour her. He previously mentioned in a note to this alternative epitaph that the death of his concubine prompted many in the capital to write numerous celebratory poems in addition to the long drum-song and play based on her tragic life. He promised us that all these writings would be assembled into a book in future.24 However, what 24 ‘Manshu biezhi shuzhuan’, in Mao Qiling Xihe ji, xcvi.10b.

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is still extant today is actually an album, a somewhat different project, which does not contain the long drum-song and play. Instead, it is an album made of a portrait of Zhang and many poetic colophons written by all the famous and the important (a biographical note of each contributor is duly provided to accompany the contributor’s colophon lest the reader fails to appreciate his important status) as well as Mao’s own elegiac writings on her in his own handwriting. Before she died, Zhang had a portrait of herself painted so that her pictorial image could be enjoyed by posterity forever. After her death Mao Qiling began to solicit colophons for the portrait from many well-known poets and officials. Later he assembled these colophons and his own writings on Zhang into this album.25 The album is not only a book composed of writings, but a collection of calligraphic works various people dedicated to the portrait of the deceased. It is now a visual display of artistic works and a spectacle of grief or shared grief, intended to be read and gazed upon simultaneously by its readers/viewers. Mao Qiling’s memory of his deceased concubine and his grief were now being circulated in many different forms: literati poetic exchanges, xiaoshuo (fiction)-like memorial writings, popular drum-song, drama, painting, and calligraphic works. It was indeed a unique ‘multi-media’ project of public mourning in seventeenth-century China. Soliciting colophons for a painting or portrait from famous literati and scholar-officials was a networking practice quite popular among the educated elite at that time.26 Another celebrated case is that of the poet Chen Weisong (1625–82). Chen had an affair with a male performer of female roles, Xu Ziyun, and commissioned a portrait of him. Then he began to solicit colophons for the portrait. It was said that around eighty people contributed poems to Chen’s project and, not surprisingly, Mao Qiling himself was one of them.27 It then should not come as a surprise that Chen Weisong also contributed poems in honour of Mao Qiling’s deceased concubine, as Mao several times quoted in the ‘alternative epitaph’. What is particularly intriguing, however, is that Mao Qiling’s concubine originally did not have a formal name, and, actually, it was Chen Weisong who gave her the name ‘Manshu’, while this name also happened to be the sobriquet of Xu Ziyun, Chen’s then-already deceased male lover. It was very likely that Chen Weisong named Mao’s concubine with his own deceased male lover in mind, perhaps as a subtle way to mourn him as

25 The original manuscript copy of this album containing the portrait and all the colophons as well as Mao Qiling’s own hand-written writings was found in Japan in the early twentieth century. Later a facsimile reprinted edition of the book was published in Shanghai. See Zhang Jusheng’s postscript to this facsimile edition at the end of the book, Mao Qiling, Manshu liu ying. 26 For a general study of this literati networking phenomenon during the late imperial period, Mao Wenfang, Tucheng xingle. 27 For a discussion of this project of Chen Weisong, see Volpp, ‘Literary Consumption of Actors in Seventeenth-Century China’.

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well, wittingly or unwittingly, highlighting the role as an ‘object’ of literati’s literary exchanges assumed by both Xu Ziyun, a male servant/lover, and Zhang Manshu, a concubine. Chen Weisong’s project on his male lover had apparently become an important public event of literati social networking at that time. It was very possible that Mao Qiling had in mind Chen’s project when he embarked on his own on his deceased concubine, especially given that Zhang Manshu and Xu Ziyun occupied a very similar position as an ‘object’ of representation in terms of their shared gender identity as the ‘feminine other’ in this mourning process of literati social networking. That Xu Ziyun was an actor/female impersonator only underscored the engendered nature of such an act of literati homosociality.28 Another of Mao Qiling’s contemporaries, the well-known poet, Fang Wen (1612–69) was also one of those who tried to turn the death of his concubine into a public mourning occasion of literati social networking. According to Fang Wen, after his principal wife, Zuoshi, suddenly died of a stroke, his in-laws began to take over their properties and even killed his concubine, Jinyuan, who was pregnant at that time, wrongly accusing her of having a hand in the death of Zuoshi.29 Later Fang Wen had her portrait painted and titled it ‘Baoyuan tu’ (literally, a portrait of someone holding a mandarin duck), probably a double homophonic reference to the name of his deceased concubine, Jinyuan, and the phrase baoyuan (being seriously wronged). He began to solicit colophons for the portrait from many of his peers and friends and it became quite a social event among the literati elite at that time.30

Some Conclusions Now many grieving literati husbands felt writing individual pieces of elegiac works such as a poem or a memorial essay was no longer enough. They needed to have a large project such as a book or an album dedicated to the deceased just in order to stand out as a great elegiac author and as a mourning husband of great cultural sophistication. At the same time, to be part of such a project by contributing colophons or poems was also a badge of honour for other participants. Mourning the death of a spouse thus became a communal act — a public process whereby the literary participation of the friends and peers of a grieving husband was desired as well as expected. It was no longer only a private act of mourning on the part of the bereaved. The death of one’s spouse became an occasion for 28 For discussions of literati and their relationships with female impersonators, besides Volpp’s article, see also Huang, Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China, pp. 140–46 and Wu Cuncun, Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China, pp. 64–84 and 116–58. 29 See Fang Wen’s long narrative poem, ‘Shu’ai’, in Fang Wen, Fang Tushan shiji, pp. 69–72. 30 See Li Shenhua, Fang Wen nianpu, pp. 272–74 and, for some of the colophons on the portrait contributed by these friends, refer to Li Shenhua, pp. 526, 529–30, 537, 541–42.

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validating or enhancing the grieving husband’s cultural and social standing among his literati peers, and sometimes an opportunity for his self-reinvention. Indeed, mourning the death of one’s own spouse as well as participating in the mourning of the deceased spouses of one’s friends became an important part of a literatus’s social life, whereas the ability to compose various types of memorial writings on demand at short notice was crucial to his image as a cultured man, as reflected in the collected works of many literati. Mourning was an important shared experience among the literati in that it enhanced their sense of the membership of a special homosocial community, where they not only shared the feelings of the losses of the loved ones but also, more importantly, had to demonstrate their special ability to articulate such mutual feelings of loss in a way that would reaffirm and solidify their standing as men of cultural sophistication. Death, especially the death of a spouse (often a concubine) became almost something to be ‘celebrated’ because her literatus husband cherished so greatly this rare opportunity such a death had granted him: her death was a great opportunity for her grieving husband and his peers to showcase their elegiac talents and to enhance their sentiment of homosocial solidarity. Sometimes the male mourner was much better remembered than the mourned female. Deceased concubines assumed a special function in this virtuoso exercise of self-promotion on the part of these male elegiac writers. A concubine, thanks to her lower and ambiguous status, proved to be a more convenient ‘subject’ for this kind of communal literati elegiac discourse, as her image could be manipulated more freely without as many concerns over Confucian decorum as there would be in the case of a formal wife. Here the aforementioned act of naming of Mao Qiling’s concubine on the part of Chen Weisong alerts us to an interesting fact — this kind of communal mourning project with the participation of many in the form of poetic colophons dedicated to a portrait of the deceased became more popular among the literati partly because the mourned was a concubine, whose status, in many ways, resembled that of Chen’s male lover, a servant boy/catamite, thus someone more easily objectified. While Qu Dajun, You Tong, and many others also solicited elegiac poems from their friends to honour their deceased wives, publicly requesting colophons for the portrait of one’s own deceased wife might be considered by some to be an act that was not so discreet. The case of a concubine was different: a concubine could perform the usual role of a wife under certain circumstances and yet, at the same time, she could also be a maid, who nevertheless remained sexually available for the husband, or even an entertainer, who otherwise could have become accessible only outside the family compound, as in the case of Mao Xiang’s concubine, Dong Xiaowang, a former courtesan. This also helps explain why in pre-modern China a man’s own deceased parents seldom became the subjects of his elegiac poems, except in those more functional or practical writings such as epitaphs and biographical sketches (epitaphs for burial and biographical sketches for epitaph writers), and why instead his spouses became the main subjects of his elegiac poems. However, compared with a deceased wife, a late concubine tended to occupy a more

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prominent place in the social circulation of grief among the literati. In the hierarchy of a family, a concubine occupied a position much lower than that of the principal wife. On the other hand, a concubine could still be considered a man’s spouse to qualify as the subject of traditional elegiac discourse normally reserved for a wife. At the same time, precisely because of her lower status, a concubine could more easily become an ‘object’ in this circulating process of grief that tended to pay more attention to her sexual appeal and other not-so-wifely qualities without overly scandalizing the more conservative. In the gradual shift of the focus from the mourned to the mourner in the development of elegiac writings in late imperial China, the concubine and her death appear to have performed a unique enabling function. As a female figure to be mourned, she has proven to be a favourite ‘metaphor’ in her mourning husband’s project of self-celebration — her ‘life’ as constructed and construed by her male mourner was presented largely as an illustration of his own virtues as a husband, and, more importantly, as a man of literary brilliance, as Mao Qiling and many others had unabashedly tried to emphasize in their elegiac writings. Her death was an excuse for the male mourner’s self-promotion and social self-reinvention.

Works Cited Primary Sources Chen Gongyin, Dulu tang ji (Guangzhou: Zhongshan daxue chubanshe, 1988) Fang Wen, Fang Tushan shiji (Hefei: Huangshan shushe, 2010) He Yuchun, comp., Shuohai (Beijing: Renmin ribao chubanshe, 1997) Huang Zongxi, Huang Zongxi quanji (Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 2005) Li Le, Jianwen zhaji (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986) Mao Qiling, Manshu liu ying: fu ming zhuan bing mingren tiba (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1930) ———, Xihe ji, reprinted in Siku quanshu (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987) Mao Xiang, Tongren ji, reprinted in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu ( Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1997) Pan Lei, Suichu tang wenji, reprinted in Siku quanshu cunmu congshu ( Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1997) Qu Dajun, Qu Dajun quanji (Beijing: Remin wenxue chubanshe, 1996) Tang Shunzhi, Jingchuan xiansheng wenji, reprinted in Sibu congkan (Taipei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1967) Wu Dingzhong, comp., Dong Xiaowan huikao (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2001) You Tong, Xitang zazu sanji, reprinted in Xuxiu Siku quanshu (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995) Zuo Tradition/Zuozhuan: Commentary on the ‘Spring and Autumn Annals’, trans. and introduced by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016)

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Secondary Studies Hawes, Colin S. C., The Social Circulation of Poetry in the Mid-Northern Song: Emotional Energy and Literati Self-Cultivation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005) Huang, Martin W., Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006) Hu Xu, Daowang shi shi (Beijing: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 2010) Lewis, Mark Edward, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999) Li Shenhua, Fang Wen nianpu (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2007) Mao Wenfang, Tucheng xingle: Ming Qing wenren huaxiang tiyong xilun (Teipei: Xuesheng shuju, 2008) Rolston, David, ‘Formal Aspects of Fiction Criticism and Commentary in China’, in How to Read the Chinese Novel, ed. by David Rolston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 42–74 Volpp, Sophie, ‘Literary Consumption of Actors in Seventeenth-Century China’, in Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrik Hanan, ed. by Judith Zeitlin, Lydia H. Liu, and Ellen Widmer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), pp. 153–83 Widmer, Ellen, ‘Xiaoqing’s Literary Legacy and the Place of the Woman Writer in Late Imperial China’, Late Imperial China, 13.1 (1992), 111–55 Wu Cuncun, Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China (New York: Routledge, 2012) Yu Zhanghua and Xu Qingping, Gudai zazhuan yanjiu (Changchun: Jilin wensyi chubanshe, 2005) Zhu Zejie, ‘Sanzhong tiyong lei Qingshi zongji yizhu xuba jikao’, Yuejiang xuekan, 6 (2010), 76–80

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Just a Humble Petitioner of a Saint? Devotion as a Strategy for Prestige in Depositions of Fourteenth-Century Italian Canonization Processes

In the fourteenth century, the need to invoke a saint for help often arose among daily tasks, in an accident or illness. After all, saints were considered to possess power over nature and a miracle was thought to be a sudden recovery or rescue in a situation beyond human help. To turn to a saint’s help was a traditional coping mechanism, and this mode of relief was, in principle, available to all Christians regardless of their place of residence, gender, economic status, or age.1 When a saint’s aid was pleaded for, it was necessary to show desperation, need, and humility. These were components of a successful interaction with a saint, emphasizing the hierarchy between the petitioner and the heavenly intercessor. After the grace was gained, the petitioner manifested his or her gratitude by offering a counter-gift to the saint. Promising an offering in exchange for a cure was part of the miracle schema: a traditional way to interact with a saint as well as a well-established component in a miracle narration. The promise to a saint was binding and it was a grave sin to leave the vow unfulfilled. Even if this basic formula of interaction was established and generally accepted, interaction with a saint offered room to manoeuvre, enabling individual initiatives.2 Invocations and votive offerings took many forms; in addition to material objects, rituals and bodily practices were also favoured as expressions





1 Since divine help was needed and pleaded for among the daily tasks and troubles, hagiographic material has long been used as a study for social history of the laity. See, especially, Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims and Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents; Sigal, L’homme et le miracle; Krötzl, Pilger, Mirakel und Alltag; Goodich, Violence and Miracle; and Lett, L’enfant des miracles. 2 On ritual interaction with a saint, see, for example, Sigal, ‘Le vœu et l’ex-voto dans l’Angleterre médiévale’, pp. 285–91; Klaniczay, ‘Ritual and Narrative in Late Medieval Miracle Accounts’, pp. 207–23. Sari Katajala-Peltomaa    is a Senior Research Fellow at HEX, Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University. Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 227-243 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126149

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of gratitude. A ritual performance as a manifestation of gratitude was not only targeted towards the Divine, it was also a social process, communication aimed at and inspected by the surrounding community. Such performances were symbolic, bodily narrations arguing for an affirmation of one’s position based on wealth and rank. They could also communicate complex and flexible social categories, such as being a successful nurturer, a devotee of a saint, a pious Christian. These rituals were manifestations of devotion, but simultaneously they were always also negotiations of status and gender; they were ways to display personal success and offered an opportunity to claim respect. In the context examined here, late medieval Italian urban settings, public rituals were a crucial part of religious and political life. Public ceremonies of religious and political nature intermingled; they were an essential way to construct and manifest patriotic and collective identities and coherence of a community.3 The same holds true for independent interaction with a saint. It was largely constructed of rituals made public; even private invocations were displayed to the community after receiving an answer to one’s prayers. Typical for Italian miracle narrations was the publicity afforded by the urban context. Invocations and thanksgiving rituals were a way to take initiative and claim agency in the field of religion; hence they were also a method of self-representation. The interaction with a saint was closely connected with the everyday responsibilities, options, and opportunities. One characteristic of the Italian context was the gendered modes of participation: pleading for the divine help for a family member seems to have been a particularly feminine duty. Men, on the other hand, seem to have mainly invoked the saint for help for themselves, while women’s caregiving role covered the whole (extended) family.4 These features make this context a particularly fruitful setting for the analysis of how religious performances — invocations for help and subsequent votive offerings — intermingled with gendered social status; if and how religious rituals and devotion were used as a strategy for prestige both on an individual and familial level.

Canonization Hearings as Source Material In late medieval Italy a petitioner in need had a wide variety of heavenly intercessors to choose from, and hagiographic material from this area is abundant. The focus here is on a specific type of miracle narration, namely depositions in canonization processes. Canonization was a papal privilege: all new saints and



3 See, for example, Jansen, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy; Webb, Patrons and Defenders; and Vauchez, Religion civique à l’époque médiévale. 4 On gendered participation and rituals in the Italian context, see Katajala-Peltomaa, Gender, Miracles and Daily Life, and comparison between northern and Italian practices, KatajalaPeltomaa, ‘Devotional Strategies in Everyday Life’, pp. 21–45.

j u s t a h u m b l e p e t i t i o ne r o f a sai nt ?

cults needed to be evaluated by the papal Curia before an official proclamation of sainthood; therefore an official judicial inquiry of the candidate for altars was needed. Canon law guided the practicalities of this kind of inquisitio: the pope opened the process and sent (usually three) commissioners of high clerical rank to carry out the interrogation of the life and miracles of the saintly candidate.5 Local proctors helped in the practicalities of hearings, and official notaries recorded the testimonies in formam publicam, guaranteeing the judicial reliability of the process. The witnesses, lay men and women who had personally known the saintly candidate or experienced or witnessed a miracle, were summoned before the inquisitorial committee.6 The witnesses swore an oath before being interrogated. While they were giving evidence of theological issues such as the holy life of the candidate and identifying their personal cures as supernatural, they were simultaneously narrating details of their daily life and describing their devotional practices and ritual performances. Witnesses were usually quite free to narrate their experiences, but, obviously, they chose the rhetoric they were willing to use at an interrogation and selected the details they were willing to make public. In addition to personal preferences, the hagiographic genre, particularly the miracle narratives and the questions of the inquisitorial committee, affected the outcome of hearings, the written canonization records. Furthermore, the local practicalities affected both the devotional practices and the way the oral depositions were written down. For example, the regulations of canon law were not always followed meticulously, and sometimes only one witness to the case was interrogated, even if canon law required corroborating testimonies. On occasion the testimonies were recorded in detail, while in other hearings they were heavily summarized.7 This chapter will give special focus to the canonization dossiers of Birgitta of Sweden8 and Nicholas of Tolentino.9 Birgitta’s canonization hearings





5 On technical and judicial aspects of canonization hearings, Vauchez, La Sainteté en Occident; Wetzstein, Heilige vor Gericht; Paciocco, Canonizzazioni e culto dei santi, and Krafft, Papsturkunde und Heiligsprechung. See also Katajala-Peltomaa and Krötzl, ‘Approaching Twelfth- to Fifteenth-Century Miracles’, pp. 1–39. 6 On notaries and interpreters, Krötzl, ‘Prokuratoren, Notare und Dolmetscher’, pp. 119–40 and Krötzl, ‘Vulgariter sibi exposito’, pp. 111–18. 7 On methodological approaches to canonization processes in general and examples with close reading of various processes, see Krötzl and Katajala-Peltomaa, eds, Miracles in Medieval Canonization Processes. 8 Birgitta of Sweden (1303–73) was a member of a Swedish noble family. She is one of the most well-known as well as controversial medieval saints. The scholarship on St Birgitta is vast, but her miracles have attracted less interest. See, however, Fröjmark, Mirakler och helgonkult; Myrdal and Bäärnhielm, eds, Kvinnor, barn & fester; Krötzl, Pilger, Mirakel, und Alltag; and Heβ, Heilige machen im spätmittelalterlichen Ostseeraum, pp. 99–204. On the practicalities of Birgitta’s canonization, see Nyberg, ‘The Canonization Process of St Birgitta of Sweden’, pp. 67–85. 9 Nicholas of Tolentino (1245–1305) was an Augustinian friar of humble origin, born after his parents’ invocation to his namesake, Nicholas of Bari. He was a familiar figure in Tolentino and was already famous for his sanctity during his lifetime. Gentili, ‘Introduzione’,

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were conducted during 1376–80 in a rather sporadic manner. Miracles had already been recorded in Sweden before the opening of the official process, and these cases were added to the canonization records. Instead of being divided into parts treating the life and miracles of the candidate, like many other contemporary canonization processes, Birgitta’s process consisted of the parts Acta, Attestaciones and Summarium. Attestaciones includes depositions of witnesses interrogated in Italy, Rome, and Naples, and it will be the focus on this chapter.10 The canonization process of Nicholas of Tolentino was carried out in Tolentino and in several nearby towns of the Marches of Ancona in 1325.11 This record was also not constructed in two parts: the depositions to life and miracles were interspersed with each other. Canonization inquests rarely offered an option for direct accusations or the shaming of others, since at stake was the sanctity and miracles of the candidate, not communal relations. Normally no one was blamed for the difficulties or misfortunes leading to the troublesome situation before the miracle. The depositions were not devoid of competition or status manifestation, though; these were only expressed in subtle ways. The witnesses’ intention was to convince the inquisitorial committee of their spiritual experiences and simultaneously of their worth as witnesses. While giving judicial proof of theological matters, the witnesses were simultaneously constructing an image of themselves as reliable, responsible, and honourable members of the community. The testimonies at an official inquiry were simultaneously a mode of identity building.

Crown of Thorns — Crown of Pearls Emotions were integral parts of the interaction with a saint, as miracles progressed from one emotion to the next: from desperation and fear via humility to joy, gratitude, and devotion. In general, affection and humility were central to all late medieval religiosity and were emphasized in devotional literature; the intention was that producing emotions would foster a more personal and intense relationship with Christ and other holy persons.12 pp. ix–xxvii; Lett, Un procès de canonisation, and San Nicola, Tolentino, le Marche. 10 The Acta includes practical information of the process and miracles recorded by local clergy in Sweden as well as letters from the bishop of Linkoping and archbishop of Lund, which also contain miracles. These miracles were often recorded in a summarized manner and the use of notaries was not typical in Sweden. Summarium is an abbreviation of the process done at the papal Curia. 11 The commissioners were Federico, bishop of Senigallia, and Tommaso di Cesena. Thomas di Fermo, lector of the Augustinian friars of Tolentino, acted as consultant, proctor, agent, promoter, and messenger. The official recognition of Nicholas’s sainthood took place more than a century after the inquiry in 1446. Il Processo, ed. by Occhioni. 12 The scholarship on affective religiosity and feminine spirituality has been vast in recent decades. The seminal author of the field is Caroline Walker Bynum. See especially Bynum, Jesus as Mother. See also Tinkle, Gender and Power; McNamer, Affective Meditation; and

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Contemplating Christ’s passion was especially important: narratives of Christ’s torture, including macabre details like the thorns of the crown entering Christ’s brain, were preached to the lay audience.13 Emotional responses to this kind of details were obviously personal, even intimate, modes of spirituality, but since emotions are also conveyed by cultural norms, they simultaneously were both produced by and contributed to the cultural and social context. Part of the affective religiosity was to put contemplation into practice: spiritual experiences were to be expressed within and by everyday contexts. All Christians were encouraged to use their senses, emotions, and imagination in the realm of religion. This was particularly relevant, however, to women, since affective devotion was associated with typically feminine virtues such as humility. Therefore, given the prevalence of emotionality in religiosity, close bonds with a heavenly intercessor, firm devotion, and humility before a saint were not only elements of inner spirituality, but also messages to the community. When a noble Roman lady, Ocillena, suffered from a painful throat, she first consulted doctors for help. She clearly had the economic means to afford medical help, as she was a member of the Colonna, one of the richest and most influential baronial families of late medieval Rome, and she was also the widow of a chancellor, Nicolaus de Montenigro. Doctors could not help her, however, and, as she testified, pronounced that she was about to die. According to them, only a divine miracle could rescue her. The doctors proclaiming her inevitable death was a deliberately chosen and significant detail in Ocillena’s deposition. This kind of rhetoric was part of the hagiographic genre underlining the fact that the heavenly remedy, the ability of a saint, was more powerful than any earthly medicament.14 At the same time, such details functioned on a personal level, stressing the desperate situation which, in turn, validated the cure as miraculous. At that point Ocillena invoked Birgitta for help. As a counter-gift, she promised, as soon as she was healthy enough to leave her house, to make with her own hands a crown of pearls and donate it to the monastery of St Laurent in Panisperna, where Birgitta had been buried. Furthermore, she promised to have a mass celebrated in Birgitta’s honour, and listen to the whole mass on her bare knees.15

Bryan, Looking Inward. 13 Karant-Nun, The Reformation of Feeling, throughout, for this detail p. 22. 14 Lett, ‘Judicium medicine and judicium sanctitatis’, pp. 153–70. 15 ‘deuote cum magna instancia votum emisit, quod, si Deus ipsam testem meritis et intercessionibus predicte domine Brigide de infirmitate huiusmodi liberaret, [ut] ipsa testis quamprimum sana posset domum exire, ipsa testis opraretur manibus proprijs vnam coronam de perlis et offerret eam in monasterio sancti Laurencij Panisperne, ubi dicta domina Brigida fuit sepulta, et ibidem unam missam deuote faceret celebrari et ad ipsam missam nudis pedibus et flexis, donec ipsa missa esset finita, staret.’ Acta et processus, ed. by Collijn, pp. 423–24. ‘She uttered the vow devotedly with great perseverance, asking if God

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Obviously a crown of pearls was an immensely valuable gift to a saint or a monastery. It clearly displayed the wealth of Ocillena and her family, assuring their position in social hierarchies. Late medieval Rome was a city controlled and led by baronial families counterbalancing papal power. With their allies, Ocillena’s natal family, the Colonna, were in constant fierce rivalry with the Orsini family and their supporters. Ferocious and aggressive political rivalry between various parties often had very concrete eruptions: violence was endemic. The prevalence of violence was manifested in the grim and fortified towers — still prominent in the cityscape — where the elite families lived. The Avignon era altered the pope’s position within Rome and the city’s political balance, but by the time of Ocillena’s testimony in October 1379, Pope Gregory XI had returned to Rome, ending the Avignon era.16 The competition between baronial families often broke out as strife, but the elite families also knew how to employ more delicate methods in their thirst for power and authority. Members of both the Colonna and Orsini families, for example, occupied many important ecclesiastical positions: they were bishops and cardinals, even popes. Margherita Colonna (c. 1255–80) also enjoyed a saintly reputation. The Colonna family in particular had a sort of monastery policy as part of their political strategy. The kin group was active in founding monasteries in Rome and nearby to gain land and control. In addition to the monastery of Poor Clares in San Silvestro in Capite, in 1308 Cardinal Giacomo Colonna (1270–1329) founded a second Clarissan monastery in Panisperna. Many women of the Colonna and supporting families were cloistered in these monastic houses, and the abbesses especially came from these families. Accordingly the target of Ocillena’s donation was not haphazard or done solely out of devotion to Birgitta. The monastery of St Laurent in Panisperna was a key element in Colonna policy, even if San Silvestro in Capite seems to have been a more important site of devotion for the women of the family.17 At first Panisperna housed twelve sisters, but by 1383 there were already thirty-six of them. The fame of Birgitta and her relics likely increased the importance and status of the monastery. The Colonna family did not have

would, for the merits and intercession of said lady Birgitta, free her from that illness, then the said witness would, as soon as she was healthy and could leave her house, make, with her own hands, a crown of pearls and offer it to the monastery of St Laurent in Panisperna, where said lady Birgitta had been buried. Furthermore, she would devotedly have a mass celebrated and [attend] the mass with bare feet and on her knees, and remain until the mass was finished.’ It should be noted that what exactly was meant with coronam de perlis remains a bit unclear. Corona could also mean a garland and perla could indicate beads. Thus, to make a rosary could have been Ocillena’s intention — and it would have been easier for her to accomplish with her own hands. Nevertheless, votive offerings of precious metal and jewels were not unknown. See, Katajala-Peltomaa, Gender, Miracles and Daily Life, p. 206. 16 Brentano, ‘Violence, Disorder, and Order in Thirteenth-Century Rome’, pp. 308–30. Carocci, Baroni di Roma. 17 Rehberg, ‘Nobiltà e monasteri femminili’, pp. 403–35; Ait, ‘Il patrimonio delle clarisse di San Lorenzo’, pp. 453–72; and Marini, ‘Il monastero di San Lorenzo in Panisperna’, pp. 437–52.

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exclusive authority over the monastery, though; in 1354 the abbess was a certain domina Ursina from the Orsini family.18 Birgitta had frequented the monastery in Panisperna during her years in Rome, and when she died she was buried in the church of San Laurent for a few months before her relics were transferred to Sweden in 1374. The Clarissan monastery in Panisperna and especially the church of San Laurent were centres of her cult in Rome, and miracles even took place there during her funeral.19 Connections to St Birgitta were important for the family strategy of the Colonna. After all, Cardinal Agapito de Colonna (1325–80) was one of the commissioners carrying out the hearing for Birgitta’s canonization.20 Many family members of the Colonna were beneficiaries of Birgitta’s intervention and cured of various illnesses. Ocillena is, however, the only one to testify herself in the hearing. Miraculous experiences by this family were, however, promoted by an influential person: dominus Alfonsus seem to have been quite eager to recite the miraculous recoveries of the kin group. Alfonsus was the former bishop of Jaén and an active promotor of Birgitta and her cult. He had been a close associate of Birgitta; he helped her to get papal approval for the rule of her monastic order and revised Birgitta’s Revelaciones for publication.21 According to him, the Colonna family had private relics of Birgitta, and another noble lady married to the family, domina Johanna, also promised a crown of pearls to the monastery in Panisperna.22 He may have mixed up various recoveries and promises of the ladies of the family — or this sort of valuable offering to Birgitta was indeed a custom within this family. Regardless of its value, the crown was not enough on its own, and a personal commitment of the petitioner was also emphasized in the vow: Ocillena promised to make it herself, tying herself intimately to both Birgitta and the monastery of St Laurent. A donation of a personal object, such as a personally made crown, bears the memory of the donor with it; it made the liaison between the donor, gift, and recipient visible and concrete. When the crown was displayed, it served as a clear memento of its donor and of her economic position and piety.23

18 Ait, ‘Il patrimonio delle clarisse di San Lorenzo’, p. 457. 19 The first ones to be cured after Birgitta’s death were a noble lady Agnes de Contessa and a sister in the monastery of Panisperna, Francisca Papazzura. Acta et processus, ed. by Collijn, pp. 26, 283, 341–42, 362, 395, 397, 421, 447, and 458. 20 The commissioners in Birgitta’s hearing were four cardinals: Thomas de Frignano, a Franciscan friar and former general of the order, Johannes de Amelia, former archbishop of Corfu, Agapito de Colonna, former bishop of Lisbon, and Gentilis de Sangro. 21 Päivi Salmesvuori, Power and Sainthood, pp. 14–15. 22 Acta et processus, ed. by Collijn, pp. 402–04. 23 Gift exchange was an indispensable part of reciprocal interaction in the medieval world; it was a crucial mode of bonding both in the social and spiritual sphere. The scholarship from the last two decades is way too vast to be mentioned here in full. See, for example, Bijsterveld, The Medieval Gift; Algazi, Groebner, and Jussen, eds, Negotiating the Gift.

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As an act of gratitude, Ocillena also humbled herself. Kneeling during the prayer symbolizes the submissive position of the petitioner, and could make prayers more effective. Her performance also further stressed the link between herself, the monastery, and Birgitta, as this penitential act also enabled fuller contact with the sacred space, the church that used to house Birgitta’s body. Attending mass barefoot and on one’s knees on a stone floor may have been a rather uncomfortable experience; it was a penitential act emphasizing her humility and devotion, which was further stressed by its duration: Ocillena promised to maintain the performance all through the mass. These rituals narrated a story of devotion, humility, and dedication — but not only that. Humility was the virtual antithesis of the sin of pride, and an established element of religious rhetoric. ‘The last shall be first’ (Matthew 20.16), and Ocillena had voluntarily renounced signs of her worldly wealth and prestige. The premise for this kind of performance was obviously to have a position one could renounce. Since penance enabled entrance into heaven, Ocillena’s gestures also argued that because of her humility she was worthy of redemption.24 Thus she managed to stress her prestigious social status and her respectful religious position simultaneously. As a point of comparison for Ocillena’s activities, one may take the Orsini family, the closest rival of the Colonna. Four members, dominus Latinus de Ursini, domina Angela de Ursinis, domina Golicia de Ursinis, and Count Nicholas de Nola were testifying in the canonization process of Birgitta.25 The number of witnesses is a telling detail since miracles and depositions in a canonization dossier were always a selection. The investigation and recording took time, money, and effort and only the most reliable cases were chosen to be investigated and the most reliable and trustworthy people selected as witnesses. Therefore, unlike in many other court records, to be summoned as a witness in a canonization hearing was a sign of privileged status.26 Furthermore, the Orsini depositions were considerably long; these four witnesses were interrogated much more thoroughly than Ocillena, who testified only about her own cure. Correspondingly, the Orsini family had benefitted from more miracles — both in vita and post mortem — and these incidents had a wider reputation: several witnesses outside the kin group testified to them by hearsay. The only other witnesses to mention the miraculous cure of Ocillena were dominus Alfonsus and Lucie Nicolle, even if many other ladies had been present, as they argued.27

24 Voluntary humility when approaching the divine was also emphasized in several passages in the Bible. On the humility topos, see Newman, ‘Crucified by the Virtues’, pp. 182–209. 25 Prefatus Nicolaus comites Nolanum, Acta et processus, ed. by Collijn, pp. 226–36; dominus Latinus baronis Romani, pp. 352–63; domina Angela de Ursinis, pp. 434–35; domina Golicia de Ursinis, pp. 448–59. 26 The dominion of elite Guelph families among witnesses is particularly emphasized in Nicholas of Tolentino’s hearings. Lett, Un process de canonisation and Lett, ‘La parole des humbles comme ressource’, pp. 233–40. 27 Acta et processus, ed. by Collijn, pp. 396, 424–25.

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The Orsini seem, then, to have been more successful in making their close liaison with Birgitta acknowledged; their fame as beneficiaries of miraculous interventions was widespread. These quantitative elements, however, tell only one side of the story. When comparing the qualitative details, one may note that the recorded votive offerings of the Orsini family were much more modest than that of Ocillena. Domina Angela, for example, promised only a wax arm in exchange for a cure of her son from scrofula. Wax images in the form of the ailing body part were the most typical votive offerings favoured by petitioners from all walks of life. In Angela’s case, it may have been of more expensive quality, but nothing in the deposition indicated this, nor a particular manifestation of personal devotion towards Birgitta. Ocillena, in turn, skilfully employed and manifested these elements in her deposition. Ocillena seems to have been aware of how to utilize ritual participation in creating a relationship with a heavenly intercessor. The affective elements, like personally made objects and the manifestation of humility, did not by any means lessen the prestige of her social status and economic position; rather they mutually reinforced one another. The Orsini as a family may have been more successful in promoting their position in the canonization process than the Colonna, but on a personal level, Ocillena was not just another humble petitioner pleading for Birgitta’s help. She managed to manifest her devotion, affirm her social status, and elevate her social position all at the same time. Her devotional strategy was successful in gaining prestige.

Pilgrimages as Political Messages The practicalities of the cult of saints were interwoven with political alliances and aspirations all over medieval Europe. They were a way to manifest familial or patriotic pride and create coherence. In Italy, this intermingling of religion and politics was noticeable because the area was a hotspot both politically and religiously. Quite of few of the small city-states had their own temporally close heavenly intercessor — some even several of them. Furthermore, exerting dominance over geographic areas and forming alliances to secure dominion were tumultuous endeavours. Competition, aggression, even actual warfare between various groups, families, and cities was a constant state of affairs. This instability was by no means alleviated by the rivalry between the pope and the emperor and between the Guelph and Ghibelline factions, the former supporting the pope and the latter the emperor.28 As a further complication, these factions were divided internally, and were not stable, since cities might change sides, sometimes even rapidly or repeatedly. As canonization was a papal privilege, it was also a device in the pope’s assertion of power; it could serve as a way to reward loyal supporters by 28 On political relations in the area, see Cecchi, ‘Tolentino al tempo di San Nicola’, pp. 129–57.

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granting official recognition for their patron, or at least opening a hearing to investigate it. Even to initiate the canonization process required active campaigning in the Curia. Didier Lett estimates that a papal reward to loyal allies may have been behind the decision of Pope John XXII (1316–34) to open the canonization hearing of Nicholas of Tolentino in 1325. Nicholas himself had not been a political figure, nor was he connected to the power struggles between Guelphs and Ghibellines. He was an Augustinian friar well known for his humility and ascetic way of life; he died in 1305. However, his cult and the way his canonization process was carried out was closely linked to political power struggles. The canonization hearing was held in cities of the Marches of Ancona which belonged to the Guelph faction, and elite local families of Guelph background dominated the hearing as witnesses. Their political adversaries or beneficiaries of more modest background were not called for questioning on the matter.29 Thus political alliance and social position were the selection criteria in this process. Gender, on the other hand, does not seem to have been the most important status marker in the selection, as Nicholas’s hearing has a relatively balanced gender ratio among witnesses: 194 men and 174 women. Even if hagiographic material typically contains more female protagonists than do medieval documents and texts in general, the clear majority of the miracle beneficiaries tend to be male. Furthermore, canon law cautioned about the use of women as witnesses; on occasion their testimony was prohibited altogether, and in cases of controversy, men’s testimonies were to prevail over women’s. These regulations were followed in disparate ways, however, when the canonization hearings were carried out.30 Among these privileged witnesses in Nicholas’s hearing was domina Annese, the widow of dominus Ugolinus de Marsiano. She was originally from a noble family from Perugia and was married to the ducal family of Marciano, among which the counts of Orvieto originated. With her lady companions, domina Annese testified to a liberation miracle performed by St Nicholas in Perugia, in which a prisoner was freed after making an invocation to St Nicholas aloud. Domina Annese, domina Olivella Butii, domina Lucola Venture, and domina Mathiola Luce were going to church when the miracle took place.31 Even if this was not a personal recovery or rescue, the miracle itself carried a strong message: since God had the power to set the prisoners free (Isaiah 61.1), St Nicholas clearly was God’s chosen and worked miracles

29 On practicalities of this hearing, see Gentili, ‘Introduzione’, pp. ix–xxvii; San Nicola, Tolentino, le Marche and Lett, Un procès de canonisation. 30 On gender and other elements of status as a selection criteria, see Katajala-Peltomaa, Gender, Miracles and Daily Life, pp. 23–70. See also James Brundage, ‘Juridical Space’, pp. 147–56. 31 These women’s testimonies are in Il Processo, ed. by Occhioni, testis XLII–XLV, pp. 174–98, also citationes testium, p. 65. On domina Annese position’s as a member of the upper aristocracy, see Sensi, ‘Nobildonne di casa Trinci e Marsciano’, pp. 363–70.

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through God’s power. Therefore all those venerating St Nicholas were also on the side of the righteous. All the aforementioned dominae made a joint pilgrimage to the shrine in Tolentino on the feast of St Nicholas. Domina Annese may have made the journey out of personal devotion, as Nicholas had also rescued her nephew, as she testified. She had also heard of other miracles performed by Nicholas. However, her pilgrimage was not merely an act of piety since at the same time she was making a public, political statement with her performance. She was supporting the political choices of her families, since her hometown Perugia, and Orvieto, the residence of her husband’s family, were controlled by the Guelph faction. Similar interconnection between personal devotion and family politics can be found in Matelica. A noble lady named Caradruda, domina Annessucia, and domina Iohanna Mulucii testified to the miraculous recoveries that had taken place in their domestic lives: the recoveries of their grandson, son, and stepdaughter. By their depositions, they were depicting themselves as fulfilling the traditional caregiving roles and gendered expectations of their culture. They were displaying their devotion and making visible their domestic caregiving by embarking on a pilgrimage on a feast day of St Nicholas in exchange for a miraculous recovery. Pilgrimage of this sort could in itself be seen as a claim for esteemed position; after all, a cured child and saved offspring was a source of joy and pride in a society with high child mortality. The intermingling of devotion with caregiving was not all they communicated, though. They belonged to the wealthy and powerful family of the Mulucci which controlled the city of Matelica during these years.32 Therefore, at the same time they were making manifest their support for the political choices of their families. The support for a Guelph saint was a particularly political act in Matelica. It had earlier belonged to the Ghibelline faction, but after Concordia, a 1308 peace treaty with Camerino, a leading city of the area, the Guelph faction gained influence in Matelica. The role of women was emphasized in the reconciliation process, which was controlled by the pope. The intention was to seal the peace treaty via the exchange of women, that is, with intermarriages between the towns. Italian custom had the wife moving to the husband’s commune, and the intent of the pact was to prevent future hostilities or even turn them into emotional bonds by sending daughters to the former enemy city-states. San Severino, Fabriano, and Matelica — the other party of the peace treaty — never actually sent their daughters to Camerino in marriage. Nevertheless the Concordia signifies the importance to and intermingling of family affairs with politics and was by no means the only example of a marriage pact as a means of peace-making.33

32 These women’s testimonies are in Il Processo, ed. by Occhioni, testis CXCVI–CXCVIII, pp. 439–43, citationes testium, pp. 66. For the Mulucci family, Lett, Un procès de canonization, p. 44. 33 Lett, ‘Genre et pais’, pp. 629–55. See also Jansen, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy.

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To embark on a journey to a sacred location was not a decision made lightly, or purely out of devotion, as it required time, effort, and money. Such travels could have been rough and even dangerous. Pilgrimages were acts of devotion but simultaneously they were public performances; a journey to a sacred place took the participants out of their homes and hometowns. Travelling to a sacred place could form a liminal moment with direct communication with the Divine. However, such travels were also visible and examinable, and examined, by others: they were social performances. In late medieval Italy, a pilgrim had various options to choose from — and choose they must. Therefore, in a region divided by rivalling factions, a pilgrimage to a shrine in a city supporting the Guelph faction was a politically laden act. It was part of the rivalry on a larger political scale, but it also formed part of familial and personal competition. Pilgrimages were also shared rituals: by travelling together these women of elite background emphasized their collective identity, as members of the elite families but also as feminine caregivers of their families. Joint travel also symbolized their loyalty to each other and marked them out from the rest of the community. These performances were affirmations of belonging to the triumphant party and of having an advantageous position in both the field of politics and in religion.

Performing Gender — Competing for Status Women were rarely agents of violence on a communal level. They were, nevertheless, by their familial ties part of the competition between different factions, be they baronial families in late medieval Rome or Guelphs and Ghibellines on the Apennine peninsula. The private and public relations were entangled in the field of politics and this had an immense influence on the social and cultural construction of femininity in late medieval Italy. Elite women could and even had to take various measures for the promotion of themselves and families. From this perspective, politics was not solely a masculine endeavour. Gender was not the sole determining element, and the ritual performances described in the depositions show how it was intermingled with other elements of status such as age, marital status, and economic position. The construction of femininity was an active ongoing process requiring negotiation and renegotiation; it was performed and lived out daily in communal and familial life. Motherhood, family politics, and economic position had an immense influence on the performance.34 So, if Ocillena ever made good her promise of listening to the mass on her bare knees after donating the valuable crown, she was not

34 On gender as occupying multiple sites along a continuum or within a matrix, see, for example, the following collections by Pasternack and Farmer, eds, Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages and Bitel and Lifshitz, eds, Gender and Christianity in Medieval

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only performing the identity of a pious and devout widow. Certainly she was manifesting her devotion, but at the same time she was claiming the monastery of San Laurent as part of the dominion of her natal family, the Colonna. By her performance she was both tying herself to the peer group of elite women and setting herself apart from them, as she belonged to the family who had established the monastery. She was competing on an individual level by manifesting her piety and on a familial level by asserting the authority and prestige of her family in this monastery. Her primary audience was the nuns of her peer group: kin, supporting, and rival families. Some of them may have even been in a similar position as widows, since many elite women of the Roman baronial families retired to a monastery in widowhood. However, since by the end of the fourteenth century Italian nunneries were not yet particularly strict with the clausura, it is more than likely that word of her devotional act got around. Ultimately her performance was aimed at and likely also reached wider Roman society.35 Correspondingly, the noble dominae at the shrine of St Nicholas were making visible their private caregiving roles by embarking on a pilgrimage to fulfil a vow after receiving a hoped-for cure. They demonstrated that they had been successful in their nurturing role and fulfilled the position society expected of them. They were, however, more than just wives, mothers, and grandmothers. They all belonged to the ruling faction of their place of origin. Therefore the public performance of a pilgrimage had political overtones and was also viewed in that context. By their travel, they were underlining the political choices, the support to the Guelph faction, of their families, and demonstrating their dominance over their opponents. These elements were displayed by bodily practices and these rituals and symbols told a story of devotion, piety, and faith — but also one of economic and political success. Mundane political goals, family power, and personal prestige were by no means the sole or cynical aims of these religious rituals. Quite the contrary: religion-as-lived was an integral part of these spheres as well, and a division between them would be impossible and futile. These performances, invocations, votive offerings, and pilgrimages had spiritual significance for the participants, and by living out their religion the aforementioned women simultaneously participated in the social life of their families and communities. Indeed, it was possible to use these rituals for social ends precisely because of the spiritual and devotional value bestowed by the pilgrimages and the successful interaction with a saint. For these women, devotion, as it appeared in their depositions and in ritual participation, was a way to construct and perform Europe. On the evolution of gender concepts and particularly lacunas or ‘blind spots’ in the historiography of medieval and early modern studies, see Muravyeva and Toivo, ‘Introduction’. Cf. Tinkle, Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis, p. 38. 35 Ait, ‘Il patrimonio delle clarisse di San Lorenzo’, on Colonna women’s testaments and other donations to San Silvestro in Capite and San Laurent in Pansiperna, see Rehberg, ‘Nobiltà e monastery femminili nel Trecento romano’. On implementations of clausura, Gill, ‘Scandala’, pp. 177–203.

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gender, and a viable strategy in the sphere of social and political competition for prominent status.

Works Cited Primary Sources Acta et processus canonizacionis Beate Birgitte: Efter Cod. A 14 Holm., Cod. Ottob. lat. 90 o. Cod. Harl. 612, ed. by Isak Collijn, Svenska Fornskriftsällskapet, 2nd ser., Latinska Skrifter, 1 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1924–31) Il Processo per la canonizzazione di S. Nicola da Tolentino, ed. by Nicola Occhioni (Rome: Padri Agostiniani Tolentino, École française de Rome, 1984) Secondary Studies Ait, Ivana, ‘Il patrimonio delle clarisse di San Lorenzo in Panisperna tra XIV e XV secolo: prime indagini’, Roma religiosa: monasteri e città (secoli VI–XVI), ed. by Giulia Barone and Umberto Longo, Reti medievali rivista, 19.1 (2018), 453–72 Algazi, Gadi, Groebner Valentin, and Bernhard Jussen, eds, Negotiating the Gift: Pre-modern Figurations of Exchange (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003) Bijsterveld, Jan-Arnoud, The Medieval Gift as Agent of Social Bonding and Political Power: A Comparative Approach (Leiden: Brill, 2001) Bitel, Lisa, and Felice Lifshitz, eds, Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) Brentano, Robert, ‘Violence, Disorder, and Order in Thirteenth-Century Rome’, in Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities, 1200–1500, ed. by Lauro Martines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 308–30 Brundage, James, ‘Juridical Space: Female Witnesses in Canon Law’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 52 (1998), 147–56 Bryan, Jennifer, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) Bynum, Caroline Walker, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) Carocci, Sandro, Baroni di Roma: dominazioni signorili e lignaggi aristocratici nel Duecento e nel primo Trecento (Rome: École française de Rome, 1993) Cecchi, Dante, ‘Tolentino al tempo di San Nicola’, in San Nicola, Tolentino, le Marche: contributi e ricerche sul processo (a. 1325) per la canonizzazione di San Nicola da Tolentino; convengo internazionale di studi, Tolentino, 4.–7. Settembre 1985 (Tolentino: Pezzotti, 1987), pp. 129–57 Finucane, Ronald, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London: Dent, 1977)

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———, The Rescue of the Innocents: The Endangered Children in Medieval Miracles (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000) Fröjmark, Anders, Mirakler och helgonkult: Linköpings biskopsdöme under senmedeltiden (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 1992) Gentili, Domenico, ‘Introduzione’, in Il Processo per la canonizzazione di S. Nicola da Tolentino, ed. by Nicola Occhioni (Rome: Padri Agostiniani di Tolentino, École française de Rome, 1984), pp. ix–xxvii Gill, Katherine, ‘Scandala: Controversies concerning clausura and Women’s Religious Communities in Late Medieval Italy’, in Christendom and its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000–1500, ed. by Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 177–203 Goodich, Michael, Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public Salvation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) Heß, Cordelia, Heilige machen im spätmittelalterlichen Ostseeraum: Die Kanonisationsprozesse von Birgitta von Schweden, Nikolaus von Linköping und Dorothea von Montau (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008) Jansen, Katherine Ludwig, Peace and Penance in Late Medieval Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018) Karant-Nun, Susan, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) Katajala-Peltomaa, Sari, Gender, Miracles and Daily Life: The Evidence of FourteenthCentury Canonization Processes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009) ———, ‘Devotional Strategies in Everyday Life: Laity’s Interaction with Saints in the North in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Lived Religion and the Long Reformation in Northern Europe, c. 1300–1700, ed. by Sari KatajalaPeltomaa and Raisa Maria Toivo (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 21–45 Katajala-Peltomaa, Sari, and Christian Krötzl, ‘Approaching Twelfth- to FifteenthCentury Miracles: Miracle Registers, Collections, and Canonization Processes as Source Material’, in Miracles in Medieval Canonization Processes: Structures, Functions, and Methodologies, ed. by Christian Krötzl and Sari KatajalaPeltomaa (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 1–39 Klaniczay, Gábor, ‘Ritual and Narrative in Late Medieval Miracle Accounts. The Construction of the Miracle’, in Religious Participation in Ancient and Medieval Societies: Rituals, Interaction and Identity, ed. by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Ville Vuolanto, Acta Institutum Romanum Finlandiae, 41 (Rome: Institutum Romanum Finlandiae, 2013), pp. 207–23 Krafft, Otfried, Papsturkunde und Heiligsprechung: Die päpstlichen Kanonisationen vom Mittelalter bis zur Reformation; Ein Handbuch, Archiv für Diplomatik, Beiheft, 9 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005) Krötzl, Christian, Pilger, Mirakel und Alltag: Formen des Verhaltens im skandinavischen Mittelalter (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1994) Krötzl, Christian, ‘Vulgariter sibi exposito. Zu Uebersetzung und Sprachbeherrschung im Spaetmittelalter am Beispiel von Kanonisationsprozessen’, Das Mittelalter, 2 (1997), 111–18

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———, ‘Prokuratoren, Notare und Dolmetscher. Zu Gestaltung und Ablauf der Zeugeneinvernahmen bei spätmittelalterlichen Kanonisationsprozessen’, Hagiographica, 5 (1998), 119–40 Krötzl, Christian, and Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, eds, Miracles in Medieval Canonization Processes: Structures, Functions, and Methodologies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018) Lett, Didier, L’enfant des miracles: enfance et société au Moyen Âge (xiie–xiiie siècle) (Paris: Aubiers, 1997) ———, Un process de canonisation au Moyen Âge: essai d’histoire sociale; Nicolas de Tolentino, 1325 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2008) ———, ‘Genre et pais. Des mariages croisés entre quatre communes de la Marche d’Ancone en 1306’, Annales: histoire, sciences sociales, 67 (2012), 629–55 ———, ‘La parole des humbles comme ressource. L’utilisation de la procédure inquisitoire par les postulateurs de la cause dans la procès de canonisation de Nicolas de Tolentino (1325)’, in Agiografia e culture popolari: Hagiography and Popular Cultures, ed. by Paolo Golinelli (Bologna: CLUEB, 2012), pp. 233–40 ———, ‘Judicium medicine and judicium sanctitatis. Medical Doctors in the Canonization Process of Nicholas of Tolentino (1325): Experts Subject to Inquisitorial Logic’, in Church and Belief in the Middle Ages: Popes, Saints and Crusaders, ed. by Kirsi Salonen and Sari Katajala-Peltomaa (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), pp. 153–70 Marini, Alfonso, ‘Il monastero di San Lorenzo in Panisperna nel tessuto urbano di Roma nei secoli XIV–XV’, Roma religiosa: monasteri e città (secoli VI–XVI), ed. by Giulia Barone and Umberto Longo, Reti medievali rivista, 19.1 (2018), 437–52 McNamer, Sarah, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) Muravyeva, Marianna, and Raisa Toivo, ‘Introduction: Why and How Gender Matters’, in Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Marianna G. Muravyeva and Raisa Maria Toivo (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1–16 Myrdal, Janken, and Göran Bäärnhielm, eds, Kvinnor, barn & fester i medeltida mirakelberättelser (Skara: Skaraborgs Länsmuseum, 1994) Newman, Martha, ‘Crucified by the Virtues: Monks, Lay Brothers, and Women in Thirteenth-Century Cistercian Saints’ Lives’, in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. by Sharon Farmer and Carol B. Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 182–209 Nyberg, Tore, ‘The Canonization Process of St Birgitta of Sweden’, in Procès de canonisation au Moyen Âge: Medieval Canonisation Processes, ed. by Gábor Klaniczay (Rome: École française de Rome, 2004), pp. 67–85 Paciocco, Roberto, Canonizzazioni e culto dei santi nella ‘christianitas’ (1198–1302) (Assisi: Porziuncola, 2006) Pasternack, Carol B., and Sharon Farmer, eds, Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

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Rehberg, Andreas, ‘Nobiltà e monasteri femminili nel Trecento romano: il caso dei conventi delle clarisse di San Silvestro in Capite e di San Lorenzo in Panisperna’, Roma religiosa: monasteri e città (secoli VI–XVI), ed. by Giulia Barone and Umberto Longo, Reti medievali rivista, 19.1 (2018), 403–35 Salmesvuori, Päivi, Power and Sainthood: The Case of Birgitta of Sweden (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) San Nicola, Tolentino, le Marche: contributi e ricerche sul Processo (a. 1325) per la canonizzazione di San Nicola da Tolenino; convengo internazionale di studi, Tolentino 4.–7. Settembre 1985 (Tolentino: Pezzotti, 1987) Sensi, Mario, ‘Nobildonne di casa Trinci e Marsciano, due famiglie comitali umbre, devote di San Nicola da Tolentino’, in San Nicola, Tolentino, le Marche: contributi e ricerche sul processo (a. 1325) per la canonizzazione di San Nicola da Tolentino; convengo internazionale di studi, Tolentino, 4.–7. Settembre 1985 (Tolentino: Pezzotti, 1987), pp. 363–70 Sigal, Pierre-André, L’homme et le miracle dans la France médiévale (xie– xiie siècle) (Paris: Cerf, 1985) ———, ‘Le vœu et l’ex-voto dans l’Angleterre médiévale d’après le procès de canonisation de saint Thomas de Cantiloupe, évêque de Hereford († 1282)’, in Homo religiosus: Autour de Jean Delumeau (Paris: Fayard, 1997), pp. 285–91 Tinkle, Theresa, Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010) Vauchez, André, La Sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge: d’après les procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Rome: École française de Rome, 1988) ———, Religion civique à l’époque médiévale et moderne: chrétienté et islam (Rome: École française de Rome, 1995) Webb, Diana, Patrons and Defenders: The Saints in the Italian City-States (New York: Taurus, 1996) Wetzstein, Thomas, Heilige vor Gericht: Das Kanonisationsverfahren im europäischen Mittelalter (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004)

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Martha Bayless

Performances — Reflections and Concluding Remarks

In these four works the public performance of virtue or skill is the vehicle for increased status and prestige. The most visible and straightforward of these competitions for power was the early medieval board game, where skill at this mini-performance of martial competition was regarded as the emblem of a leader’s skill at war and dominance. As such, the board game was an emblem of agency, normally the preserve of men, and, as depicted in literature, the prize was often those without agency: women. Both literature and history reflect instances of women attempting to play the game, often with success, though that success is frequently deplored by observers. Those women who did play the game typically came from positions of power, as royalty or as supernatural beings, or even, as in the case of the sixth-century abbess of Poitiers, as abbess, at the pinnacle of power in a realm of women. Thus it appears that women did not earn the right to compete by winning at the game, but only had the chance to win at the game when they had already won the chance to compete. The instance of the ‘woman warrior’ of Birka shows that in some instances a woman might even have retained that right. By contrast, it is notable that in two of these studies, the greater prestige of men does not just exclude women but is founded on the erasure of women. In the example of seventeenth-century China, the performance of men is literally constructed on the death of women. In celebrating the women’s lives and virtues, the men are celebrating women who no longer have any agency whatsoever, by virtue of being dead. The primacy of men in this equation is reinforced by the fact that poems were also contributed by the male friends of the husband or male mourner, rather than by women who might have been close to the deceased. In the case of You Tong, You Tong’s own biography celebrates his public mourning and its associated collection of elegies, so that the impact of his wife’s death is effectively transferred to him. The absence of any benefit to the women involved is underscored by the lengthy letter written by Mao Qiling to his concubine, Zhang Manshu, after her death — a letter Martha Bayless    is Professor of English and Folklore at the University of Oregon (USA). Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 245-247 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126150

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that she could never see, but that could be admired by those to whom the letter was effectively addressed: his male peers. As Huang points out, these mourning documents formed part of a homosocial network. The position of men in speaking for their women echoed the women’s erasure in life. Mao Qiling observed in his description of Manshu, ‘Her handwriting was so much like mine, people thought I wrote for her’.1 Indeed, the effacement of such women was so marked that it is almost as if their chief accomplishment was to die and provide such an opportunity for their men. In this regard Qu Dajun wrote about the loss of his wife: ‘Alas, you were a woman and yet you have been celebrated in so many writings to eulogize you in the nether world! You should have no regret dying so young […] There has never been a book such as this collection’.2 The effacement of living women was also on display in the China of the first and second centuries bce, as Zhou describes. The jealousy ascribed to women was closely allied to self-promotion, but women’s self-denial was celebrated as a factor in the prosperity of the kingdom. For men to prevail over other men in the political realm, in other words, first women had to suppress their individual strivings. As subordinates, in their roles as wives or concubines, women’s positions depended on the favour of the man they served. In this sense women resembled male courtiers, whose positions depended on the favour of the king, but it is clear that women were considered the ‘natural’ subordinates; as Zhou points out, the situation of male courtiers is framed with reference to women competing for the favour of a man. In effect, any woman’s husband was her king. The example of fourteenth-century Rome both affirms and complicates these dynamics. As Kajala-Peltomaa demonstrates, women were once again subordinate to a greater power, but in this case it was the supernatural power of the saint; and that power might even be female, as in the case of St Birgitta. Although women’s self-subordination contributed to the prestige and power of their kin groups and political factions, the power of public display was not granted solely to men, but benefited the women as well. In their public pilgrimages and performances, the women were drawing attention to special favours granted to them by the powerful saint. Some of these methods of devotional display were typically feminine, such as crafting a crown of pearls or undergoing the self-mortification of a mass on bare knees; but others were less so, particularly the pilgrimages. Women in general often went on pilgrimage, so the pilgrimage was not an entry into a typically male realm, but for all its pious purpose, it was an experience of comparative freedom for women, involving an excursion outside the domestic sphere, the pleasures of tourism, the headiness of mixing with strangers, and a break from routine. Thus within the bounds of proprieties and restrictions, the women who

1 ‘Manshu biezhi shuzhuan’, in Mao Qiling Xihe ji, xcvi.6b–7a. 2 ‘Fen Daoli ji guwen’, Wengshan wenwai, juan 13, Qu Dajun Qu Dajun quanji, pp. 220–21.

p e r fo r m an c e s — r e fl ect i o n s an d co nclu d i ng re mark s

publicly performed their alliance with saints exalted themselves and their groups while gaining an extra measure of freedom in the process. Because such alliances with saintly power involved holy figures, women were exempt from the charges of unholiness that accompanied other displays of power. Because they were fulfilling a vow to the saint, what might have been a charge of ostentatious display was invalidated by the fact that a promise to a saint was sacrosanct; the woman could be in effect regarded as subordinating herself to the saint’s power, however flashy the results. In the case of Ocillena, with her displays of the crown of pearls and the bare-kneed mass in the family monastery, she was symbolically claiming her place in her geographical territory, a tactic given even greater force by the fact that St Birgitta herself had in effect established Rome as her territory. Of these four studies, this is the only instance in which women were able to work consistently within the greater power structure to compete for prestige. Other strategies may have been available to them, of course, but in these examples of the competition available to men, women were largely effaced or excluded. Yet even in these realms of male-only competition, we can catch glimpses of women working behind the scenes to better their positions. In the example of early China, the stereotype of women’s jealousy of wives or fellow concubines shows that in many cases, women did indeed compete with each other for access to power. In early medieval northern Europe, women could not be kept out of the realm of board games, the emblems of power. And in seventeenth-century China, the status-bestowing elegies on the deaths of women reveal snippets of information about their actual accomplishments and values. Mao Qiling’s epitaph on Zhang Manshu includes stories of her pathos, but also reveals her agency: ‘After she became my concubine, Manshu was determined to study with me. Not long after she started reading, she already began to have her own thoughts about what she read.’3 Tellingly, Mao Qiling does not convey much of what Manshu’s ‘own thoughts’ were. But we can surmise that behind all of these reports of women’s virtuous self-denial and unseemly agency, women were similarly having their own thoughts.



3 ‘Manshu biezhi shuzhuan’, in Mao Qiling Xihe ji, xcvi.6b–7a.

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Part III

(Re)presentations

Lewis Webb

(Re)presentations: Introduction

The third and final section examines status competition through material, bodily, and literary (re)presentations — priestly status symbols, priestly activities, posture and dress, iconography, virginity, asceticism, love poetry, and translation — of various qualities, including authority, sanctity, desirability, masculinity, and literary mastery. These (re)presentations follow prevailing standards and traditions and/or introduce new ones. The ascendancy and priesthood of Livia — the wife, widow, adopted daughter, and priestess of the princeps Augustus, mother of his heir, and eventual goddess — is the subject of the first chapter, by Lovisa Brännstedt. After Augustus’s death in 14 ce, Livia’s authority, political standing, and status dramatically increased: she became femina princeps (first woman). Brännstedt explores some of the mechanisms of this ascendancy, including the formalization of Livia’s position in Rome, her elevation to a priesthood for her deified husband, her acquisition of various priestly status symbols, her conspicuous priestly activities, and changes in her posture and dress in her iconography. Particularly noteworthy are Livia’s testamentary adoption as Julia Augusta, subsequent status as divi filia (daughter of a god) after Augustus’s deification, appointment to the priesthood of deified Augustus, and potential co-optation into the sodales Augustales. Significant too are her right to use a lictor, her conspicuous construction with her son Tiberius of a temple and shrine for deified Augustus (a form of patronage), the adoption of new forms of posture and dress in her iconography on sculpture and coins — including a seated posture and the bearing of regal, priestly, and divine attributes — and her eventual right to travel in a carpentum (two-wheeled vehicle) and sit with the Vestal Virgins in the theatre. All of these material and bodily (re)presentations of sanctity and authority built on pre-existing traditions in Rome, for it had long been acceptable for women to have religious authority, but their accumulation in Livia elevated her to new heights. Through these mechanisms, Brännstedt argues that Livia, while technically a senatorial woman, transcended and exceeded the status of all other senatorial women, so that she eventually became the victrix (female victor) of elite female status competition in Rome, establishing a model for her female successors, the new feminae principes (first women). Once Livia herself was deified in 42 ce, her own cult opened up opportunities for new forms of Lewis Webb    is a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Oxford.

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competition among women, as priestesses of Diva Augusta. Livia ascended far beyond all previous senatorial women and irrevocably altered the stakes of elite female status competition in Rome.1 The entanglements of sanctity and status are also at the heart of the second chapter by Sissel Undheim, wherein she concentrates on the ascendancy of primarily female virgin martyrs in the competitive Christian ascetic hierarchies of the fourth century ce. Notably, she examines how the recurrent motif of the double crown of martyrdom and virginity in Christian texts and material culture came to represent virgin martyrs’ unsurpassed status in Christian communities. Her chapter focuses on the rhetoric and iconography of the cult of St Agnes at Rome, on the roles of virgin martyrs as models and shaming devices in the writings of Jerome, Ambrose, and Prudentius, and on archaeological and iconographical material from the fifth century ce and beyond that portrays the double crown and provides various interpretations of virginal gender and status. Undheim reveals how Ambrose envisioned St Agnes’s virginal death as a kind of ‘duplex martyrium’ (double martyrdom).2 This duplex martyrium of St Agnes was transformed into a ‘duplex corona’ (double crown) by Prudentius.3 According to Undheim, Prudentius and the Church Fathers took up this traditional symbol,4 laden with notions of glory and sanctity, and transformed it into a symbol of the elevated status of martyrs, virgins, and virgin martyrs. Virgin martyrs like St Agnes also became powerful ‘shaming devices’ for other Christians in the texts of the Church Fathers, as well as rhetorical combatants in a religious competition between Christians and non-Christians. Indeed, in the latter case, Ambrose represented Christian virgins as ‘out-virgining’ other virgins, notably the Vestals and other non-Christian virgins.5 Undheim also finds traces of the double crown and/or associated claims to virginal status in a fifth–sixth-century ce fresco from Naples for the young girl Nonnosa, in an inscription on a sarcophagus for the young boy Theusebius, and in a sixth-century ce mosaic from Ravenna depicting a procession of virgin martyrs. The double crown became a powerful symbol of the sanctity and elevated status of virgin martyrs within Christian communities, and the textual and material traces of the double crown witness to fierce status competition among Christians and non-Christians. Julia Bray’s chapter, the third in this section, turns to the competitive strains of the poetry of ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, a probable member of the early Islamic Meccan rentier aristocracy, who lived in Arabia c. 644–712/21 ce. Themes of love and boasting (fakhr) permeate his poetry, themes shared

1 Cassius Dio, lvii.12.2. 2 Ambrose, De virginibus, i.9. 3 Prudentius, Peristephanon liber, xiv.7. 4 The crown was already multivalent in a Roman context: a symbol of athletic and martial prowess, victory, and honour, of sacrificial victims, and of deities and their attendants. 5 Ambrose, Epistulae, xviii.12; De virginibus, i.19.

( r e ) p r e s e n tat i o ns: i nt ro d u ct i o n

with traditional pre-Islamic qasidas. But ʿUmar departs from the conventions of the latter by manipulating temporality and reality in his poetry, notably through emphasis on a kind of eternal present, through alterations of the narrative voice, and through his own narrative omniscience. ʿUmar frequently ventriloquizes women in his poems, inhabiting their bodies and minds, but he does not centre them; instead, he uses them to boast of his own desirability and masculinity. There is no mutuality here: his ventriloquism is a form of dominance and possession. For example, in one poem ʿUmar-as-women boasts that he is ‘Our lover, sent us by Fate in the nick of time, unswerving’ and ‘Our desire’.6 Bray argues that ʿUmar competes with the ventriloquized women in such poems and wins. He is the victor and the conquered, ventriloquized women represent his own desirability and masculinity. But his victories appear to be fantasies, as none of the women seem to have been real people, nor are male relatives of the women ever mentioned. Thence ʿUmar’s competitive goals remain elusive. Despite these ambiguities, ʿUmar’s boastful voice lays claim to unrivalled status within his poetic world. In the fourth chapter, Britt-Marie Karlsson and Sara Moding focus on Hélisenne de Crenne (a pen name), a female author and translator living in sixteenth-century France, who challenged the gendered field of translation and laid claim to credibility, authority, and literary mastery with the first translation into French prose of the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid. Despite her erudition and the success of her other works, her translation was not a great success and there is still no further edition of her Aeneid, although Karlsson and Moding are remedying that lacuna. This neglect may have been a deliberate rejection by men of her attempt at admission into the ‘manly coded field of mediation and interpretation of the classics’. Neglect notwithstanding, Crenne’s translation offers a powerful example of one woman’s claims to superior status in the literary realm and beyond, for Virgil’s Aeneid was a highly esteemed work and its male protagonist Aeneas an exemplum of filial piety and virtue for young men in the Renaissance. Building and expanding on Octovien de Saint-Gelais’s verse translation, Crenne freely alters and embellishes in her prose translation, notably removing or de-emphasizing Trojan and Italian details and little-known mythological and historical names, which simplifies and universalizes her translation. She also fills her text with challenging Latinisms and commentaries in the margins of her text. Her text seems to address multiple audiences, namely readers of vernacular literature and learned readers including the dedicatee King Francis I. In her translation, Crenne draws encomiastic connections between Hector, Aeneas, and Francis I, and presents Aeneas as a royal exemplum. She also centres love and Dido, which aligns with her focus on the power of passion and forceful independent women in her previous 6 ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, Diwan, ed. by ʿAbd al-Hamid, no. 33, trans. by Julia Bray.

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works. Karlsson and Moding argue that Crenne aims at challenging male dominance in translation, at diffusing knowledge about antiquity to a broad audience, at providing examples of strong women (herself and Dido), and at praising Francis I. With her translation, Crenne competed with her contemporaries for elevated status within the literary realm: a place in Parnassus. Lovisa Brännstedt, ‘Coniunx et sacerdos: Livia as Widow and Priestess of Divus Augustus’ Eleven Sissel Undheim, ‘Double Martyrdom, Double Crown. Virgin Martyrs and Fourth-Century Ascetic Hierarchies’ Twelve Julia Bray, ‘A Competitive Fantasy Figure and his Female Conquests: ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa’ Thirteen Britt-Marie Karlsson and Sara Moding, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne Challenging Male Mastery: Translating Virgil’s Aeneid in the French Sixteenth Century’ Ten

Lovisa Brännstedt

Coniunx et sacerdos Livia as Widow and Priestess of Divus Augustus*

Introduction A beautiful sardonyx gem of early Tiberian date (14–20 ce) shows Livia holding the bust of the deceased and deified Augustus.1 Most noticeable are the huge arms and hands of Livia and the small scale of the bust she holds; the presentation of Livia and the figurine of Augustus accentuates an apparent reversal in the normal Roman gender order of man supreme and woman subordinate.2 As previously argued by Natalie Kampen, the cameo depicts Livia simultaneously as Augustus’s wife, widow, daughter, priestess, and mother of his heir.3 A shield engraved with a lion and the small circular tympanon that Livia’s arm rests upon are iconographic references to Cybele, while sheaves and poppies signify a connection to Ceres, and through her to maternity and fecundity. Livia is depicted wearing a slipped-shoulder tunic, which is generally associated with Venus and hence points to her adoption into the Iulian gens. The shield and the fact that Livia is enthroned and wears a turreted crown suggests that she is to be seen as the protector of the Roman state.4 The divine references, together with indicators of Livia’s

* This chapter is based on parts of my PhD thesis (Brännstedt, ‘Femina princeps’) and I would like to thank my supervisors Eva Rystedt and Gunhild Vidén, and the faculty opponent Emily Hemelrijk, who all have been most generous in giving me the benefit of their comments and constructive criticism on my dissertation. Lewis Webb deserves my warm gratitude for inviting me to participate in the conference, and for suggesting that I focus on Livia’s relation to the sodales Augustales. Thanks are also due to Kathryn Welch for her helpful advice. All remaining errors are my own. 1 Kunsthistorisches Museum, IX A 95; Bartman, Portraits of Livia, cat. 110, p. 193; Kampen, Family Fictions, pp. 23–37; Megow, Kameen, no. B 15, pl. 10. For a discussion on dating the cameo see Kampen, Family Fictions, p. 25. 2 Kampen, Family Fictions, p. 24. 3 Kampen, Family Fictions, pp. 23–37. 4 Barrett, Livia, p. 61.

Lovisa Brännstedt    is a research fellow in Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at Lund University (Sweden). Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 255-273 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126151

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matronly virtue, such as the stola that she wears, and her demonstration of piety to her deceased husband, construct Livia as the partner of the deified Augustus, continuing his political project with the cooperation of her son.5 Her position echoes in Roman literature; Ovid calls her coniunx sacerdos while Velleius refers to her as sacerdos ac filia.6 This chapter concerns Livia’s position in the age of Tiberius, from 14 ce until her death in 29 ce, with emphasis on what followed immediately after Augustus’s demise.7 Livia had indeed been participating in status competition during the long reign of Augustus, but the rhetoric and politics of the ‘restored’ republic made her political performances and presentations complicated and delicate. Just as Augustus was primus inter pares, Livia was, theoretically, the first among her female equals. Her position was essentially the same one as that of republican senatorial women, although she worked on a different scale, and with more public visibility, due to the unprecedented power of the imperial family. During the reign of Tiberius, however, Livia’s political standing was dramatically increased, and she would eventually become the victrix of elite female status competition in Rome. In the present chapter I will focus on Livia’s appointment as priestess following the death and deification of Augustus in 14 ce.8 The cult of divus Augustus had no absolute need of a priestess, since a flamen, the sodales Augustales or the Arval Brothers would have sufficed to serve it; hence Livia’s appointment was a deliberate political choice made by either her, Augustus (before his demise), or Tiberius. The exact relation between Livia and the other priestly colleges has gone unexplored, which calls for further attention, and I will suggest that she is likely to have been co-opted into the sodales Augustales. The appointment is important, as it facilitated Livia’s religious activities and offered her a new political platform from which to further engage in status competition. I will begin by demonstrating how Augustus’s death was immediately followed by the formalizing of Livia’s position in the Roman state. She was posthumously adopted as his daughter, received the title Augusta, and inherited one third of his assets. I then discuss how Livia in the capacity of 5 Kampen, Family Fictions, p. 37. 6 Ovid, Ex Ponto, iv.9.107; Velleius, lxxv.3. For Velleius see Welch, ‘Velleius’, pp. 309–34. 7 Following the sociologist Robert Merton, ‘position’ can be explained as determined by one’s particular status in society and can be used to describe both the formal and informal rank that an individual holds. Attached to a ‘position’ is a role, or a pattern of behaviour, that may be oriented towards what Merton calls a ‘reference group’, a collective which has particular expectations of the position-holder. An individual can possess more than just one status and one role at a time, and these multiple roles and statuses are often interrelated. (Merton, Reader, and Kendal, The Student-Physician with further elaborations in Merton, Social Theory. For a discussion on roles and role models in the Roman world based on Merton’s work see Bell, ‘Role Models’.) 8 For Livia as priestess see Fishwick, The Imperial Cult, i, 161. For Germanicus as flamen see CIL VI 909; CIL X 513; 1415. For Augustus’s deification see Koortbojian, Divinization.

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priestess erected a temple and a shrine to divus Augustus together with her son Tiberius, held annual games on the Palatine, and threw a banquet for senators and equestrians in honour of her divine husband. Thereafter will follow a discussion on how Livia’s new office was publicly advertised by the fact that she was granted a lictor in the exercise of her sacred office, and I show how she marked out her new and elevated position in dress (being veiled) and accessories (such as the patera). The discussion of Livia’s appearance will be based on an examination of provincial coinage from the reign of Tiberius, with the additional aim of studying how Livia’s new role was perceived, negotiated, and validated outside the city of Rome. I will conclude that Livia as widow and priestess of divus Augustus no longer appeared as on the same level as other elite women. Rather than being presented as a traditional Roman matrona, as she had been during the reign of Augustus, Livia was now represented as seated, provided with priestly, regal, and divine attributes.

From Livia Drusilla to Julia Augusta On 19 August 14 ce the emperor Augustus died in the city of Nola, and his will was read in the Senate the day after his body arrived in Rome.9 Livia was instituted as one of his heirs in the first degree, receiving one-third of his estate, while Tiberius, the other principal heir, received two-thirds. The most remarkable part of Augustus’s will was, at least from Livia’s point of view, the posthumous adoption of her as his daughter, and the conferring on her the name and title Augusta.10 From 14 ce onward she was no longer Livia Drusilla but Julia Augusta, divi filia. Unfortunately, little is known about the adoption of women and nothing is known about either testamentary adoption of wives, or about the transfer of an honorific title from a man to a woman. Livia’s situation was most likely without precedent. The circumstances surrounding Augustus’s will are discussed by Velleius Paterculus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio, but none of them gives any detailed information about the legal consequences of his adoption of Livia, nor does any ancient jurist. Cassius Dio only notes that she together with Tiberius autocratically (αὐταρχέω) took part in the proceedings concerning the honours given to Augustus when he had died.11 Financial considerations do not seem to have been a major motivation for the adoption: according to Cassius Dio, Augustus had secured permission from the Senate to leave her as much as he did.12

9 Cassius Dio, lvi.32.1. 10 Cassius Dio, lvi.32; Suetonius, Augustus, ci; Tacitus, Annales, i.8. Velleius, ii.75.3. None of the authors gives any detailed information about the legal consequences of Livia’s new position. 11 Cassius Dio, lvi.47.1. 12 For the legal problems of Livia’s inheritance see Hopwood, ‘Livia’, pp. 143–48.

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What could Augustus have intended by adopting his wife as his daughter? There might of course have been several considerations. In her capacity as his daughter, Livia had direct ties to the clients of Augustus. She also inherited the loyalty of Augustus’s freedmen and slaves. Livia, on being adopted as the ‘daughter of a god’, rose higher in religious standing, even though she was not declared divine until 42 ce.13 Nevertheless she was accorded divine worship in some places long before the official deification, and there are many references to her almost superhuman status, no doubt further bolstered by her new position as divi filia.14 Augustus might have foreseen that the Senate would declare him divine after his death, and might have thought it more appropriate for Livia to be the daughter of a god rather than the wife of a god, divi filia rather than divi uxor. The adoption emphasized Augustus’s esteem for Livia and could have been made in the hope of protecting her. Augustus, maybe more than anyone, knew how bloodstained an accession to power could be, and Tiberius’s succession was not to be taken for granted. Some scholars have interpreted the adoption as a way of stressing a physical connection between Augustus and Tiberius, given that it promoted Livia as the link in the line of succession from her husband to her son.15 Livia was indisputably important in stabilizing and legitimating the succession, but adoption was already recognized as a valid way of creating familial connection between men, and Livia does not seem to have played a crucial role when Augustus adopted Tiberius in 4 ce.16 The radical change of Livia’s status brought about by her adoption could not have been made only with a view to securing Tiberius’s Iulian identity. Why, then, did Augustus adopt Livia? I believe that a key to an understanding of the adoption is the fact that it was posthumous. Testamentary adoption was a way whereby a testator could provide his testamentary heir with financial resources and attributes of his social standing, such as slaves, freedmen, and political connections.17 If Augustus wanted to make sure that Livia would inherit a part of his power and auctoritas, the adoption might have been a necessity. To take on the testator’s family name was a common condition if a posthumously adopted heir was to receive a bequest.18 Augustus’s previously adopted sons, Gaius, Lucius, Tiberius, and Agrippa Postumus had been adopted while Augustus was still alive, and received the regular Iulian cognomen Caesar rather than Augustus. Tiberius had been adrogated — a kind of adoption that could only

13 Cassius Dio, lx.5.2; Suetonius, Claudius, xi.2; Apocolocyntosis, ix.5. 14 See Brännstedt, ‘Femina Princeps’, pp. 139–88. 15 Huntsman, ‘Family and Property’, p. 197; Barrett, Livia, pp. 150–51; Kampen, Family Fictions, p. 29. 16 For adoption as a mode of succession amongst elite families see Lindsay, Adoption; Saller, ‘Roman Heirship’. For Augustus’s testament see Champlin, ‘Testament’, pp. 154–65. 17 Lindsay, Adoption, pp. 79–86. 18 Lindsay, Adoption, p. 82.

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take place when the two parties to the adoption were present — in 4 ce, but did not receive the title Augustus until Augustus’s death ten years later. There is indeed an emphasis in the sources for Livia’s adoption on the bestowal of the imperial nomenclature. Tacitus states that Livia was adopted into the Iulian family and the Augustan name: ‘Livia in familiam Iuliam nomenque Augustum adsumebatur’.19 Suetonius recounts that Augustus conferred his name on Tiberius and Livia, who were appointed as his chief heirs: ‘heredes instituit primos: Tiberium ex parte dimidia et sextante, Liviam ex parte tertia, quos et ferre nomen suum iussit’.20 It is noteworthy that both Livia and Tiberius were required to bear the name as a part of Augustus’s will, even though Tiberius had been adrogated already in 4 ce. Despite the adoption, instances where Livia is referred to as Augustus’s daughter are of rare occurrence. Only three examples are known. The Fasti Praenestini record how Livia herself, together with Tiberius, dedicated a statue to their father Augustus near the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome, bearing the inscription ‘sig(num) divo Augusto patri ad theatrum Marc(elli) Iulia Augusta et Ti. Augustus dedicarunt’.21 The inscription is significant not only because it identifies Augustus as Livia’s father, but also because Livia’s name precedes that of Tiberius.22 Furthermore, two inscriptions attached to sculpture groups speak of Livia as the daughter of Augustus. They are from Velleia and Aphrodisias respectively, and date to the reign of Caligula.23 No coin inscriptions refer to Livia as the daughter of Augustus.24 The epigraphic evidence, however, clearly indicates that her new name won general acceptance. I have elsewhere examined about 190 inscriptions that both record Livia’s nomenclature and are reasonably well dated.25 The larger part of the corpus can be dated to after 14 ce, which testifies to Livia’s increasing status after the death of Augustus. All of the Latin inscriptions dating to after the death of Augustus refer to Livia as Augusta or Julia Augusta, with the exception of an inscription from Sicily, dating from the age of Claudius, in which she is called

19 Tacitus, Annales, i.8. 20 Suetonius, Augustus, ci.2. 21 CIL I2 pp. 230–39 = AE 1898 no. 14 = AE 1922 no. 96 = AE 1953 no. 236 = AE 1993 no. 144 = AE 2002 no. 181 = AE 2007 no. 312. 22 Tacitus (Annales, iii.64) asserts that Tiberius was offended by how Livia had placed her name before his, and took it as derogation from the imperial dignity. 23 Velleia: CIL XI 1165, Aphrodisias: AE 1980 no. 877. 24 Livia continued however to be referred to as the daughter of her natural father, Drusus Claudianus. Though he had been dead for over half a century, Livia is called Drusi filia in nine Latin inscriptions dating to after 14 ce. 25 Brännstedt, ‘Femina princeps’, pp. 67–72. I have excluded any inscription that only records her name as a part of the nomenclature of her slaves and freedmen, but it could be worth mentioning that Livia’s freedwomen became known as Iulia, while her freedmen normally took the nomen Iulius, but the praenomen of her biological father, Marcus. This might have been a way to distinguish them from the freedmen of Augustus. Also excluded are inscriptions recording her name as a part of the titles of her priests and priestesses.

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Diva Livia.26 Sebaste, the Greek equivalent of Augusta, was applied to Livia during Augustus’s lifetime. Thus her name in Greek was not connected to the will of Augustus, except in the sense that it anticipated it. While the epigraphic sources use Augusta consistently Tacitus alone, of the major literary sources, regularly uses her new name. Suetonius employs a combination of her original name and new title and calls her Livia Augusta. Surviving state documents, such as the Tabula Siarensis and the Senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone patre use Augusta or Julia Augusta as Livia’s official name and she is also referred to as Augusta in the Roman calendars. After Livia was deified in 42 ce, she was consistently called Diva Augusta. Legends on coins reflect the same trend: Livia is not featured on coins minted in the western provinces until after the death of Augustus, but all of the eighteen coin types minted after 14 ce whose legends bear Livia’s name refer to her as Augusta or Julia Augusta. Altogether the sources indicate that the adoption was necessary in order to transfer the title from Augustus to Livia, but once the adoption was ratified her status as Augustus’s daughter was not intended to be emphasized. If the main motivation behind the adoption was to secure the title for Livia, what, then, was the significant implication of the name Augusta? It has often been argued that when women held civic titles, they were strictly honorary, any real power being delegated to the woman’s husband or a male relative, or some other male official. Similarly, it has been stressed that the title ‘Augusta’ was simply bestowed upon Livia because of her relationship to Augustus and is, therefore, not really significant. However, it seems simplest to assume that when Livia came to bear the title ‘Augusta’ she held the position implied by the name and exercised its authority. Still, even if Augusta no doubt was a prestigious cognomen and marked Livia’s position in the Roman state, it should be pointed out that even for Augustus, this cognomen had been a mark of his authority but carried no formal power. Livia as Augusta was not the equal to Tiberius in terms of specific constitutional powers such as the tribunicia potestas or the consular imperium, but in the auctoritas that was implicit in the august title due to its very etymology.27 I find it telling that Augustus did not give Livia this name during his lifetime. Perhaps it would have made them, Augustus and Augusta, into what would have looked too much like a Hellenistic ruling couple. This was already happening in the eastern part of the empire, where Livia had by now been

26 CIL X 7464. 27 The etymological root of ‘Augustus’ was augere, ‘to increase or augment’, and it also had a connection with the sacred sphere of augury. Cassius Dio (liii.16.8) asserts that the name implies that Augustus was more than human, and that the Greeks hence used the word sebastos to address him. Livy (i.7.9; v.41.8; viii.6.9; viii.9.10) uses augustior, the comparative form of the adjective augustus to point a contrast with the adjective humanus. Ovid (Fasti, i.605–12) draws a similar distinction with regard to augustus and stresses that the ancestors referred to things holy as augusta. Ovid (Fasti, i.605–12) further affirms that augustus had the same root as both augurium and augere. See also Suetonius, Augustus, vii.2.

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named Sebaste in a large number of inscriptions. The same was not desirable in Rome where the rhetoric of Augustus’s rule focused on the restoration of the Roman republic. However, even if Augustus did not wish to share his name with Livia during his lifetime he took measures to make sure that she would receive it after his demise. Augustus seems to have taken no chances when he wrote his very precise testament and he must have made the provisions needed to ensure that the adoption would be legal. He could have made good use of his position as pontifex maximus, as the high priest was in charge of issues concerning adoption and testamentary succession. There was a compelling precedent in his own testamentary adoption by Julius Caesar and he would have been aware of its political benefits. One should not forget that the name Augustus did not have a single, uncomplicated meaning, but evoked several associations. Augustus undoubtedly understood its power, and was aware that the female equivalent would raise Livia to a level far beyond traditional honours. Even if it is not possible to pin down the exact significance of Livia’s new position as Augusta, the conferring on her of Augustus’s own title was groundbreaking. The importance of the cognomen is confirmed by the fact that it was used by subsequent empresses, and institutionalized as a title by the Senate during the reign of Caligula. Even though the position of empress was to be redefined, and many imperial women did not present themselves in the same manner as Livia, the use of the title continued throughout Roman antiquity.

Priestess of divus Augustus Augustus was declared divine by the Senate about a month after his demise, on 17 September 14 ce.28 If we assume that Augustus anticipated his deification, Livia’s appointment as priestess might have been planned when Augustus was still alive. Women had functioned as priestesses during the republic, and there were a range of opportunities for religious participation available for women.29 For Livia to hold an office in the religious sphere, where women were admitted to a larger extent than in other political arenas, would have been less offensive to the more conservative Romans than her holding of any other kind of office would have been. The changing political structure of the Tiberian principate however allowed her to include new elements in her role as priestess, and engage in new forms of status competition. I will begin by quoting Cassius Dio who provides the most exhaustive account for the events:30 At the time they [the Senate] declared Augustus immortal, assigned to him priests and sacred rites, and made Livia, who was already called Julia and 28 Fasti Amiternini under 17 September: ‘divo Augusto honores caelestes a senatu decreti’, InscrIt, 13.2, p. 209. 29 See Schultz, Women’s Religious Activity and DiLuzio, A Place at the Altar. 30 Cassius Dio, lvi.46–47. I have made a revision of the last sentence.

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Augusta, his priestess; they also permitted her to employ a lictor when she exercised her sacred office. On her part, she bestowed a million sesterces upon a certain Numerius Atticus, a senator and ex-praetor, because he swore that he had seen Augustus ascending to heaven after the manner of which tradition tells concerning Proculus and Romulus. A shrine voted by the Senate and built by Livia and Tiberius was erected to the dead emperor in Rome […] Livia held a private festival in his honour for three days in the palace, and this ceremony is still continued down to the present day by whoever is emperor. Such were the decrees passed in memory of Augustus, nominally by the Senate, but actually by Tiberius and Livia. For when some men proposed one thing and some another, the Senate decreed that Tiberius should receive suggestions in writing from its members and then select whichever he chose. I have added the name of Livia because she, too, was autocratically laying claim to power. According to Cassius Dio, Livia was appointed priestess (ἱέρειᾰ) by senatorial decree on 17 September in connection to Augustus’s consecration.31 It is not clear if her Latin title was sacerdos or flaminica.32 Both Velleius and Ovid refer to her as sacerdos, and her successor, Antonia minor, is called sacerdos divi Augusti on coins and inscriptions.33 However, Velleius and Ovid do not use the title in contexts that refer to this specific appointment. Furthermore, Agrippina minor was voted a flamonium Claudiale by the Senate when they constituted the cult of divus Claudius, and Tacitus claims that no honours were any longer reserved for the gods when Augustus wanted to be worshipped with temples and cult images by flamines and sacerdos.34 Commentators have often taken this statement to refer to Augustus’s policy vis-à-vis the provincial imperial cult; however, Ittai Gradel has proposed that it refers to Augustus’s desire for state deification and the plural of flamines is a stylistic feature to go with sacerdotes.35 While I agree with Gradel that Tacitus’s remark may very well describe Augustus’s yearning for a posthumous consecration, it might be worth considering that flamines could be collective for flamen and flamincia, i.e. Germanicus and Livia. The unusual restrictions on the flamen and flaminica

31 As demonstrated by Swan, The Augustan Succession, p. 351 the passage refers to the 17 September vote of apotheosis rather than Augustus’s symbolical ascension to heaven at his funeral. 32 Flaminica is a more narrow title than sacerdos, normally signifying dedication to just one god. Both titles are, just like their male counterparts, used synonymously. For an overview of the female titles in a provincial context see Hemelrijk, ‘Priestesses’, pp. 137–61, for a more general discussion see Gradel, Emperor Worship, pp. 85–91. Fishwick, Livia, pp. 406–10, argues that the office given to Livia was that of flaminica. 33 Velleius ii.75.3; Ovid Ex Ponto, iv.9.107; RIC 12 124 no. 67; ILS 222. 34 Tacitus, Annales, i.10.5: ‘nihil deorum honoribus relictum, cum se templis et effigie numinum per flamines et sacerdotes coli vellet’. 35 Gradel, Emperor Worship, pp. 276–78.

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Dialis cannot have been imposed on the new flamines, but the prestige of the old priesthood was transferred on both of them, no matter the title Livia held. The priests that Augustus was assigned were the sodales Augustales. It included twenty-one members drawn by lot from the elite of the state (primores civitatis) plus four supernumerary seats given to Tiberius, Drusus Minor, Claudius, and Germanicus.36 The sodales had an archaic precedent in the sodales Titii, supposedly established by Romulus for his co-regent Titus Tatius after his death.37 Furthermore, Germanicus was appointed flamen of divus Augustus, clearly modelled on the three flamines maiores to Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus.38 It is well known that republican flaminicae were members of the pontifical college, and I will in the following argue that Livia was in a similar way co-opted into the sodales Augustales.39 Despite some modern translations and discussions, a sodality is an association and not a brotherhood per se, and nothing would preclude Livia’s membership, whether as an ordinary or supernumerary member.40 Livia’s public actions following the deification of Augustus suggest that she indeed was a member of the sodality, among them her joint building project together with Tiberius of the temple to divus Augustus that Cassius Dio refers to.41 The temple was located behind the Basilica Julia, in the depression between the Capitoline and the Palatine Hills, though the exact site is unknown. The literary sources do not provide much information on the temple, but it seems not to have been completed until the reign of Gaius, who dedicated it in 37 ce.42 Besides the temple, the part of the house on the Palatine where Augustus was born was consecrated by Livia and Tiberius as a sacrarium.43 Architectural patronage had been common in the political competition of the republic, and Rome was teeming with monuments erected by victorious generals.44 During the reign of Augustus monumental patronage fell into the hands of the 36 Tacitus, Annales, i.54; ii.83. 37 Tacitus, Annales, i.54. 38 Gradel, Emperor Worship, p. 275. 39 For the position of the republican flaminicae see DiLuzio, A Place at the Altar, pp. 17–78. 40 For female members of provincial sodalitates, corpora, or collegia see Hemelrijk, Hidden Lives, pp. 181–269. 41 See also Tacitus, Annales, i.10.8. Tacitus does not provide any information besides the fact that Augustus was decreed a temple and divine rites. For discussions on the sources see Platner and Ashby, Topographical Dictonary, pp. 62–65; Barrett Caligula, p. 210. For a discussion on the temple in general see Fishwick, ‘On the Temple of Divus “Augustus”’. The temple has never been excavated so for the physical appearance of the temple we have to rely on the testimony of coins, cf. BMCRE 4.350 no. 2051. 42 Cassius Dio, lix.7.1; Tacitus, Annales, vi.45.2; Suetonius, Tiberius, xlvii; Gaius, xxi. Fishwick, ‘On the Temple of Divus “Augustus”’, p. 232. 43 Pliny, Naturalis historia, xii.42.94. Pliny attributes the construction of the temple to Livia alone. For a discussion on the sacrarium see Fishwick, ‘On the Temple of Divus “Augustus”’, pp. 245–55. 44 See Hölkeskamp, Reconstructing the Roman Republic, pp. 98–106 and Davies, Architecture and Politics.

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imperial family, as a consequence of the new political order. Livia’s architectural patronage appears to have started in 7 bce with the construction of Porticus Liviae on the Esquiline Hill, followed by the restoration of the temples to Bona Dea on the Aventine and Fortuna Muliebris on the Via Latina.45 Such patronage was not necessarily carried out without tension. The Vestal Licinia had in 123 bce dedicated an ara, aedicula, and pulvinar to Bona Dea on the same site as Livia.46 The pontifices, however, deemed Licinia’s dedication to not be sacred and the Senate issued a decree invalidating the dedication.47 Livia most likely carried out her dedications and restoration in conjunction with Augustus as pontifex maximus. When she undertook the erection of the temple to divus Augustus her position as priestess and connection to the sodales Augustales would have helped her to win the acceptance of the pontifices, together with the fact that Tiberius was elected pontifex maximus on 10 March 15 ce.48 Livia’s building patronage is important in terms of status competition as it was a reflection of her being priestess of divus Augustus, and a visual reminder of power gained through office and elite position. Livia’s arrangement of games in honour of divus Augustus on the Palatine, the so-called Ludi Palatini, further suggests her membership of the sodales Augustales, as one of their tasks was to run games in his honour.49 The games are confirmed by the Fasti Praenestini and were held on 17 January, the anniversary of their wedding day, and a forceful reminder of Livia’s status as both the widow and priestess of Augustus.50 The 17 January was also the day of the dedication of the Ara Numinis Augusti, and would be the day of Livia’s own consecration in 42 ce.51 The Ludi Palatini are famed for having witnessed the assassination of Caligula in 41 ce and much of what we know of the games derives from accounts of his murder.52 At least in that year they featured pantomime performances and were given in a temporary theatre built before the palace.53 The games continued to be celebrated through the centuries and Dio himself attended them during the reign of Septimius Severus.54 The connection between Livia, the sodales,

45 Brännstedt, ‘Femina princeps’, pp. 116–25. 46 Cicero, De domo sua, 136. See also DiLuzio, A Place at the Altar, pp. 93–94. 47 Cicero, De domo sua, 136–37. Licinia was accused of incestum later the same year (Livy Periochae, 63; Cassius Dio, xxvi fr. 87.3; Macrobius, Saturnalia, i.10.5–6), so when Ovid (Fasti, v.152–58) is mentioning her and Livia in the same verses it is not necessarily flattering for Livia. 48 CIL XI 3303 = ILS 154. 49 Cassius Dio, lvi.46.3; Tacitus, Annales, i.73. Price, ‘From Noble Funerals to Divine Cult’, pp. 78–79. 50 InscrIt 13.2, pp. 400–01. 51 Cassius Dio, lx.5.2; Suetonius, Claudius, xi.2; Apocolocyntosis, ix.5. 52 Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae, xix.75–114; Suetonius, Caligula, lvi.2–58.3; Cassius Dio, lix.29.5–7. 53 Fishwick, The Imperial Cult, i, 163 n. 83 with references. 54 Cassius Dio, lxxvi.3.3. The Ludi Palatini were included in the list of pagan anniversaries in the works of both ‘Philocalus’ writing in the fourth century and the fifth-century Polemius Silivius. See Grant, Roman Anniversary Issues, p. 156.

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and the arrangement of games would come to the fore in 22 ce when she fell seriously ill just as she was to reach her eighties.55 Livia’s sickness was treated as a matter of great public concern. When she had recovered the Senate decreed acts of thanksgiving, supplicationes, to the gods and ludi magni to be arranged by the four great priestly colleges plus sodales Augustales.56 Tacitus even refers to the sodales in this context as the personal sodality of the imperial family.57 If we return to the death of Augustus we learn from Cassius Dio that Livia held a banquet in honour of her deceased husband.58 She had previously given a banquet together with Julia the elder for the women of Rome on the occasion of Tiberius’s ovatio in 9 bce, and Cassius Dio himself recounts that Livia and Antonia had planned a banquet for Drusus’s intended triumph the same year.59 Two years later, 7 bce, Livia and Tiberius jointly dedicated the porticus Liviae, and while Tiberius gave a banquet to the Senate as part of the celebrations Livia gave one — this time without a female co-host — for women.60 At this point in time, however, the banquet that Livia hosted included senators, equestrians, and their wives, and was approved by a senatorial decree, unlike the banquets that she had held in 9 bce, and it was not, as previously, marked by gendered separation. To be the hostess of such a gathering provided Livia with an opportunity to further interact with the political elite while it simultaneously contributed to the enhancement of her status. It could be argued that this development was due to the fact that Livia, as a widow, was no longer part of a ruling couple. She was seen, rather, along with Tiberius, as one of the most important representatives of the imperial power, and as such Livia could, and was perhaps even expected to, act more freely after Tiberius came to power than she had done under Augustus.

Priestess in the View of Others Livia’s new office was publicly advertised and reflected by the way in which she moved within the cityscape of Rome.61 Cassius Dio above writes that she was granted a lictor in respect of the exercise of her sacred office.62 In 55 Tacitus, Annales, iii.31.2; iii.64.3. 56 Supplicatio can be translated as both ‘propitiation’ and ‘thanksgiving’, but as these supplicationes were carried out after Livia had recovered from her illness, the latter is the correct translation in this context. 57 Tacitus, Annales, iii.64: ‘proprium eius domus sacerdotium’. 58 Cassius Dio, lvi.46.5. 59 Cassius Dio, lv.2.4. See Webb and Brännstedt, ‘Gendering’. 60 Cassius Dio, lv.8.2. 61 Brännstedt, ‘Livia on the Move’. 62 Cassius Dio, lvi.46. Tacitus (Annales i.14.2) asserts that Tiberius refused his mother this right. The statement of Tacitus may however be seen as a case of his having used Livia to discredit Tiberius. Agrippina would later be given the same privilege as the priestess of Claudius. See Tacitus, Annales, xiii.2.3.

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42 bce, the Senate had voted to allow the Vestal Virgins one lictor each, and it is safe to assume that this already established practice helped legitimize Livia’s escorted movement.63 It was the lictor curiatus who walked alongside a Vestal Virgin, a special kind of lictor, whose main task was religious, rather than the secular one of carrying before senior magistrates the symbolic bundle of rods tied around an axe. The pontifex maximus was in charge of the lictores curiati, who furthermore escorted flamines and were present at various sacrifices. I suggest that Livia was granted a lictor curiatus rather than an ordinary lictor, but it remains uncertain whether he escorted her only when she performed her religious duties or also when she participated in public ceremonies.64 Regrettably, we do not know the details of the ritual duties she performed. I do however agree with Duncan Fishwick that Livia played an actual part in the state cult, particularly in view of the lictor she was granted.65 Besides the lictor, Livia’s position as priestess was marked out by dress and accessories. Our main source for her presentation and appearance are visual media such as sculpture and coins, which allow us to turn our gaze away from Rome, to the provinces.66 All the coins discussed below originate from the reign of Tiberius and were issued at provincial mints. Livia began to be depicted on provincial coins from 14 ce and onwards as seated, or sometimes standing, holding priestly and divine attributes in her hands.67 Tracene Harvey has noted that there are two main varieties of pose on coins depicting the seated Livia: she is either seated facing right with her torso turned in profile away from the viewer or with her torso towards the viewer.68 Each of these poses comes with a combination of hand-held attributes. The first pose shows the seated Livia holding a sceptre or a torch in her left hand, while the right hand holds a patera. The second pose features Livia holding the sceptre in her right hand while the left hand holds various attributes such as ears of grain and/or flowers or a branch. To be seated on a chair, stool, or throne was an indication of a superior political position in Roman society.69 Furthermore, the sceptre is a symbol of the divinity and authority of the gods, while a similar object, the staff, was a symbol of monarchical, magisterial,

63 Cassius Dio, xlvii.19.4. 64 Brännstedt, ‘Livia on the Move’, p. 42. 65 Fishwick, The Imperial Cult, i, 162–63. 66 For Livia on coins see Hahn, Die Frauen des römischen Kaiserhauses and more recently Harvey, ‘The Visual Representation of Livia’. For recent scholarship on the images of the imperial family on provincial coins see Horster, ‘Coinage and Images’. Imperial coinage and its reception have been the subject of several studies: e.g., Crawford, ‘Roman Imperial Coin Types’; Ando, Imperial Ideology; Noreña, ‘Communication’; Hekster, ‘Coins and Messages’; Duncan-Jones, ‘Implications’; Hedlund, ‘“… Achieved Nothing Worthy of Memory”’; Manders, Coining Images of Power. 67 For this type of coins see RPC I, no. 341; 645; 711; 723–26; 731–32; 754–55; 763; 766; 769; 795; 797; 849–50; 986; 1149; 1506; 2126; 3919–20. 68 Harvey, ‘The Visual Representation of Livia’, p. 193. 69 On being seated in Hellenistic and Roman art see Davies, ‘On Being Seated’.

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and priestly authority very much in the tradition of Hellenistic monarchs.70 The sceptre was the attribute of gods such as Jupiter, Juno, and Roma. It is worth noting that during his lifetime Augustus was not depicted carrying the sceptre on coins. Divus Augustus, Tiberius, and Livia are the only members of the imperial family to be represented holding the sceptre, making the connection between the three of them stronger, and perhaps even denoting Livia and Tiberius’s shared authority as successors of Augustus. The attribute combined with the sceptre is the patera, a round, flat dish.71 It was used as a sacrificial bowl to pour the libatio that was sprinkled upon the head of the sacrificial victim before it was offered. It was the attribute of various gods including Zeus/Jupiter, Juno/Hera, and Ceres/Demeter and was also held by the personification of Pietas. The patera-and-sceptre combination was also shared by Vesta, who is shown on coins of 37–38 ce holding these attributes.72 Furthermore, the patera was a symbol of priestly office; thus Livia’s position as sacerdos added to the legitimacy of her holding it. Because the patera, and the duty it represented, belonged to the high religious sphere Livia is always veiled when carrying it. The second main type of pose features Livia holding the sceptre in her right hand while the left holds attributes such as ears of grain and/or flowers or a branch. Ears of grain and/or flowers are often associated with Ceres/ Demeter. Coins of this type were issued at Greek mints from Tiberius and onwards. The sceptre in Livia’s hand is sometimes replaced with Ceres’ torch. The torch would eventually become a symbol of the priestly office that was dedicated to divus Augustus and the subsequent divi. Antonia, the mother of Claudius, and Livia’s successor as the priestess of divus Augustus, is featured on coins, issued about 41 ce, whose reverses show lighted vertical torches and the legend sacerdos divi Augusti.73 Also of relevance is a series of coins minted at Rome in 15–16 ce, which has been the subject of much discussion.74 These coins bear, on the obverse, portraits either of the deified Augustus or of Tiberius, both identified by name, commemorating the consecration of the former and the succession of the latter. The reverses show an unnamed seated female figure on an ornate chair, facing right with her feet resting on a stool. She wears matronly garb and her head is veiled. In her left hand she holds a sceptre and, in her right, a patera. Her identity is debated. Gertrude Grether suggested already in 1946 that the seated figure is Livia, while other scholars have suggested that it represents either Vesta or Pietas.75 Due to the lack of an identifying legend it is not possible to determine conclusively whether it 70 Alföldi, ‘Hasta—summa imperii’; Harvey, ‘The Visual Representation of Livia’, pp. 200–01. 71 Harvey, ‘The Visual Representation of Livia’, pp. 203–05. 72 RIC 12 Gaius 47. 73 RIC 12 Claudius 67. 74 RIC 12 Tiberius 33–36. 75 Wood, Imperial Women, p. 89 (Pietas); Sutherland, Coinage, pp. 85–86 (Vesta); Grether, ‘Livia’, pp. 235–36 (Livia).

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is Livia or not, but on the basis of the provincial issues which contain legends identifying the seated woman with Livia, it is not unlikely that a viewer would connect the image with her.76 An undated as from Rome with a radiate head of Augustus and the legend divus Augustus pater on the obverse and a seated female holding a patera and sceptre on the reverse may very well represent Livia as priestess, as local coins from Caesaraugusta, Emerita, Hippo, and Italica identify the type as Livia.77 There is no evidence that Livia’s iconography on coins was ordered at an imperial level. The coin images that developed during the reign of Tiberius were probably local initiatives; their viewers were primarily inhabitants of the localities where they were minted, plus visitors from neighbouring cities and villages. However, the visual programme for Livia’s representation on coins that developed following a Hellenistic tradition in the eastern provinces was to provide a model for the coins from the western provinces and Rome that began to feature Livia in the twenties (though we cannot know whether the die-cutters of Rome intended to convey exactly the same message as their provincial colleagues). Renderings of Livia as a seated female figure with priestly accessories can also be found in sculpture.78 The conventions of how Livia was represented in visual media fell within clear guidelines that allowed for a limited number of compositional modes, and also a limited number of elements within each mode, and this probably facilitated the readability of the images amongst viewers. Some of the elements were exclusive to Livia, such as her facial features and nodus hairstyle, while elements such as the patera connected her with her priesthood.79 These visual formulae were freely available to anyone who wanted to honour Livia. Livia’s presence in the form of sculptures, coins, and literary references increased dramatically during the reign of Tiberius. She was often publicized with references to her role as sacerdos/flaminica. By such acts as issuing coins or erecting a statue, subjects around the empire acknowledged and affirmed her status as priestess. In the course of her lifetime, Livia slowly accumulated the honours of the Vestals.80 As a priestess she, as demonstrated above, was granted a lictor and she would eventually gain the right to travel in a carpentum and to be seated with the Vestals at the theatre.81 During the reign of Tiberius Livia publicly transcended the boundaries of the traditional female sphere, but the enlarging and reshaping of her political position was not done without tension. I would like to argue that the reason why the Vestal Virgins were often used as role

76 For this view: Harvey, ‘The Visual Representation of Livia’, pp. 183–85. 77 Caesaraugusta RPC 341; Emerita RPC 40; Hippo RPC 711; Italica RPC 66–67. See also Barrett, Livia, p. 296. 78 Cf. Bartman, Portraits of Livia, p. 109. 79 Harvey, ‘The Visual Representation of Livia’, p. 188. 80 See Brännstedt, ‘Femina princeps’, pp. 87–88. 81 For the Vestal Virgins see Beard, ‘The Sexual Status’; Takács, Vestal Virgins, and DiLuzio, A Place at the Altar.

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models for Livia, was that, in this way, the new dimensions of her position could be seen as fitting into a career framework for women already existing in the Roman state. It was a well-chosen reference, as the Vestal priestesses blurred the lines of the female–male dichotomy, using markers from both categories to bolster their position. Their dress and sexual purity linked them to chaste matrons, but the right to have lictors accompanying them when walking around in the Roman cityscape, and their privilege of being seated with the senators at games, gave their position, like Livia’s, a quasi-masculine dimension.

Conclusion In 14 ce, at the age of seventy-two, Livia took up her first formal office as priestess of divus Augustus. Several aspects of her priesthood were essentially republican; however, during the reign of Tiberius Livia no longer appeared as on the same level as other elite women. If anything, she used the traditional female role as priestess to separate herself from them. As Augusta and priestess of divus Augustus, Livia was escorted by a lictor, travelled in a carpentum, and was placed together with the Vestal Virgins at the theatre. She furthermore engaged in the erection of a temple to her divine husband and arranged games in his honour, all this being in her purview as not only priestess but member of the sodales Augustales. Rather than being presented as the archetypal Roman woman, Livia began to be represented in visual media as seated, provided with priestly, regal, and divine attributes. Coins even feature Livia without a male counterpart, revealing how far perceptions of the res publica had changed in the direction of incorporating female leadership. It is well known how Augustus established himself as princeps; based his position on both his potestas (legal power) and auctoritas (personal authority), and essentially won the status competition of the late republic. His title Augustus and many priesthoods, including that of pontifex maximus, were furthermore crucial to support his elevated position as princeps. It is an important finding then, that these were fundaments that Livia shared with Augustus. However, if we examine the chronology of how the status of Livia and Augustus developed, it appears that Augustus acquired both priesthoods and the title ahead of Livia: he received the office of pontifex maximus in 12 bce and acquired the title ‘Augustus’ forty-one years prior to Livia’s adoption as ‘Julia Augusta’. It was not until the reign of Tiberius that Livia fully reached the position as the emperor’s colleague in the maintenance of an imperial and dynastic regime. Livia clearly transcended and exceeded the status of previous elite women. While her position was a product of a process of negotiation, redefinition, and new synthesis of how women might be implicated and engaged in the Roman imperiality, successive empresses were loaded with honours as a matter of course, and, once established by Livia, the practice of according these honours appears to have needed little explanation. When she herself was declared

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divine in 42 ce her cult statue was erected alongside that of divus Augustus in the temple Livia herself had built together with her son. Livia was deified on 17 January, on the same day as the games she once had instituted in her husband’s honour, and on the anniversary of their wedding day. The cult of diva Augusta in turn enabled a large number of women to serve as priestesses within the imperial cult and gain status in their local communities.82 Lastly, it has not been my intention to discuss the relationship between Livia and Tiberius, but it is worth noting that Tiberius did not (or at least not successfully), prevent Livia from taking up a formal office which doubtless increased her political standing and offered her possibilities to engage in status competition. If we return to the sardonyx gem discussed in the introduction it is clear as Augusta, the widow, daughter, and priestess of the divine Augustus, Livia was more closely tied to Augustus than ever. She was the link between her divine husband and the Roman people, and his blessings came to them through her mediation. With the words of Cassius Dio, writing in hindsight, Livia indeed ‘surpassed all previous women’.83

Works Cited Primary Sources84 AE = L’Année épigraphique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1888–) BMCRE = British Museum Catalogue of Coins of the Roman Empire (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1923–) Cassius Dio = Cassius Dio, Dio’s Roman History, trans. by Earnest Cary and Herbert B. Foster, Loeb Classical Library, 32, 37, 66, 82, 83, 175, 176, 177, 9 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) CIL = Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin, 1863–) ILS = Inscriptiones Latinae selectae, ed. by Hermann Dessau (Berlin: Weidmann, 1892–1916) InscrIt = Inscriptiones Italiae, ed. by Attilio Degrassi (Rome: Libreria dello stato, 1931–32) Ovid, Ex Ponto = Ovid, Ex Ponto, in Ovid: Tristia; Ex Ponto, trans. by Arthur Leslie Wheeler, Loeb Classical Library, 151 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 264–489 RIC = Roman Imperial Coinage, ed. by Harold Mattingly and Edward Allen Sydenham (London: Spink, 1923); rev. edn. of vol. i only C. Humphrey V. Sutherland and Robert A. G. Carson (London: Spink, 1984)

82 For a comprehensive study of imperial priestesses in the Latin West see Hemelrijk, Hidden Lives. For the priestesses (and priests) of Livia see Brännstedt, ‘Femina princeps’, pp. 170–77. 83 Cassius Dio, lvii.12.1–2. 84 Directly quoted primary sources only.

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RPC = Roman Provincial Coinage, ed. by Andrew M. Burnett, Michel Amandry, and Pere Pau Ripollès (London: British Museum Press, 1992) Suetonius, Augustus = C. Suetonius Tranquillus, Opera, i: De vita Caesarum, ed. by Maximilian Ihm (Berlin: Teubner, 1993) Tacitus, Annales = Cornelius Tacitus: Ab excessu Divi Augusti (Annales) pars 1, libri I–VI, ed. by Stefan Borzsák (Berlin: Teubner, 1992) Velleius = C. Velleius Paterculus, Ex historiae Romanae libris duobus quae supersunt, ed. by Kurt Stegmann de Pritzwald (Berlin: Teubner, 1965) Secondary Studies Alföldi, Andrew, ‘Hasta—summa imperii: The Spear as Embodiment of Sovereignty in Rome’, American Journal of Archaeology, 63 (1959), 1–27 Ando, Clifford, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) Barrett, Anthony A., Caligula: The Corruption of Power (London: Batsford, 1989) ———, Livia, First Lady of Imperial Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) Bartman, Elizabeth, Portraits of Livia: Imaging the Imperial Woman in Augustan Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Beard, Mary, ‘The Sexual Status of Vestal Virgins’, The Journal of Roman Studies, 70 (1980), 12–27 Bell, Sinclair, ‘Role Models in the Roman World’, in Role Models in the Roman World: Identity and Assimilation, ed. by Sinclair Bell and Inge-Lyse Hansen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), pp. 1–39 Brännstedt, Lovisa, ‘Livia on the Move’, in The Moving City: Processions, Passages and Promenades in Ancient Rome, ed. by Jonas Bjørnebye, Simon Malmberg, and Ida Östenberg (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 37–46 ———, ‘Femina princeps. Livia’s Position in the Roman State’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Lund University, 2016) Champlin, Edward, ‘The Testament of Augustus’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 132 (1989), 154–65 Crawford, Michael H., ‘Roman Imperial Coin Types and the Formation of Public Opinion’, in Studies in Numismatic Method Presented to Philip Grierson, ed. by Christopher H. V Brook and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 47–64 Davies, Glenys, ‘On Being Seated: Gender and Body Language in Hellenistic and Roman Art’, in Body Language in the Greek and Roman Worlds, ed. by Douglas Cairns (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2005), pp. 215–38 Davies, Penelope, Architecture and Politics in Republican Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) DiLuzio, Megan J., A Place at the Altar: Priestesses in Republican Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016) Duncan-Jones, Richard P., ‘Implications of Roman Coinage: Debates and Difference’, Klio, 87 (2005), 459–87

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Fishwick, Duncan, The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, 3 vols in 8 pts (Leiden: Brill, 1987–2005) ———, ‘On the Temple of Divus “Augustus”’, Phoenix, 46 (1992), 232–55 ———, ‘Livia: Sacerdos or flaminica?’, The Classical Quarterly, 66 (2016), 406–10 Gradel, Ittai, Emperor Worship and Roman Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) Grether, Gertrude, ‘Livia and the Roman Imperial Cult’, American Journal of Philology, 67 (1946), 222–52 Harvey, Tracene, ‘The Visual Representation of Livia on the Coins of the Roman Empire’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Alberta, 2011) Hedlund, Ragnar, ‘“… Achieved Nothing Worthy of Memory.” Coinage and Authority in the Roman Empire c. ad 260–295’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Uppsala University, 2008) Hekster, Olivier, ‘Coins and Messages. Audience Targeting on Coins of Different Denominations’, in The Representation and Perception of Roman Imperial Power, ed. by Lukas de Blois and others (Amsterdam: Gieben, 2003), pp. 20–35 Hemelrijk, Emily A., ‘Priestesses of the Imperial Cult in the Latin West’, L’Antiquité classique, 75 (2005), 137–70 ———, Hidden Lives, Public Personae: Women and Civic Life in the Roman West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) Hölkeskamp, Karl-Johan, Reconstructing the Roman Republic: An Ancient Political Culture and Modern Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) Hopwood, Bronwyn, ‘Livia and the Lex Voconia’, in Gender Identities in Italy in the First Millennium bc, ed. by Edward Herring and Kathryn Lomas (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), pp. 143–48 Horster, Marietta, ‘Coinage and Images of the Imperial Family: Local Identity and Roman Rule’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 26 (2013), 243–62 Huntsman, Eric D., ‘The Family and Property of Livia Drusilla’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1997) Kampen, Natalie B., Family Fictions in Roman Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Koortbojian, Michael, The Divinization of Caesar and Augustus: Precedents, Consequences, Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Linderski, Jerzy, ‘Augustales and Sodales Augustales’, in Roman Questions, ii: Selected Papers, Heidelberger althistorische Beiträge und epigraphische Studien, 44 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007), pp. 179–83 Lindsay, Hugh, Adoption in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Manders, Erika, Coining Images of Power: Patterns in the Representation of Roman Emperors on Imperial Coinage, a.d. 193–284 (Leiden: Brill, 2012) Megow, Wolf-Rüdiger, Kameen von Augustus bis Alexander Severus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987) Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968)

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Merton, Robert K., George G. Reader, and Patricia L. Kendal, The StudentPhysician: Introductory Studies in the Sociology of Medical Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957) Noreña, Carlos F., ‘The Communication of the Emperor’s Virtues’, Journal of Roman Studies, 91 (2001), 146–68 Platner, Samuel Ball, and Thomas Ashby, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (London: Oxford University Press, 1929) Price, Simon, ‘From Noble Funerals to Divine Cult: The Consecration of Roman Emperors’, in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, ed. by David Cannadine and Simon Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 56–105 Saller, Richard P., ‘Roman Heirship Strategies in Principle and in Practice’, in The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present, ed. by David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 26–47 Schultz, Celia, Women’s Religious Activity in the Roman Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) Sutherland, Carole H. V., Coinage in Roman Imperial Policy, 31 bc – ad 68 (London: Methuen, 1951) Swan, Peter Michael, The Augustan Succession: An Historical Commentary on Cassius Dio’s ‘Roman History’, Books 55–56 (9 b.c. – a.d. 14) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Takács, Sarolta, Vestal Virgins, Sibyls, and Matrons: Women in Roman Religion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008) Webb, Lewis, and Lovisa Brännstedt, ‘Gendering the Roman Triumph: Elite Women and the Triumph in the Republic and Early Empire’, in Gendering Roman Imperialism, ed. by Greg Woolf and Hannah Cornwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) Welch, Kathryn, ‘Velleius and Livia: Making a Portrait’, in Velleius Paterculus: Making History, ed. by Eleanor Cowan (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2011), pp. 309–34 Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 bc – ad 68 (Leiden: Brill, 1999)

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Double Martyrdom, Double Crown Virgin Martyrs and Fourth-Century Ascetic Hierarchies

Haec est sola digna retributio, cum sanguis sanguine compensatur; et redempti cruore Christi, pro redemptore libenter occumbimus. Quis sanctorum sine certamine coronatus est?1 (This is the only proper recompense: to compensate blood with blood; and so, as we are redeemed by the blood of Christ, we willingly die for our redeemer. What saint has ever been crowned without combat?)

Introduction By the fourth century ce, the crown of martyrdom was an established motif in Christian literature and art. Echoing the honours attributed to soldiers of war returning in triumph, as well as athletic champions in the games, the martyrs’ crown signalled battles won by bravery and physical combat.2 Despite seemingly gendered restrictions to such traditional male honours, this was a trophy that could be won by men and women alike.3 Nevertheless, with fourth-century ce Christian literature, there seems to emerge another crown with even more gendered connotations: the crown of virginity. By building on Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Maud Burnett McInerney’s previous

1 Jerome, Epistulae, xxii.39. I wish to thank the editors, and particularly Lewis Webb, for thorough reading and many helpful suggestions that have improved the translations of the Greek and Latin throughout this chapter. 2 Brekelmans, Martyrerkranz, p. 33. There is quite a large literature on crown motifs in antiquity and Late Antiquity. See e.g. Mathews, Clash of Gods, pp. 157–67 with notes. A different interpretation, with a more theological focus on the relevant New Testament passages, is given in Harrison, ‘The Fading Crown’, pp. 493–529. 3 Mathews, Clash of Gods, p. 163 notes that the Graeco-Roman tradition of crowning the deceased in funerary ceremonies was for men but not for women. Sissel Undheim    is Professor in the Study of Religion at the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion, University of Bergen (Norway). Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 275-297 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126152

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research on the virgin martyrs’ double crown, this chapter seeks to explore how the double crown became a potent metaphor and visual expression of the virgin martyrs’ unsurpassed status in the increasingly competitive Christian hierarchy.4 This elevated position of the virgin martyrs seems in turn to have ‘trickled down’ and intensified the living, consecrated virgins’ social and sacred status during the fourth century ce. By examining rhetoric and iconography specifically related to the cult of St Agnes at Rome, but with reference to other late antique martyrs, this chapter will discuss the ‘double crown’ of virgin martyrs as a recurring motif in discourses vying to establish asceticism as the most valued expression of orthodox Christianity. I will particularly focus on the virgin martyrs’ role as models and shaming devices in the writings of Jerome, Ambrose, and Prudentius. The textual sources will then be supplemented with archaeological and iconographical material that may provide other, and even more elastic, contemporary interpretations of virginal gender and status, in order to demonstrate how male virginity also became a challenging and contested site for ascetic status in the Christian community. Before we turn to the late antique sources, I will take a brief detour to contemporary Rome, where the double crown is still a potent symbol in one specific religious ceremony.

Celebrating St Agnes Every 21 January, on the day of St Agnes, a solemn rite is carried out in the Basilica of St Agnes on Via Nomentana outside the city walls of Rome. The church is crowded, and decorated for this very special occasion — la benedizione degli agnelli — the blessing of the lambs.5 Two large baskets are carried up the aisle in a procession, and in each basket is a little lamb, covered in red and white roses. The ceremony is part of a complex rite, with many stages, but what is important here are the two lambs.6 The linguistic similarity between Agnes (from Greek hagnos-, meaning ‘pure’ and ‘untouched’) and agnus (meaning ‘lamb’) made the lamb an attribute of Agnes already in early iconography, and the saint is often represented with a lamb in images and text. The lamb symbolism ties Agnes closely to Christ as Agnus Dei, and

4 Kelly, Performing Virginity; McInerney, Eloquent Virgins. 5 The description here is based on my observations of the ceremony on 21 January 2005. See also Visser, Geometry of Love, pp. 117–21 for a description and analysis of the ceremony. 6 Before coming to Sant’Agnese, the lambs have been blessed by the pope, and they are then carried (or today, taken by cars) in procession to the Church of St Agnes. After the ceremony in the church, the lambs are taken to Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s residence, where they are reared. Wool from these lambs is eventually woven by the Benedictine sisters at S. Cecilia in Trastevere, and made into the sacred palliums, the honorary capes of the archbishops. The palliums are the ones given to the new archbishops in a new ceremony on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June, cf. Visser, Geometry of Love, pp. 120–21.

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thus stresses the sacrificial aspect of her martyrdom in itself, but also as an imitation of the death of Christ.7 In the Church of St Agnes on St Agnes’s day, however, there are interestingly two lambs, and each is adorned with a crown of roses.8 The first lamb, wreathed with red roses, is said to symbolize Agnes’s blood sacrifice — her martyrdom. The second lamb, adorned with a crown of white roses, signifies the saint’s second martyrdom, her virginity.9 These contemporary rites celebrating Agnes in the Church of St Agnes outside the Walls (Sant’ Agnese fuori le mura) on 21 January have evolved over a period of more than 1600 years. An entry in the Deposito martyrum, which is preserved as part of the Filocalus Calendar, attests to the commemoration of St Agnes on the site where she was buried at Via Nomentana as an annual event on 21 January from at least 354 ce.10 Over the next decades, a cultic complex was constructed at the site, and Agnes was eulogized by, among others, Pope Damasus11 and the Spanish poet Prudentius.12 Prominent writers such as Jerome and Ambrose praised the saint as an exemplary Christian virgin, a model for the virgins the Church Fathers sought to recruit. The glorious crown of martyrdom was no longer easily obtained in the post-Constantinian empire, but Christians could still enter the contest



7 This is for instance seen in the procession of virgins in the mosaics of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. The lamb appears often in early Christian iconography, and mainly as the Agnus Dei, Christ as the lamb of God. Revelation 4.14 makes explicit reference to virgins and the Lamb, a biblical topos that late antique writers often expand upon, and lambs appear in the number twelve (representing the disciples), as a mass (the flock of the Shepherd), and as one. In the Agnes iconography, this also emphasizes the martyr’s imitatio Christi, cf. Moss, The Other Christs. 8 I use crown here both for those made of metal as well as those of organic material, such as laurel and flowers. There are also crowns that combine different materials (see e.g. Mathews, Clash of Gods, p. 164). The term also overlaps and may be synonymous with diadems. Although crowns of different materials often had very distinctive use and meaning (such as the laurel crown adorning a triumphant general), these also seem to have blurred and overlapped. See for instance Beard, The Roman Triumph, p. 229 (and throughout). For golden crowns as spoils carried in triumphal processions, see Östenberg, Staging the World, pp. 119–27. 9 According to Visser, Geometry of Love, p. 120, the lambs also have a gold paper with the letters SAV (Sancta Agnes Virgo) and the SAM (Sancta Agnes Martyr) respectively attached to their wool. 10 Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, ii, 74–76. 11 Damasus, Elogium, 37, ed. by Trout, p. 150: ‘Fama refert Sanctos dudum retulisse parentes | Agnem cum lugubres cantus tuba concrepuisset, | Nutricis gremium subito liquisse puellam; | Sponte trucis calcasse minas, rabiemque tyranni: | Urere cum flammis voluisset nobile corpus, | Viribus immensum parvis superasse timorem, | Nudaque perfusos crines, et membra dedisse, | Ne Domini templum facies peritura videret. | O veneranda mihi, sanctum decus alma pudoris, | Ut Damasi precibus faveas precor, inclyta Virgo’. 12 Prudentius, Peristephanon liber, xiv, ed. and trans. by Thompson with extensive changes, pp. 338–345. For an overview of the late antique sources, see Denomy, The Old French Lives. For the two crowns particularly associated with Agnes also in later representations, see Morey, ‘Corones tweyne’, pp. 119–33.

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for the crown of virginity. At least, that is, those who were still virgins. Did that make it a gender-exclusive competition? The ceremony of the lambs is first attested in a document from 1442.13 In northern Europe, the virgin — or bridal — crown had by then become a mandatory part of the consecration ceremony for the women who entered monastic life as nuns.14 According to Gisela Muschiol, the crowning of consecrated virgins only became part of the so-called veiling ceremony from the tenth century ce.15 For the double martyrdom and the two crowns, however, we may turn to Late Antiquity and the Latin Church Fathers.

Virginity as Martyrdom Ambrose appears to be the first to specifically mention the double martyrdom of Agnes. Presented for the first time to his congregation in Milan as a sermon on, in fact, 21 January, Ambrose’s theological treatise from 377, On Virgins (De virginibus), takes the dies natalis of St Agnes as the starting point for what eventually was to become a three-book-long theological justification and appraisal of virginity as the best way of life for Christians of the female sex.16 In these introductory passages to the sermon/treatise, the Milanese bishop rhetorically asks whether hers was not a whole new kind of martyrdom (‘Novum martyrii genus’). In ‘one and the same victim’, a twelve-year-old girl, Ambrose identified a new and intensified martyrdom, where chastity and faith was combined. ‘Et virgo permansit, et martyrium obtinuit’ (She remained a virgin, and at the same time obtained martyrdom). A ‘double martyrdom’, duplex martyrium, Ambrose called it.17 That virginity in itself could be compared to martyrdom, was however not Ambrose’s invention. In his treatise Symposium, dated late third/early fourth century ce, Methodius of Olympus had described virginity as martyrdom: [Christ] announces that the order and holy choir of the virgins shall be the first to enter in company with Him into the rest of the new dispensation, as into a bridal chamber. For they were martyrs, not as bearing the pains of the body for a little moment of time, but as enduring them through all their life, not shrinking from truly wrestling in an Olympian contest for the prize of chastity; but resisting the fierce torments of pleasures and fears and griefs, and the other evils of the iniquity of men, they first of

13 Visser, Geometry of Love, p. 121. 14 Hotchin, ‘The Nun’s Crown’, pp. 178–94; Bynum, ‘Crowned with Many Crowns’. 15 Muschiol, ‘Time and Space’, p. 197. 16 Cf. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, pp. 60–64. 17 Ambrose, De virginibus, i.5–9, cf. Ambrose, De officiis, i.41: ‘Quid de sancta Agne, quae in duarum maximarum rerum posita periculo, castitatis et salutis, castitatem protexit, salutem cum immortalitate commutavit?’.

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all carry off the prize, taking their place in the higher rank of those who receive the promise.18 The notion of virginity as martyrdom was closely tied to late antique discourses that presented asceticism as a kind of martyrdom.19 The analogy may be traced back to Cyprian, who compared the red crowns of the suffering martyrs with the white awarded because of ‘labour’.20 In the Life of St Anthony, Athanasius described how the Desert Father, after not succeeding in his desire to suffer martyrdom, returned to his cell, ‘and was there daily a martyr to his conscience, and contending in the conflicts of faith’.21 St Thecla came to be known as a famous martyr, although she, despite her many and horrible trials, had not suffered the ‘blood sacrifice’ of martyrdom.22 Athanasius presents Thecla’s steadfast preservation of virginity in ways that seem to conflate with notions of martyrdom. Ambrose (who in On Virgins relied on Athanasius’s First Letter to Virgins to such an extent that Yves-Marie Duval has indeed questioned the originality of Ambrose’s work),23 also refers to Thecla, alongside Mary and Agnes, as a model for Christian, consecrated virgins. In fact, in Ambrose’s exposition, it is Thecla’s virginity that saves her from the martyrdom ‘by the beasts’: Docuerunt religionem dum adorant martyrem: docuerunt etiam castitatem, dum virgini nihil aliud nisi plantas exosculantur, demersis in terram oculis, tamquam verecundantibus, ne mas aliquis vel bestia virginem nudam videret.24 (They [the wild beasts] demonstrated piety when they honoured the martyr; and they also demonstrated chastity when they did nothing else but kiss the virgin’s feet with their eyes turned to the ground, as though through shamefacedness, so that no male, even a beast, should see the virgin naked.) A few passages earlier, Ambrose had provided his reasons for choosing virginity as his topic for the sermon: Invitat nunc integritatis amor, et tu, soror sancta, vel mutis tacita moribus, ut aliquid de virginitate dicamus; ne veluti transitu quodam perstricta

18 Methodius, Symposium, vii.3, trans. by Clark, p. 750. 19 Castelli, ‘Virginity and its Meaning’, pp. 65–67; Cobb, ‘Memories of the Martyrs’, p. 112. 20 Cyprian, Epistulae, viii, in Cobb, ‘Memories of the Martyrs’, p. 112, cf. Ambrose, De officiis, xxxii: ‘Et qui viribus corporis, legitimoque luctandi certamine coronam petunt, quotidiano usu palaestrae durantes membra, nutrientes patientiam, laborem assuescunt’. 21 Athanasius, Vita Antonii, 47, trans. by Elleshaw, p. 596 (Life of Anthony). 22 Cf. e.g. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, p. 136: ‘the apparent contradiction embodied in the martyr who does not die’. 23 Duval, ‘L’originalité de de virginibus’, pp. 9–66. Cf. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, pp. 144–46. 24 Ambrose, De virginibus, ii.20, trans. by Romestin, p. 832 (On Virgins), modified. For other references to Thecla as an example for virgins, see Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride, p. 112.

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videatur, quae principalis est virtus. Non enim ideo laudabilis virginitas, quia et in martyribus reperitur, sed quia ipsa martyres faciat.25 (Now the love of integrity invites me, and you, my holy sister, even though silent by mute habits, to say something about virginity, lest that which is a principal virtue should seem to pass depreciated. For virginity is praiseworthy, not because it is found in martyrs, but because it makes martyrs itself.) Here, Ambrose explicitly states that virginity makes martyrs, thus elevating the status of those who consecrate their virginity, and consequently their lives, to the Christian Church.26 Jerome makes a similar claim in a later letter, written to the aristocratic Christian virgin Demetrias. This letter is dated to the year 414 ce, when the fall of Rome to Alaric and his troops was still fresh in memory. Here Jerome too evokes St Agnes as a model for inspiration for the newly consecrated virgin: Si te virorum exempla non provocant, hortetur faciatque securam beata martyr Agnes quae et aetatem vicit, et tyrannum, et titulum castitatis martyrio consecravit. […] Assume scutum fidei, loricam justitiae, galeam salutis, procede ad praelium. Habet et servata pudicitia martyrium suum.27 (If men’s examples do not challenge you, be encouraged and take confidence in the blessed martyr Agnes who conquered both her age and a tyrant, and by her martyrdom consecrated the title of chastity. […] Take up the shield of faith, the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, and advance to battle. The preservation of chastity involves a martyrdom of its own.) Virginity, according to both Ambrose and Jerome, is seen as a kind of martyrdom that merits similar kind of honours. As a living martyr, the sacred virgins are thus represented as embodied sanctity that few others can rival.

Crowns of Virginity: From Virginity as Martyrdom to Double Martyrdom While Ambrose seems to be the first to draw attention to Agnes’s double martyrdom, Prudentius is the first to give an explicit description and explanation of Agnes’s double crown. When used in contexts of martyrdom, corona combined two primary semantic fields of the term, merging the reference of corona as a sign of the victory of athletes and bravery of soldiers (in the case 25 Ambrose, De virginibus, i.10. 26 For references to the consecrated virgins as a sacrificial victim, see Undheim, Borderline Virginities, pp. 57–58. 27 Jerome, Epistulae, cxxx (Ad Dem.) 5, trans. by Fremantle (Letters), p. 447, with changes.

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of Christians the soldiers of Christ)28 and, secondly, denoting the wreath of flowers that decorated the victims to be sacrificed in traditional Greek and Roman cult, as well as cult statues and attendants.29 In the panegyrics of the Church Fathers, however, the powerful symbolism of the crown was further expanded as it became the token of even new and more glorious honours.30 With quite gendered connotations to male athletic and military victories, the crown thus also came to signify the elevated status of the Christian martyrs in a new hierarchy of sanctity. Prudentius’s Passio Agnetis, from his Crowns of Martyrdom (Peristephanon liber), is interesting for a number of reasons. The poem has been studied extensively, particularly with an eye to the very vivid and sexualized descriptions of the violence that the virgin martyr has to endure.31 Here, however, the focus will be on the double crown that Prudentius explicitly depicts as the reward specifically reserved for the virgin martyr: ‘Duplex corona est praestita martyri, | Intactum ab omni crimine virginal, | Mortis deinde gloria liberae’32 (A double crown (duplex corona) was bestowed upon the martyr [St Agnes], for her virginity undefiled from all crime, and then for the glory of her voluntary death). This kind of double martyrdom, Prudentius explains, is thus also exceedingly fruitful, as it combines the sixtyfold yielded by virginity with the hundredfold of the martyrs’ blood sacrifice. Prudentius writes: ‘cingit coronis interea Deus | frontem duabus martyris innubae: | unam decemplex edita sexies | merces perenni lumine conficit, | centeneus extat fructus in altera’33 (Meanwhile God encircles the unmarried martyr’s forehead with two crowns; in one is a reward that by eternal light produces sixtyfold, | in the other is found a hundredfold fruit). I will return to the images from the parable of the sower shortly, but first: at the very finale, not only of the Passio Agnetis, but also at what is the very end of the Peristephanon liber, Prudentius exclaims: 28 Lewis and Short, A New Latin Dictionary, s.v. ‘corona’. E.g. martyrs as ‘athletes’, crowned with laurels, cf. Ambrose, De officiis, xxxiii. See also Brekelmans, Martyrerkranz; Cobb, Dying to be Men, pp. 57–58. 29 Cf. e.g. Tertullian, De spectaculis, 9, 12, and throughout. 30 E.g. Athanasius, On Virginity, 17, trans. by Brakke, p. 309. ‘The [virgin] will clap her hands in glory, crying out and saying, “The king has brought me to his inner chamber” (S. of S. 1:4). Then she will live, being served by angels, judging those angels who have sinned [cf. I Cor. 6:3), reproaching virgins who have fallen, boasting in the crown she has received’. 31 Burrus ‘Reading Agnes’, pp. 25–46; Kelly, Performing Virginity; McInerney, Eloquent Virgins; Grig, ‘The Paradoxical Body of Saint Agnes’, pp. 111–22; Undheim, Borderline Virginities, p. 119. 32 Prudentius, Peristephanon liber, xiv.7–9. (trans. by Thompson, p. 339, with extensive changes); Guttilla, ‘Il martyrium e la duplex corona’, pp. 91–116, argues that Prudentius borrows the topic from Paulinus of Nolas, Carmina, 18, where his patron saint Felix is poetically adorned with two crowns, one white and one red. Felix is neither described as virgin nor martyr (but confessor). He is nevertheless provided with two crowns by his devotee. 33 Prudentius, Peristephanon liber, xiv.119–23, trans. by Thompson, p. 345, with extensive changes.

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O virgo felix, o nova gloria, | caelestis arcis nobilis incola, | intende nostris conluvionibus | vultum gemello cum diademate, | cui posse soli cunctiparens dedit castum vel ipsum reddere fornicem. Purgabor oris propitiabilis | fulgore, nostrum si iecus inpleas, nil non pudicum est quos pia visere | dignaris almo vel pede tangere.34 (O happy virgin, o new glory, noble dweller of heavenly heights, turn your face with your twin diadems (gemello cum diademate) on our filth, you to whom alone the Father of all has given the power to restore even a brothel to chastity! I shall be cleansed by the brightness of your gracious face, if you would fill my heart. Nothing is not chaste which you consider worthy to visit in love or to touch with your nourishing foot.) The motif of the twin, or double diadem, also appears in a (pseudo-)Damasian epigram dedicated to St Agatha. The text, which might predate Prudentius and Ambrose (but is more likely a much later text)35 also mentions the double diadem which decorated the virgin saint.36 This double crown of Agnes and other virgin saints, such as Agatha, was only obtained by means of the most brutal and blood-splattered trials. Not only must the martyr typically suffer horrible torture before she obtained her martyrdom of blood, she also had to endure what Kathleen Coyne Kelly has termed ‘circumvented rape’, that is, evading a number of specific attacks on her virginity, be it from powerful suitors or by exposure in a brothel. According to Kelly, this ‘near-rape narrative is a bait-and-switch game that always leaves the audience fully aware of the bait that has been withheld’.37 In earning this double crown, the passio, or narrative relating the eventual death of the virgin, is also accordingly intensified. The audience, that is those listening to the sermon or reading the novelistic passio, not only awaits the answer to whether the heroine will attain her desired martyrdom. Equal suspension is attached to the question of whether she miraculously will preserve her virginity throughout her ordeals and until death unites her, pure and untouched, with Christ, her bridegroom.

The Fruits of Virginity As indicated in Prudentius’s praise of Agnes’s double crown, the paradoxical fruitfulness of virginity was often stressed with reference to the parable of the sower. According to the interpretations found in the late antique ‘virgin literature’, the married represented the thirtyfold, the widows the sixtyfold, and the 34 Prudentius, Peristephanon liber, xiv.124–33, trans. by Thompson, p. 345, with extensive changes. 35 Poche, Agnes in Agony. See also Damasus, Elogium, ed. by Trout, p. 135. 36 Damasus, Carmina, 30 (S. Agatha): ‘diadema duplex decorat’. 37 Kelly, Performing Virginity, p. 62. She quotes Adrienne Auslander Munich, according to whom ‘absolute virginity tells no story about itself, but enables the story to be told’. Cf. McInerney, Eloquent Virgins, p. 71, and Burrus, ‘Reading Agnes’.

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virgins the hundredfold.38 Jerome praises his patroness, the Roman aristocratic widow, Paula, by attributing even to her some of the honours of virginity: ‘Long experience has taught her [Paula] how to rear, to preserve, and to teach virgins; and daily into her crown is the chastity of the hundredfold number woven’.39 Jerome’s use of the number 100 here denotes the virginity to which Paula herself, as a widow, could have no claim. However, because of her patronage of virgins, she could still adorn herself with the hundredfold fruits. Through her patronage, in other words, the sanctity of the sacred virgins’ virginity seems to also somehow rub off on their mistress, even though she is no virgin herself. The imagery combining virginity, martyrdom, and the abundance that is generated by the combining of these two contributes to placing also virgins as such, and particularly those who are formally consecrated, at the uppermost echelons of the Christian (religious) hierarchy. The parable of the sower is elsewhere interpreted so that the martyrs are seen as the ones yielding hundredfold.40 It is this imagery Prudentius relies on when the virgin martyr and her double crown now splendidly yield both hundredfold and sixtyfold at the same time. In the course of the fourth century ce, when martyrdom was no longer an accessible means to attain salvation and sanctity, the consecrated virgins of the Church were placed at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of sanctity.41 Still, however, surpassed by the martyrs in this hierarchy of sanctity, this paved the way for a new accumulation of honours and sanctity, now represented by the virgin martyrs and their ‘double crown of martyrdom’. Virgin martyrs such as Agnes, and later Lucy, Agatha, Pelagia, Cecilia, and countless others, thus came to be seen as the most elevated and holiest of humans, as their martyrdom was amplified by their virginity. In terms of social status as well as gender, however, this kind of mainly female sanctity was not necessarily so unproblematic.

Virgin Martyrs, Ascetic Discourse, and Intra-Christian Competition Addressing his congregation in January 377 ce — and now we return to 21 January and the death day of Agnes — Ambrose first approached his chosen topic, virginity, with the following words: Natalis est martyris, hostias immolemus. Natalis est sanctae Agnes, mirentur viri, non desperent parvuli; stupeant nuptae, imitentur innuptae.

38 Undheim, ‘Christus virgo’, pp. 251–65. See for instance Jerome, Epistulae, xxii.15, Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, i.3, Augustine, De virginitate, 46, and Cyprian, Epistulae, lxxvi.6. 39 Jerome, Epistulae, xlviii.2: ‘Quae longo usu didicit nutrire, servare, docere virgines: in cujus corona centenarii quotidie numeri castitas texitur’. For Jerome, see also Lamprecht, ‘Crown of Virginity’. 40 Undheim, ‘Christus virgo’. 41 Brown, The Body and Society, p. 359.

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Sed quid dignum de ea loqui possumus, cujus ne nomen quidem vacuum luce laudis fuit? Devotio supra aetatem, virtus supra naturam; ut mihi videatur non hominis habuisse nomen, sed oraculum martyris, quo indicavit quid esset futura.42 (It is the birthday of a martyr; let us immolate the [sacrificial] victims. It is the birthday of St Agnes; let men marvel, let children not despair, let the married be astounded, let the unmarried imitate. But what can I say that is worthy of her, whose name was not devoid of the light of praise? Devotion beyond her age, virtue beyond her nature; she seems to me not to have had the name of a human, but the prophecy of a martyr, with which she declared what she was to become.) One way to understand Ambrose’s panegyrics in these passages, and elsewhere in the same treatise, is by turning to Elizabeth Clark’s analyses of how women often functioned rhetorically as ‘shaming devices’ in the highly literary texts of the Church Fathers.43 Not only is the audience to be astounded and inspired by this martyr’s bravery in the face of the executioner. Ambrose’s insistence on the girl’s ‘tender age’ (she was twelve), and her frail body (‘Was there even a spot for a wound in that small body?’)44 add to the series of seemingly paradoxical heroic traits. As Elizabeth Castelli has argued, ‘The martyr’s death is a masculine death, even when (or perhaps especially when) it is suffered by a woman’.45 Ambrose’s message to the congregation may in other words have sounded like something along these lines: ‘When this tiny girl, coming straight from her parents’ comforting care, can willingly make such a sacrifice, is merely a little more chaste behaviour, or the dedication of a virgin daughter to the Church, too much to ask from you?’ Shaming the congregation, both men and women of all social classes, by demonstrating how a twelve-year-old girl is their moral superior, Ambrose thus effectively counters his critics and at the same time promotes his ascetic ideal, embodied by a young virgin girl.46 In the fourth-century ce theological disputes over the status of virgins vis-à-vis the married, the virgin martyrs only made up one fraction of the heavy ammunition Church Fathers such as Ambrose and Jerome loaded their texts with. The rhetorical function of the virgin martyrs seems primarily to have been to inspire and make the audience marvel over the paradoxical audacity and self-sacrifice of these young girls. The fact that these young virgin martyrs were introduced into these discourses on Christian sanctity was, however, likely to have even further heightened the status of the living, consecrated virgins, whose ‘daily martyrdom’ and perseverance also received increased 42 Ambrose, De virginibus, i.5, trans. by Romestin, p. 803 (On Virgins), with changes. 43 Clark, Reading Renunciation; Clark, ‘The Lady Vanishes’. 44 Ambrose, De virginibus, i.7: ‘minusculae […] aetati. […] Fuitne in illo corpusculo vulneri locus?’. Trans. by Romestin, p. 803 (On Virgins), with changes. 45 Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, p. 62. 46 This is more fully discussed in Undheim, Borderline Virginities, p. 108 and throughout.

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attention by association with the virgin martyrs they modelled themselves after. As such, the virgin martyrs, themselves imitating Christ as well as his mother, Mary, became part of the argumentation against opponents critical of asceticism and the virgin ideal, such as Jovinian, Helvidius, and Vigilantus.

‘Our Virgins’ vs ‘their Virgins’ A recurring topos in the early Christian virgin-texts is the comparisons between the virgins of the pagans and those of the Christians.47 Although by no means dominating the texts, these comparisons functioned as rhetorical means in the constructions of a Christian ascetic identity by opposing the practice of ‘us’ vs ‘them’ i.e. the pagans, thereby marking boundaries in the development of an orthodox, Christian, ascetic practice of sexual renunciation.48 It also served as an analogue to the larger historical narrative, where Christianity conquers paganism and thus confirms a divine plan. Only a few examples will suffice here: Suis castitas cumulatur dispendiis. Non est virginitas, quae pretio emitur, non virtutis studio possidetur: non est integritas quaecumque in auctione nummario ad tempus licitatur compendio. Prima castitatis victoria est facultatum cupiditates vincere; quia lucri studium tentamentum pudoris est. Ponamus tamen subsidia largitatum conferenda virginibus. Quae christianis munera redundabunt? Quod tantas opes sufficiet aerarium? Aut si arbitrantur solis Vestalibus conferendum, non pudet, ut qui totum sibi sub imperatoribus gentilibus vindicarunt, iidem sub principibus christianis non putent nobis sortem debere esse communem.49 (Chastity is increased by its own expenses. Virginity is not that which is bought with a price, and not kept through pursuit of virtue; integrity is not whatever is at present bid for at an auction with money. Chastity’s first victory is to conquer desire for money; for the pursuit of profit is a test of modesty. Let us, however, lay down that plentiful reserves be conferred on virgins. What favours will overflow upon Christians! What public treasury will supply such riches? Or if they believe that they [the favours] should be conferred on the Vestals alone, are they not shamed that they who claimed the whole for themselves under heathen imperatores should not think that we ought to have a common lot under Christian principes?)

47 Undheim, ‘The Wise and the Foolish’. 48 Undheim, ‘The Wise and the Foolish’. 49 Ambrose, Epistulae, xviii.12 (Against Symmachus). My translation, cf. Undheim, ‘The Wise and the Foolish’, p. 394.

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Later in the same letter, Ambrose refers to the abundance generated by Christian virgins, compared to those of the pagans (i.e. the Vestal Virgins) Ergo et messis nostra fides animorum est. Ecclesiae gratia meritorum vindemia est, quae ab ortu mundi virebat in sanctis, sed postrema aetate se diffudit in populos, ut adverterent omnes non rudibus animis inrepsisse fidem Christi — nulla enim sine adversario corona victoriae —, sed explosa opinione, quae ante convaluit, quod erat verum, fit iure praelatum.50 (Therefore, our harvest is the faith of souls. The grace of the Church is the vintage of merits, which from the beginning of the world flourished in the saints, but in the last age has spread itself over the people, that all might notice that the faith of Christ has not crept into uncultivated minds — for there is no crown of victory without an opponent — but the opinion being spread which before prevailed has become the preferred law.) Here, it is the crown of victory that is won by the Christians in competition with paganism. There seems to be some tension between this crown of victory or immortality awarded to all Christians through baptism but only to be received in the future, with the immediate crowning of the martyrs.51 In On Virgins, too, Ambrose interrupts his appraisal of Agnes with a section where he demolishes the virgins of the pagans, before he returns to Agnes, who is compared to ‘a certain Pythagorean virgin’,52 celebrated by the pagans according to Ambrose because she heroically bit off her own tongue and spat it in the face of the interrogating tyrant: Quanto nostrae virgines fortiores, quae vincunt etiam quas non vident potestates: quibus non tantum de carne et sanguine, sed etiam de ipso mundi principe saeculique rectore victoria est! Aetate utique Agnes minor, sed virtute major, triumpho numerosior, constantia confidentior, non sibi linguam propter metum abstulit, sed propter tropaeum reservavit. Nihil enim habuit quod prodi timeret, cujus non erat criminosa sed religiosa

50 Ambrose, Epistulae, xviii.29. My translation. 51 For the crown of victory available to all Christians through baptism, see Wharton, ‘Ritual and Reconstructed Meaning’, pp. 374–75; Mathews, Clash of Gods, p. 164. Harrison, The Fading Crown, p. 507 argues that New Testament application of crowning ceremony symbolism should be understood as a ‘democratization of Graeco-Roman conventions of honour in the Christian community’. Without entering a discussion of these theological readings of the New Testament texts, I would maintain that crown symbolism came to convey more or less subtle distinctions in Christian hierarchies of sanctity (and thus also honour) in Late Antiquity. One such distinction may be seen in the fact that the martyr’s crown was awarded immediately upon death, and thus provided a soteriological ‘guarantee’ that the baptized Christian could never be equally certain of. 52 Identified in Patrologia latina as Leaena, the mistress of Aristogeiton, cf. Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography, p. 179 and n. 91.

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confessio. Itaque illa secretum tantummodo celavit; haec probavit Dominum, quem quia aetas nondum poterat confiteri, natura confessa est.53 (How much stronger are our virgins, who conquer even those powers which they do not see; to whom the victory is not only over flesh and blood, but also over the prince of the world himself and ruler of the age! In age, Agnes indeed was lesser, but in virtue she was greater, triumphing over more, more constant in her confidence. She did not bite off her tongue because of fear but saved it as a trophy. For there was nothing she feared to say, whose confession was not criminal, but sacred. Therefore, while that one [the Pythagorean virgin] merely kept her secret; this one [St Agnes] bore witness to the Lord — she who could not yet confess because of her age, confessed by her nature.) In Ambrose’s staging of this competition, Agnes thus surpasses the heroic pagan virgin in a battle of virtue, expressed in words as well as in body. Returning to Prudentius’s Passio Agnetis, we also find this tension between ‘our virgins’ and ‘theirs’. In the opening lines of the poem, Prudentius claimed for Agnes a new role as protectress of Rome, representing her as safeguarding the well-being of the Roman people/Quirites — ‘servat salutem virgo Quiritium’ — as well as travellers who approach her with pure hearts — from her grave at the home of Romulus.54 A true virgin — that is, a Christian one — replaced the false ones, the Vestal Virgins, who had previously served this function.55 Later in the passio, Agnes is also forced to choose between being taken to a brothel or sacrificing to Minerva, possibly thought of as Pallas or the Palladium that according to tradition was kept and tended by the Vestal Virgins.56 Guiseppe Gutilla points out that this passage allows Prudentius to stage a confrontation between Christian virginity and that of the pagans.57 In this competition, the Christian virgins evidently out-virgin their pagan adversaries in what seems a contest staged mainly by the Church Fathers in order to display the Christians’ abundance of virginal virtue and sanctity.58

53 Ambrose, De virginibus, i.19. My translation. 54 Prudentius, Peristephanon liber, xiv.1–6: ‘Agnes sepulchrum est Romulea in domo, | fortis puellae, martyris inclytae. | conspectus in ipso condita turrium, | servat salutem virgo Quiritium, | nec non et ipsios protegit advenas | puro ac fideli pectore supplices’. Cf. Undheim, ‘Sanctae virginitates’; Visser, Geometry of Love, pp. 236–52. For Ambrose and Damasus as sources for this poem of Prudentius, see Palmer, Prudentius on the Martyrs, pp. 250–53. 55 Undheim, Borderline Virginities, p. 55. 56 Prudentius, Peristephanon liber, xiv.27. Cf. Ambrose, De virginibus, i.15; Denomy, The Old French Lives, pp. 25–26 and 106. 57 Guttilla, ‘Il martyrium e la duplex corona’, p. 96 n. 18. 58 I wish to thank Lovisa Brännstedt for the notion of a contest to out-virgin the pagans.

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Visualizing the Virginal Crown A depiction of Agnes from a so-called golden glass (vetro dorato), now exhibited in the Vatican Museums, places the saint in the centre of the encircled frame (Fig. 11.1). The virgin martyr, identified with the letters A N G N E, is flanked by two birds, and they are both turned towards her, each holding a crown in their beak. This, it seems, is the first portrayal of Agnes with her two crowns.59 James Morey has also noted how the seventh-century ce apse mosaics in Sant’Agnese on Via Nomentana portray the saint, already wearing a lavishly decorated diadem, while the hand of God descends from above, reaching towards her with a second crown.60 Two funerary monuments may illustrate how the crown of virginity associated with Agnes and the sacred virgins appears to have been transferred and transformed in ways that transgressed more formal notions of sacred virginity. Crowns were, as Mathews has pointed out, ubiquitous in Roman funerary art. In the two following examples, however, the traditional Roman practice of the crowning of the deceased (according to Mathews reserved for men and not women) seems to have merged with the notion of a specific crown of virginity.61 The first is a fifth–sixth-century ce fresco from the catacombs of San Gennaro in Naples. Nonnosa, who according the inscription died when she was only two years and ten months old, is placed between her parents. Suspended in the air above her head is a thick wreath or crown, not unlike the one handed to Agnes from heaven in the seventh-century ce Sant’Agnese mosaics. Laura Lioce follows Ciavolino in suggesting that the crown of Nonnosa should be seen as a symbol of purity and virginity.62 The crown of Nonnosa echoes the description of the deceased of the so-called Theusebius sarcophagus, currently on display at the museum of Byzantine art in Berlin (Fig. 11.2). The inscription on the lid of this child’s sarcophagus, dedicated to the thirteen-month-old Theusebius, describes him as entering the halls of eternal life, carrying the virgin crown he has been given by the Lord.63

59 The image is rendered in Morey, ‘Corones tweyne’, pl. 1. The Vatican Museum holds a number of vetri dorati with different representations of Agnes, both alone and flanked by Peter and Paul. This is however the only one to depict the two crowns. 60 Morey, ‘Corones tweyne’, p. 125. Cf. e.g. the crowning of Constantine by Tyche in Gemma Constantiniana (Rijksmuseum), also referred to as the Trajan cameo. For the seventhcentury ce apse mosaic in Sant’ Agnese, see Trout, ‘Pictures with Words’. 61 Mathews, Clash of Gods, p. 163. Caesarius of Arles, Regula virginum, 63 (‘you receive crowns of glory together with holy Mary’). 62 Lioce, ‘Ritratti tardoantichi’, pp. 34–38. 63 The text is given in Ferrua, ‘Il sarcofago di un bambino’, p. 357: ‘nat(us) kal. april ba(p)t. IIII non. april | Theusebio virgini neofito | hicmihi caro, hic pio, hic cevic filio ecce sepulto | Theusebi sanctifico semper sociato pudori. | bis senos menses deo qui pertulit annum | ter denos dies super ista luce moratus est | immaculatus a pecc(at)o felici conditus dono est | natali completus et item a Chr(is)to renatus | aeternam vitae penetravit Theusebius

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Figure 11.1. Agnes. Vetro dorato, from the Vatican Museums. Photo: Vatican Museums, inv. no. 60759. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 11.2. Thesebius’s sarcophagus. Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst. Credits: Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Antje Voigt, 2014. Reproduced with permission.

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There are, however, no representations of crowns in the relief decorating the sarcophagus, nor as decoration as part of the lid inscription. Although crowns and wreaths were relatively common motifs in ancient funerary art, in this case, the crown of virginity is only presented in writing and not as image. Even more curious in this case is the fact that the barely one-year-old Theusebius is not only a toddler, like Nonnosa. He is also male, which indicates that virginal status somehow had an appeal that crossed traditional gender barriers. While no martyrs in the original sense of the term, these two deceased children seem thus to have been adorned in death with the other crown of martyrdom — that of virginity. In this manner, the status, sanctity, and also soteriological rewards that followed martyrdom appear in some cases to have ‘spilled over’, not only from martyrs to consecrated virgins, but also to any virgin as such. Although a very rare example of a male Christian virgin, Theusebius thus serves as an example of how the ascetic contest, and the prize that could be won by the virgin at death, was visualized as receiving the crown from the Lord.64 In the sixth-century ce mosaics at Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, a procession of twenty-two virgin saints mirrors the procession of male saints on the opposite side of the nave (Fig. 11.3 and Fig. 11.4). The virgin martyrs are all depicted with diadem-like ornaments on their heads, carrying their crowns in their hands in a procession.65 As pointed out by Deborah Deliyannis, in the very standardized representation of the female saints, only Agnes stands out with the lamb at her feet.66 The whole scene indicates movement towards the Magi scene at the head of the procession (in fact also depicted on the Theusebius sarcophagus). The virgins thus appear to carry their crowns to present to the baby Christ on his mother’s lap, in a movement following the three Magi offering their gifts. sedem | virginemq(ue) gerit, dom(ino) tribuente, corona(m) | Rufiinus et Severa parentes filio dulcissimo! Benemerenti fecerunt in dom(ino) | quesquas in pace. dep(ositus) VI non. mai.’ The main publications on this sarcophagus are Hempel, ‘Theusebius renato in Christo’; Jastrzebowska, ‘Les sarcophages chrétiens d’enfants à Rome’; Arnulf, ‘Die Deckelinschrift des Berliner Kindersarkophages’; Schmidt, ‘Single-Zone Frieze Sarcophagus of a Child’. For an analysis of the inscription that focuses on the soteriological dimensions of virginity, see Undheim, Borderline Virginities, pp. 129–30. 64 Undheim, Borderline Virginities, p. 183. For the challenges posed by (female) sacred virgins to traditional gender hierarchies, see e.g. McInerney, Eloquent Virgins, p. 8. McInerney argues also (p. 29) that this kind of inverted hierarchy status was the reason for Tertullian’s highstrung anxiety in his treatise On the Veiling of Virgins (e.g. De virginibus velandis, ii.5). His fear, McInerney argues, is that unreserved praise of virginity would allow for women to claim an exclusive feminine avenue of access to the divine, one that is not open to men. Cf. Augustine, Marriage and Virginity, trans. by Hunter, pp. 139–52 for how the status of consecrated Christian virgins affected the rule of celibacy for priests. 65 Deliyannis, Ravenna, p. 364 n. 148 rightly points out that not all the martyrs (i.e. not Perpetua and Felicitas) were virgins according to the narrative traditions. 66 Deliyannis, Ravenna, p. 168.

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Figure 11.3. From the procession of virgin martyrs, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna. Courtesy of Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo — Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le province di Ravenna, Forlì-Cesena e Rimini. Photo: Sissel Undheim, 2019.

Figure 11.4. From the procession of male saints, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna. Courtesy of Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo — Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio per le province di Ravenna, Forlì-Cesena e Rimini. Photo: Sissel Undheim, 2019.

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The twenty-six male saints, paralleling the procession of female saints on the opposite side of the nave, also carry their crowns of martyrdom in the very same manner. The question, then, is whether the head ornaments of the women in this frieze should also be interpreted as crowns, or diadems, symbolizing the double crown of virginity and martyrdom, or whether there is only the one crown that they carry in their hands.67 The almost contemporary mosaics portraying the twelve virgin saints on the triumphal arch in the Basilica Eufrasiana at Poreč depict the virgins with veils, but, unlike the ones in Ravenna’s Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, there are no diadems or crown to mark their status.68 However, some of the male saints (not all), depicted in full figure in the apsis (and not in the portrait frames as are the female saints) carry crowns in their hands. Seemingly presented as gifts to the Mother and Child enthroned at the apse, the male saints of Poreč behave like the Magi and virgin martyrs in Ravenna and present their crowns to the divine child. As in Sant’Agnese, a hand appears in the cloud, reaching to crown a virgin’s head, yet in Poreč it is not that of a virgin martyr, but the mother of God herself, the model for all virgin saints, who receives the crown from above.69

Status Competition and Unstable Hierarchies As Elizabeth Castelli has argued, the ‘unfolding ideology of virginity is highly complex, intertwining theological arguments, current philosophical ideas, and a collection of contemporary rhetorical themes to produce a tightly woven image of virginity as the ideal of Christian life’.70 The ideological discourses that established virginity as the pinnacle at the ascetic hierarchy were indeed complex and by no means uncontested in Late Antiquity. The role of the virgin martyrs was of course only part of this entangled web of intricate theological, practical, and more commonplace rhetorical arguments that were laid out in treatises, letters, and poetry of the third and fourth centuries ce. Nevertheless, the crown of virginity seems to have become a very specific symbol of the honours attained by the virgin martyrs in the Latin West, indicating the status competition and unstable hierarchies in the development of Christian asceticism. The notion of virginity as its own kind of martyrdom, and the unsurpassed double martyrdom of the virgin martyrs, seems in turn to have generated new paradoxes and theological discourses, as the demands to distinguish between heterodoxy and orthodoxy took ever new twists and turns in the religious 67 Cf. Prudentius, Peristephanon liber, xiv.127; Damasus, Carmina, 30. 68 Terry and Maguire, Dynamic Splendor, i, 85 et ad pass; ii, 45–51; Deliyannis, Ravenna, p. 364 n. 155. 69 The same feature might also be seen in the ninth-century ce apse mosaic of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, where the hand appears in the apsis to crown the centrally placed Christ, cf. Thunø, The Apse Mosaic in Early Medieval Rome, p. 18. 70 Castelli, ‘Virginity and its Meaning’, pp. 67–68.

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competitions that were staged. Particularly the gendered aspect of virginity, which generally, but not always, was attributed to females only, contributed to tension, as female virgins seemed to rank highest in the Christian ascetic hierarchy. The crown, not necessarily reserved for female saints, nevertheless became a powerful symbol of the status and prestige attributed to virgin martyrs, a token of their double sanctity. The exchange of crowns, depicted in texts as well as visual art, thus illustrates some of the tensions connected to gender and sanctity in fourth-century ce Christianity. The crown was both a gift to be given to God and a reward to be received in a competition where paradise and eternal life, as well as status in this life, were at stake.

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Julia Bray

A Competitive Fantasy Figure and his Female Conquests ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa

A member (as far as we can make out) of the early Islamic Meccan rentier aristocracy, the poet ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa was born around 644 ce, seems to have spent his life in Arabia, and died in 712 or 721. Other than this, little is known about him. But because most of his poetry is pseudo-autobiographical and pseudo-dialogic — it depicts his flirtations or affairs with high-born Arab women, and imagines what they said or wrote to him and thought about him — in a later scholarly tradition it stimulated storytelling in which ʿUmar is either the main actor, playing himself as he appears in his poems, or has walk-on parts spun off from the stories grafted on to his poetic persona.1 In the stories, he represents carefree hedonism in early Islamic Arabia, thumbing its nose at the ideological discourses of the new Muslim religion and disregarding its tribal politics. His poetry challenges another new poetic fashion, that of reverent, self-denying, so-called ʿUdhri love for an unattainable woman.2 After his death, and after his society had vanished, stories about ʿUmar seem to have undergone a long process of elaboration in Iraqi scholarly circles, and probably reached their peak of popularity in the tenth century, when they were collected by Abu l-Faraj al-Isfahani in his Book of Songs, composed in Baghdad when ʿUmar’s Arabia had long passed into legend.3 To be a poet had been an important thing in pre-Islamic Arabian society: tribes competed by fighting and through their poets’ boasting (fakhr). The early Islamic Arab society to which ʿUmar belonged held on to pre-Islamic

1 One such story is translated in Bray, ‘Verbs and Voices’, pp. 180–85. 2 ʿUdhra was an Arabian tribe, called ‘Asra’ by Heinrich Heine in his 1851 poem Der Asra (‘mein Stamm sind jene Asra, | Welche sterben wenn sie lieben’). The standard study of ʿUdhri poetry remains Djedidi, La Poésie amoureuse des arabes. ʿUdhri poetry gave rise to enduring transcultural poetic, mystical, and pictorial traditions. 3 Régis Blachère summarizes them in Histoire de la littérature arabe, pp. 631–32, and traces the scholarly process in ‘Problème de la transfiguration’. On the monumental Book of Songs and how it incorporates the previous centuries’ scholarship, see Kilpatrick, Making the Great Book of Songs. Julia Bray    is the Abdulaziz Saud AlBabtain Laudian Professor of Arabic at the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford. Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 299-310 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126153

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poetic traditions as well as developing new genres.4 But we do not know how poetic status now connected with other forms of status, especially when a poet broke with tradition, as did ʿUmar, and had no obvious tribal or political role. In one sense, however, ʿUmar was a continuator of tradition. The short, light poems for which he is best known have two themes in common with the long, complex ceremonial pre-Islamic poems known as qasidas: love and boasting (fakhr). In pre-Islamic poetry, the poet boasts of his own and his tribe’s ferocity in battle, of his toughness in surviving the harshness of the desert, of his reckless defiance of death, pain, and loss. Boasting permeates pre-Islamic poetry, and is direct and aggressive in challenges to the enemy, indirect in descriptions of the poet’s companions and environment. Love themes, which are confined to the opening passages of the qasida, are a form of indirect boasting: the covetable beauty of the woman the poet loves is catalogued in detail, and if she rejects him, he turns to feats of competitive manliness. Love is the overt theme of ʿUmar’s best-known poetry, but unlike contemporary ʿUdhri love poetry, his poems do not approach love with awe, as a blow of Fate, a mystery, and an indissoluble psychic union. Instead, like pre-Islamic poets, ʿUmar uses love poetry as a form of boasting, although the literary devices he uses are subtly but substantially different, as we shall see. Here is a (possibly authentic) example of ʿUmar’s poetry.5 In footnotes, I explain poetic conventions not mentioned above and describe how he manipulates them. His outright departures from convention will be discussed subsequently. ʿUmar’s original is in the tripping ramal metre. My rendition, which is as literal as possible unless the footnotes say otherwise, plods along at six or seven stress-based non-syllabic beats per line to his six brisk, possibly quantitative feet6 with a central caesura. We are told that ʿUmar’s poetry was set to music in his lifetime; Abu l-Faraj al-Isfahani records settings of various periods. ʿUmar’s poetry is still sung today, making him an icon of exceptionally long standing, but the time frame of my discussion is much shorter: his late seventh- to early eighth-century floreat, followed by the jump to his tenth-century immortalization by Abu l-Faraj al-Isfahani. The question of what the poem, and ʿUmar’s poetry generally, has to do with status competition and its gendering will be broached after the translation.



Heart moved by derelict pens and pastures rife with scrub, By patterns woven in dust by summer winds, then rain,

4 Poetry did, as Salma Khadra Jayyusi points out, acquire new aims and directions, and she argues that this followed a hiatus, and that ‘The admission that there was an interruption of certain aspects of poetry is vital for the understanding of the development of Arabic poetry as an art’, in Beeston and others, eds, Arabic Literature, pp. 391–92. 5 ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, Diwan, ed. by ʿAbd al-Hamid, no. 33, pp. 150–51, rhyme: -ar; metre: ramal. There is a French translation from which I diverge in details, Poèmes d’amour, ed. by Petit and Voisin, pp. 45–46. 6 We do not know for certain how prosody worked in ʿUmar’s time.

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I halted by the encampment and begged it to give me news Of the woman7 who said to her sweet, modest, stately paced companions8 5 As they strolled in a green valley bright with shrubs and flowers, Among soft dunes, in bloom after rain had laid the dust: ‘Now we’re alone, let’s share our secrets, as you desired.’ Her eyes — as eyes will always do — revealed her longing. ‘If only ʿUmar would come in secret!’ they said, to please her. 10 As they spoke my name, my charger9 bore me into view. ‘Who’s that?’ they cried, ‘do you know?’ ‘Of course! — can the moon be hidden?— Our lover, sent us by Fate in the nick of time, unswerving. He has come just as night, like a camel, is about to kneel and settle.10 All bright and fresh in musk-perfumed robes dampened to cool them: 15 Our desire has come to us, driving all stuffy bores away!’ In a variant, line 10 reads ‘As they spoke my praises …’, and line 11 is expanded into two lines: ‘Who’s that?’ asked the eldest. ‘To be sure, it’s ʿUmar’, said the middle one. Said the love-struck youngest: ‘Of course it is. Can the moon be hidden?’11

7 This opening is a shorthand composite of several conventions of pre-Islamic qasida poetry. Qasidas often began with the poet pausing, in his heroic journeying through the desert, at the spring campsite where his tribe and that of his beloved once pitched their tents to graze and herd their livestock (hence ‘pastures’ and ‘pens’). Typically the poet vainly asks the barely distinguishable traces of human habitation on the earthen floor of the campsite, which have been ‘woven’ into criss-cross patterns by wind and weather, to tell him what has become of his beloved, and recalls their past happiness (often with inconsolable weeping). After this, however, he moves on to sterner themes that demonstrate his toughness and other manly virtues. ʿUmar’s mini-poem does not have this extended development. 8 The ideal hyper-femininity of the poet’s lost love always symbolizes ease and refinement, and usually voluptuousness, in contrast to the hardships he endures. Here her retinue acts as a multiplier of her femininity. 9 In the original, in heroic style, ʿUmar’s horse is designated allusively and metonymically by an adjective, as ‘[an animal] with a blaze on its forehead’, a sign of its quality. My translation omits what I take as a toponym (‘at X’), which Petit and Voisin translate as ‘less than a mile away’, Poèmes d’amour, pp. 46, 190, as does Vadet, L’Esprit courtois, p. 143. 10 A stock heroic image of night used by male poets, for whom sleeping in the open is yet another ordeal. Here, it expresses the ladies’ fear of a dull evening, instead of which they will now enjoy a night of conversation with ʿUmar. (Because of the heat of the day, socializing takes place after dark.) 11 Abu l-Faraj al-Isfahani, Kitab al-Aghani, i, 53. A similar poem, no. 185, pp. 353–54 in ʿAbd al-Hamid’s edition of ʿUmar’s Diwan, is discussed by Jacobi, ‘Theme and Variations in Umayyad Ghazal Poetry’, p. 118. On recurrences of the motif of ʿUmar’s sudden appearance and his recognition by a woman who loves him, see Audebert, ‘Les vers chantés’, p. 311.

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The women in this poem seem very natural and convincing. This is what makes ʿUmar’s love poetry so appealing that some modern scholars treat the composite ʿUmar of the poems and stories not as a fantasy figure but as a real man, and the poems as documentation for aristocratic social life in seventh-century Arabia.12 The poems have been credited with another sort of documentary value, timeless psychological insight into women’s feelings.13 On the strength of this, ʿUmar has even been claimed as a feminist.14 Yet, as a contemporary of ʿUmar is supposed to have said to him, on hearing the variant quoted above: ‘You are making love to yourself, not the lady’.15 This could apply equally to the whole of his corpus, of which we will discuss two more examples, and, as Régis Blachère and James E. Montgomery both point out, ʿUmar’s use of courtship and of his masculinity is, above all, competitive. The question is, who is he competing with, and why? And what might his competitiveness have meant to readers in the later, quite different contexts in which the anecdotes developed? For Blachère, ‘The Lover of the poems that now go under ʿUmar’s name is in many ways reminiscent of the vainglorious Bedouin hero [of pre-Islamic poetry] for whom the conquest of a Lady is an aspect of self-glorification’, that is fakhr, the boasting discussed above, one of the essential themes, if not the essential theme, of male pre-Islamic poetry.16 Montgomery agrees: the pre-Islamic qasida offers him a variety of feminine poetic types to choose from, but ʿUmar usually opts for the proud beauty: ‘His […] poetic characterisation of women and their independence renders them more of a challenge for, and therefore upon possession more of a testimony to, his erotic (heroic) élan’. Most importantly, Montgomery stresses that this ‘can be explained exclusively in literary terms’.17 Writing in an encyclopedia entry, Montgomery lacked space to pursue this argument, which I will develop. Scholars who yield or make concessions to the biographical fallacy by treating ʿUmar’s poems not only as ego-documents but as social documents of general application end up explaining them in simplified terms, by a circular process: the poems and anecdotes together paint a picture of the pleasure-seeking ethos of ʿUmar’s milieu, which is attributed to the influx of wealth to Mecca and Medina following the Islamic conquests. A thin 12 E.g. Jayyusi in Beeston and others, eds, Arabic Literature, p. 422; ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, Poèmes d’amour, ed. by Petit and Voisin, throughout; Jacobi, ‘Umar ibn Abi Rabīʿa’. 13 Most notably by the great critic and author Taha Hussein (1889–1973) in an article of 1924 cited in ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, Diwan, ed. by ʿAbd al-Hamid, pp. 88–89, and by Jacobi, ‘‘Umar ibn Abi Rabīʿa’. 14 Most notably in ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, in Poèmes d’amour, ed. by Petit and Voisin, throughout. 15 The speaker is Ibn Abi ʿAtiq, great-grandson of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, a Medinan wit and man of fashion. He is quoted by Hussein in an article of 1924 cited in ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, Diwan, ed. by ʿAbd al-Hamid, i, 53. 16 Blachère, Histoire, p. 636. 17 Montgomery, ‘ʿUmar b. Abī Rabīʿa’.

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socio-economic analysis, this is used to account for the style and content of the poems. ʿUmar himself is then explained as both an architect of his milieu and as its product and reflection. This line of reasoning ignores what we know, as well as what we do not know, about the wider picture of his time and place (political, anthropological, religious), and masks the stretching, simplifying, and omissions involved in making the bundle of later materials relating to ʿUmar yield a coherent picture of him in his own time. More importantly, it pushes the primary source, ʿUmar’s poetry, into the background, and glosses over its strangeness and singularity. Our first poem is strange in two ways, first of all in its time scheme and the relation of time to its narrative and narrators. In the typical pre-Islamic multithematic qasida on which it is calqued, time, place, and memory stand in a complex and shifting relationship. The qasida typically begins at a moment in the past, in some cases with the motif of the poet coming upon a scene of desolation in the (then) present, which he pauses to compare mentally with the same place when it was peopled. If, as in ʿUmar’s poem, the poet then questions the unresponsive, deserted camp (which in ʿUmar’s poem does in fact respond to his questioning), the motif of the parting of tribes and/or lovers, leading to nostalgic memories of lost love, appears as a second theme.18 A good example of the two motifs being combined in sequence, as in lines 1–4 of ʿUmar’s poem, are the first nineteen lines of a poem by Labid, a great poet in the pre-Islamic tradition who is said to have died in around 661.19 After its leisurely, majestic opening, Labid’s poem snaps back to the present (wherever that present may stand in relation to the other parts of the poem) as the poet urges himself to forget what is past and lost and embrace action: ‘Off with you’, he says (line 22) ‘on a mount worn with travels’. A series of extended similes glorifying the poet’s she-camel then transports us as spectators into the timeless immediacy of scenes of desert life, played out in a panorama that alternates between, or combines, description and narrative and culminates in Labid’s catalogue of his own and his tribe’s unvarying virtues. Labid’s poem is just one example of the non-linearity of time in early Arabic poetry and its elusive connection to the present as embodied in the voice of the poet uttering his poem. (It is essential to note that all poems are composed in the first person and are declaimed.) Up to line 3, ʿUmar’s poem follows a similar schema to Labid’s. Then, astonishingly, ʿUmar disappears, and his voice is replaced by the voices of the women he has been describing. Although he is not present, he is the focus of the scene. Thinking and speaking of him, the women conjure him up in person in line 10 where, for a moment, he is simultaneously narrated by them (‘they spoke my name’) and is their and his own narrator (‘As they

18 The motif of parting can also serve as an opening theme: see Montgomery, The Vagaries of the Qasidah, pp. 4, 52–54, 70–71, 78. 19 See the translation by Beeston, ‘An Experiment with Labīd’, pp. 2–3.

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spoke my name my charger bore me into view’). Then the women’s voices take over again, and their verbal picture of him in lines 11–14 parallels his earlier verbal picture of them in lines 4–6. (These four and a half lines of apparently vicarious but in fact ventriloquized fakhr can be compared with some twenty-five lines of direct self-praise in the second half of Labid’s eighty-eight-line poem.) The poem ends on a moment of fulfilment and expectation (‘He has come […] Our desire has come to us’), in a present which, because what happens or is about to happen is not narrated, never becomes the past. The flow of time is not diffused, as in Labid’s poem, but is emphasized and virtually reversed. Another strangeness of the poem is how the poet puts himself inside the characters he narrates and who in turn narrate him. In line 7, when the woman projects her own desires on to her companions (‘let’s share our secrets, as you desired’), her speech ‘reveals her longing’ as effectively as her eyes do. What could pass at a pinch for the external viewpoint typical of the qasida — the quoting of direct speech, and description objectivized by a gnomic saying (‘Her eyes — as eyes will always do — revealed her longing’) — is really narrative omniscience. The poet becomes openly omniscient in line 9, when he tells us that the woman’s companions made a wish on her behalf so as ‘to please her’. How does he know their motives and intuitions? How does he even know what they said, without having been present?20 Yet suddenly, in the next line, there he is, a secret desire made flesh. Not only does he know the women’s inner thoughts, but he transforms them into visible reality. The poem thereby turns the descriptive conventions of the qasida inside out. In the qasida, reality is concrete and open to view, and a person’s inner state or quality is inferred from their actions (as in Labid’s self-description: ‘I have defended my clan, with the burden of my armour laid on a swift mare […] and I have climbed to a lookout on a hillock, no distance between the enemy’s bound-marks and its dusty sides’).21 ʿUmar’s poem skips over the visible and the concrete and magically turns fancy into reality, absence into presence, making the poem’s protagonists summon each other up just by thinking about each other. Despite the symmetry of the way they inhabit each other’s thoughts, this is not, however, a mutual relationship, but one of dominance and possession by ʿUmar, who reveals to the public the secret that the women meant to confide to each other and advertises it as his poetic property. On this

20 While ʿUmar was writing his poems, the problem of truthfulness was emerging in connection with reporting and transmitting the acts and precepts of the Prophet (hadith) and historical events. It was obviously desirable that an eyewitness be the original reporter, but the reliability of the witness and of any later intermediary was a nagging problem, which eventually gave rise to a vast critical literature. In line with the convention of eyewitness reporting and the equating of what is ascertainable with what is visible, the feelings, thoughts, and motives of protagonists are seldom described if a narrative is in the third person. 21 Beeston, ‘An Experiment with Labid’, p. 6.

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showing, ʿUmar’s play with poetic conventions of time and reality is indeed a consciously literary game, as Montgomery argued. Let us look briefly at two more poems in which ʿUmar plays similar games. In the first, the woman protagonist is again nameless:22 Her eye pours tears that run in jewel-like23 strings down both her cheeks. She says: ‘Do I have eyes for anyone but you, my only worldly thought and care? Tell me, does not the favour of my love give me rights in return? Have I displeased you? Is that why you spurn me? You’ll be sorry when I’m dead.24 Can it be one whole month, all but three days, since you began to shun me?—’ This poem is anchored forever in the present by the use of the present tense twice in the first line and the absence of narrative or context. The past — the ‘month all but three days’ of the woman’s abandonment by ʿUmar — leads nowhere, like the woman’s unanswered questions, which run the emotional and rhetorical gamut: line 2, as I read it, a passive-aggressive emotional demand for reciprocity, line 3 a seemingly more confident, fully spelled-out, legalistic statement of the same demand, with lines 4 and 5 unravelling into self-doubt, futile blackmail (‘You’ll be sorry […]’), and impotence. The woman’s mounting frustration is a measure of ʿUmar’s desirability, again a form of ventriloquistic self-praise, as in our first poem. Whereas our first poem’s symmetries mirrored a degree of emotional reciprocity and fulfilment, here the voyeuristic, ekphrastic frame (‘Her eye pours tears that run in jewel-like strings […]’) is left unclosed and the woman’s questions go unanswered, a painful asymmetry which underlines that the power in this relationship is all on ʿUmar’s side, and shows that he can play games with his own poetic rules, as well as going boldly against literary convention: he has made a woman the sole visible protagonist of the poem and its virtual author, and suspended her in timeless reiteration of her rejection by the poet. In traditional poetry, although she would be narrativized into transience as a piece of the poet’s past, she would reject him, and he would be left to struggle with his memories of her. My last example is a letter-poem, a genre uniquely associated with ʿUmar:25 Rabab wrote and said in reproach: ‘We know what you say26 in your poems. 22 23 24 25 26

ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, Diwan, ed. byʿAbd al-Hamid, no. 20, pp. 125–26, wafir, rhyme -ri.

The simile, which I have added, is implicit in the word ‘strings’. Literally, ‘May you carry my bier and witness my burial’. ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, Diwan, ed. by ʿAbd al-Hamid, no. 21, p. 126, metre khafif, rhyme -ari. As noted above, all poems are declaimed; by extension, to ‘say’ a poem can be to compose it as well as to recite it.

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Thoughtless, brazen man! You bandy my name about for gossips27 to air my secrets. So, this is the end. For as long as stars shine down, there’ll be no more coming together.’ I said: ‘Don’t cut me off28 on account of lying gossips. 5 You’ve been told lies. By the Almighty! I’ve never aired your secrets. My dearest lover and friend, pay no attention — I don’t.’ In this poem too ʿUmar plays games with poetic convention and with his own conventions, and above all with reality. He receives a letter from Rabab in which she ‘speaks’ to him (‘Rabab wrote and said’) and to which he replies. How? There is no mention of his writing to Rabab; rather, he gives the impression of speaking directly to her (‘I said’). But where is she? ʿUmar seems to have conjured her up by thinking about her; or perhaps he wants us to picture him talking to her letter and imagining what he would say to her in person. Does this make the poem a dialogue, or is it a pseudo-dialogue? Should we include a third, unheard voice, that of the gossips; and have the gossips really defamed Rabab, or is she only afraid that they will? In fact, of course, the poem is a monody by ʿUmar, just like the weeping woman’s non-conversation with him in the previous poem. The voice that purports to transmit other voices to us truthfully, while actually creating them, is ʿUmar’s.29 The lover-hero who rebuts a woman’s reproaches is a conventional poetic figure,30 but in traditional poetry tribal gossips bent on ruining a woman’s reputation tattle about the poet’s visits to her, not about his poems. Nevertheless, Rabab’s letter seems to let slip that she and ʿUmar have indeed ‘come together’ (‘There’ll be no more coming together’), making this another example of ventriloquistic fakhr. By now the relationship between words, meanings, and reality has become vexed. It is unclear whether the ‘coming together’ is sexual or merely romantic (the word Rabab uses can mean either), and confusion increases when ʿUmar throws ‘lies’ into the mix. Who is lying? ʿUmar’s self-defence is perfunctory and sloppy. He simply contradicts Rabab. How seriously are we to take even swearing by the Almighty as proof of innocence? His real defence is not denial but attack. Presenting herself as the wronged party, Rabab reproached ʿUmar from a stance of moral superiority. He retaliates in kind: he is too strong-minded to be influenced by gossips; she should follow his example. The fact that we never hear what Rabab has to

27 Gossips are stock poetic figures. Together with hostile relatives or jealous husbands, they are the main obstacle to lovers’ happiness. 28 ‘Coming together’ and ‘cutting’ or ‘cutting off ’ are stock antonyms. 29 As in the previous poem, this chain of reported voices is reminiscent of hadith and historical reports when they are prefaced by an intermediary or a chain of transmitters (isnad) leading back to the original speaker or actor. 30 See, for example, Montgomery, The Vagaries of the Qasidah, pp. 71–72.

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say to this suggests that ʿUmar wins the argument. The poem is structurally symmetrical but emotionally asymmetric. It opens with Rabab’s reproaches and closes with ʿUmar’s, and each is given the same number of lines, but Rabab, denied the opportunity of cross-examining him, is left dangling, rather like the weeping woman of the previous poem. In all three poems, and many others, ʿUmar depicts himself competing with women and winning. He competes only with women, and the competition appears to be an end in itself. It is not a means, for example, of ridiculing the women’s menfolk, for their names and tribes are not mentioned. Nor do the women, named or unnamed, seem to be real people.31 It is not obvious how such fantasy victories might have increased ʿUmar’s social standing. Jean-Claude Vadet argues that the poems are indeed a form of social competition, or of keeping in with a fashionable male crowd. He stresses their maleness and the fact that they address, so he believes, an exclusively masculine audience, but he does not develop a reading of them along these lines.32 What the effect of the poems we have just seen might have been on an all-male, an all-female, or a mixed audience, is well worth imagining, however: their ambiguities would have been heightened in different ways by single or mixed-sex reception. Later, when Abu l-Faraj al-Isfahani was collecting his corpus of poems and anecdotes about ʿUmar, their reception would have been influenced not just by the growth of the ʿUmar legend and the contrasting legends of chaste ʿUdhri lovers, but by the vast social changes that had taken place in the following centuries, and the growth and diversification of love poetry and of concepts and theories of love. By this time, the vision of ʿUmar and ʿUmar’s Arabia that Abu l-Faraj al-Isfahani’s scholarship had made into a compelling literary image was purely emblematic for his readers, for all its liveliness. This leads us back to examining the biographical fallacy. Its main effect is to normalize ʿUmar’s poetry and squeeze readings of it into a stereotype that fits the reader’s idea of his character. Thus Salma Khadra Jayyusi: In ʿUmar’s poetry there is hardly any ambivalence or real conflict. It is […] a constant quest for beauty and the intimacy of love […] There is a gentleness in his attitude which […] makes the woman the heroine of the moment, in command of her heart and her behaviour.33

31 See Jayyusi in Beeston and others, eds, Arabic Literature, p. 412, on the defamation of women as a theme of poetic satire that became current during this period. She thinks that ‘In his pursuit of women of the Qurashite nobility [ʿUmar] was chasing women with a taboo attached to their name’, but does not discuss his motives and implies that the ‘Over forty women […] mentioned in his poetry’ were real people (p. 422). Equally wedded to the biographical fallacy, Petit and Voisin follow Jabbur, Hubb ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa wa-shiʿruh, in arguing that the forty-odd names are pseudonyms of ʿUmar’s one true love: ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, Poèmes d’amour, ed. by Petit and Voisin, p. 11. 32 Vadet, L’Esprit courtois, pp. 119–58. 33 Beeston and others, eds, Arabic Literature, pp. 422–23.

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This sunny picture by no means fits all of the poetry ascribed to ʿUmar. The generic nature of anecdotes about ʿUmar and the dolce vita of seventh-century Mecca and Medina, whose cultural development Blachère traced, is of course not the only problem: there is also the problem of the authenticity of the poetry, which tends to be approached in the same circular manner as the anecdotes, i.e. if it sounds as we expect it to, it is probably by ʿUmar; if not, it is probably spurious. But where Blachère perceived ‘worryingly heterogenous’ items in the corpus,34 Montgomery argues, to the contrary, that ‘The selective process of transmission may […] have eliminated many poems which do not conform to the received picture of ʿUmar’. He urges A taxonomic analysis of the 333 poems and 109 fragments […] focused on [ʿUmar’s] four categories of courting, message, report […] and complaint, thereby establishing the relative frequency of poems of amorous adventure (i.e. narratives, often of astonishing inventiveness and unpredictability) and of declarations of undying or unfulfilled love concluding that ‘The complete picture of ʿUmar the poet has yet to be drawn’.35 Montgomery had earlier attacked the received view of ʿUmar in an article that suggested a ‘metaphysical ʿUmar’ as one aspect of his poetic persona, by which he meant an ʿUmar who occasionally, like early seventeenth-century English poets, deals in arguments and conceits. His analysis focused on two of the famous letter-poems, this time addressed by ʿUmar himself to a woman he calls Kaltham. The poems court her by means of extended legalistic arguments, and Montgomery is cautious as to their authenticity.36 (Line 3 of the second poem discussed in this paper, ‘Tell me, does not the favour of my love give me rights?’ is legalistic too, but in its thinking rather than its form.) On the basis of the three poems discussed in this paper and the games they play with time, truth, and reality, perhaps we should also be looking for a philosophical ʿUmar, authentic or not. The corpus is, as Montgomery remarked, ‘of astonishing inventiveness and unpredictability’, so much so, and so uniquely so, that the corpus should be our starting point rather than its date or author. If we approach ʿUmar’s poetry without trying to fit it to a preconceived context and without received ideas about which poems are likely to be authentic, we are left with a collection of remarkable ego-documents which challenge us to account for them. Most modern commentators have been anxious to historicize them,37 yet the strong internal logic of the poems constructs a literary world of its own, and it is the male–female manoeuvring within this

34 Blachère, Histoire, pp. 636, 638–41. 35 Montgomery, ‘ʿUmar b. Abī Rabīʿa’. 36 Montgomery and Mattock, ‘The Metaphysical ʿUmar?’, pp. 12–19. The poems are no. 428, p. 501 and no. 76, pp. 206–07 in ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, Diwan, ed. by ʿAbd al-Hamid. 37 An exception is Noorani, ‘Normative Notions of Public and Private’.

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imaginary world that we must explore before we can try to make social and historical sense of ʿUmar’s sexual boasting.

Works Cited Primary Sources Abu l-Faraj al-Isfahani, Kitab al-Aghani (Bulaq: Dar al-Tibaʿa al-ʿAmira, 1868) ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, Diwan, ed. by Muḥammad M. ʿAbd al-Hamid (Cairo: alMaktaba al-Tijariyya al-Kubra, 1952) ———, Poèmes d’amour de ʿOmar ibn Abî Rabʿîa, ed. by Odette Petit and Wanda Voisin (Paris: Publisud, 1993) Secondary Studies Audebert, Claude, ‘Les vers chantés de ʿUmar b. Abī Rabīʿa: recension et étude des “lauréats”’, Arabica, 51 (2004), 291–317 Bearman, Peri J., and others, eds, The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn, 12 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2007) Beeston, Alfred F. L., ‘An Experiment with Labīd’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 7 (1976), 1–6 Beeston, Alfred F. L., and others, eds, Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) Blachère, Régis, Histoire de la littérature arabe des origines à la fin du xve siècle de J.-C. (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1952–66) ———, ‘Problème de la transfiguration du poète tribal en héros de roman “Courtois” chez les “logographes” arabes du iiie-ixe siècle’, Arabica, 8 (1961), 295–300 Bray, Julia, ‘Verbs and Voices’, in Islamic Reflections Arabic Musings: Studies in Honour of Alan Jones, ed. by Robert G. Hoyland and Philip F. Kennedy (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2004), pp. 170–85 Djedidi, Tahar Labib, La Poésie amoureuse des arabes: le cas des ʿUdrites; contribution à une sociologie de la littérature arabe (Algiers: Société nationale d’édition et de diffusion, 1974) Jabbur, Jibraʾil S., Hubb ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa wa-shiʿruh (Beirut: Dār al-ʿIlm li–lMalayin, 1971) Jacobi, Renate, ‘Theme and Variations in Umayyad Ghazal Poetry’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 23 (1992), 109–19 ———, ‘‘Umar ibn Abī Rabīʿa, in Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, ed. by Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 791–92 Kilpatrick, Hilary, Making the Great Book of Songs (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) Montgomery, James E., ‘ʿUmar (b. ʿAbd Allāh) b. Abī Rabīʿa’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. by Peri J. Bearman and others, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2007),

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first published online 2012 ———, The Vagaries of the Qasidah: The Tradition and Practice of Early Arabic Poetry (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 1997) Montgomery, James E., and John N. Mattock, ‘The Metaphysical ʿUmar?’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 20 (1989), 12–19 Noorani, Yaseen, ‘Normative Notions of Public and Private in Early Islamic Culture’, in Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces, ed. by Marilyn Booth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 49–68 Scott Meisami, Julie, and Paul Starkey, eds, Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature (London: Routledge, 1998) Vadet, Jean-Claude, L’Esprit courtois en Orient dans les cinq premiers siècles de l’Hégire (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1968)

Britt-Marie Karlsson and S ara Moding

Hélisenne de Crenne Challenging Male Mastery Translating Virgil’s Aeneid in the French Sixteenth Century*

During the French Renaissance, female writers were often overlooked or even met with ridicule. Hélisenne de Crenne is the pen name of one of the authors who tried to gain access to the literary Parnassus during this period, and whose fourth and last work consists of a translation of part of the Aeneid. From the perspective of women’s intellectual history, it is crucial to highlight and make available women’s literary work in earlier periods, especially an achievement of the kind represented by a translation of the Aeneid at a time when women were not expected to accomplish such work. This is why the present contribution will discuss to what extent Crenne appropriates and challenges this highly gendered tradition, along with the strategies used to seek credibility and authority in the intellectual and literary realm.

Hélisenne de Crenne and her Work According to a source from the sixteenth century, the name Hélisenne de Crenne represents a Marguerite Briet from Abbeville (belonging to the historical region of Picardy) in France.1 This claim has subsequently been



* The results presented in this article are connected to a research project financed by the Swedish Research Council (no. 421-2013-1056). 1 From a chronicle in Latin from the sixteenth century by Nicolas Rumet (Nicolas Rumet, Nicolas et François, ed. by Prarond). Britt-Marie Karlsson    is a senior lecturer and researcher in French literature at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden). Sara Moding    is a senior lecturer and researcher in Latin at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden). Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 311-332 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126154

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called into question.2 However, the fact that Briet was married to a Philippe Fournel, Sieur de Crenne, seems to corroborate the link between Crenne and Briet, as does the testimony of François de Billon, who in 1555 affirms the Picardian origin of Hélisenne de Crenne.3 Desrosiers thinks it unlikely that a work as coherent as that of Crenne should be the result of a collective enterprise and prefers to see it as the work of a single author.4 Very little is known about Marguerite Briet, but some legal documents dating from 1538 to 1552 confirm that she was born in Abbeville and that she and her husband had a son, Pierre.5 One interesting piece of information in these documents is that Briet and her husband separated ‘quant aux biens’, that is to say that she became independent at least as far as property was concerned.6 It is not entirely clear whether this arrangement also meant that the spouses no longer lived under the same roof. Due to the scantiness of information in relation to Marguerite Briet, as well as the uncertainties that still remain concerning Hélisenne de Crenne’s true identity, it is difficult to find facts about how this author and translator managed her way into literary circles in Paris — assuming she did —, what was her role there and who were her acquaintances. What we do know is that in the late 1530s and early 1540s, the publisher Denis Janot printed four works under the name of Hélisenne de Crenne. In order to get an idea of how this authorial instance is put forward and portrayed along with her conceptions and convictions, we need to turn to the texts themselves as well as the context in which they were published and presented to the readers. In this way, and by giving some glimpses of what is said about her in other sources, we may try to establish how this female authorial persona is presented to the public as an erudite writer and translator. Several studies have already been devoted







2 Chang suggests that the disjunction of ‘Hélisenne’ and ‘De Crenne’ on the title page of the 1538 edition of Crenne’s first work, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours, informs us that these two instances may not refer to the same person and that the fusion of the protagonist/narrator Hélisenne, telling her story in the first person singular, and the author is far from obvious (Chang, Into Print, pp. 157–59). We, too, believe it is important to maintain this distinction, whoever the author may be — Marguerite Briet or someone else — which is why we call the author/translator (de) Crenne and the narrator/protagonist Hélisenne. Réach-Ngô examines the role of the printer in the creation of the authorial instance of Les Angoysses douloureuses qui precedent d’amours, and suggests that this female persona may be purely fictitious, created to assure the credibility and the success of the work (Réach-Ngô, L’écriture éditoriale, pp. 425–27). Lecointe, ‘Du récit moralisé’, suggests that Hélisenne de Crenne is the pen name of François Dassy. 3 Françoys de Billon, Le Fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe féminin, fol. 35r–v. 4 Desrosiers, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne’, p. 172. 5 De Buzon, introduction to Hélisenne de Crenne, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours, ed. de Buzon, p. 9. We do not have any exact information about Briet’s year of birth or that of her death. It is often assumed that she was born between 1500 and 1510, and the legal documents show that she was still alive in 1552. 6 Hélisenne de Crenne, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours, ed. by de Buzon, p. 10.

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to this topic, which is why we will in this article mainly focus on the image conveyed by her fourth and last work, published in 1541, the translation of one of antiquity’s greatest classics, the Aeneid.7 After the publication of three successful works (1538–40), Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours (‘The Torments of Love’, 1538), Les Epistres familières et invectives (‘Personal and Invective Letters’, 1539), and Le Songe de madame Hélisenne (‘Madam Hélisenne’s Dream’, 1540), Hélisenne de Crenne translated the first four books of Virgil’s most prestigious work, the Aeneid, into French prose (1541), edited under the title Les quatre premiers livres des Eneydes du treselegant poete Virgile, Traduictz de Latin en prose Francoyse, par ma dame Helisenne (‘The First Four Books of the Aeneid by the Eminent Poet Virgil, Translated into French Prose by Madam Hélisenne’).8 This was the first translation into French prose of the poet’s masterpiece and one would think that it might have attracted a certain amount of attention.9 This does not, however, seem to have been the case, and we have to establish the fact that, while the rest of Crenne’s books were re-edited several times, separately and all three in one volume, to this day, there has been no further edition of the entirety of her version of the Aeneid.10 There may be several reasons for this.11 According to some scholars, Crenne takes too much liberty when translating Virgil’s masterpiece for the text to be reliable, as she makes numerous changes and additions to the text. While this last assertion is true, Crenne often — although not always — emphasizes and comments on these changes herself, and she does not really in this respect deviate from



7 Old Style. For studies see Wood, ‘The Evolution of Hélisenne de Crenne’s Persona’ and Hélisenne de Crenne; Réach-Ngô, L’écriture éditoriale à la Renaissance; Karlsson, ‘(Auto) représentations d’Hélisenne de Crenne’. 8 There are English translations of these works: Hélisenne de Crenne, The Torments of Love, ed. by Neal, trans. by Neal and Rendall; A Renaissance Woman, ed. and trans. by Mustacchi and Archambault; Le songe, trans. by Neal. 9 The prose version of the Aeneid dating from 1483 is a reworking of the Aeneid, introducing also other material. As Worth-Stylianou establishes, it is regarding its content quite far from Virgil’s poem (Worth-Stylianou, ‘Virgilian Space’, p. 125), and Desrosiers concludes that a brief comparison between this text and Crenne’s translation has not resulted in any clear proof that Crenne used this source (Desrosiers, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne’, p. 177). 10 No complete edition has been made of it since it appeared in 1541. Furthermore, only a few copies from this edition are known today: there is one at the National Library of France in Paris (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Rés., Fol. B.L.613), one in Geneva (Bibliothèque de Genève, Hélisenne de Crenne Hd 91 Rés (2012-0310, Cote BGE Cxb 7699; 2e cote BGE Hd 91)), and one in Berlin (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, 4” Wd 810). In 2015, however, a digital edition of Crenne’s version of the fourth book of the Aeneid’s twelve was edited (‘Hélisenne de Crenne’, ed. by Delvallée). 11 Chang, Into Print, p. 165, believes that, after the fourth and last work edited under the name of Crenne, ‘Janot inexplicably loses interest in Helisenne’. This may well be so, but the limited success of Crenne’s last work, the translation of the Aeneid, seems to have met with is likely to have contributed to this lack of interest.

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the practice of her time.12 Her achievement may for this reason be described as an adaptation rather than a translation.13 We will however also use the words ‘translation’ and ‘translator’ in relation to this work and its originator, considering the fact that on the title page the French words for ‘translation’ and ‘translated’ are used.14 When discussing the lack of attention this work has met with, we think it is important to stress the fact that in presenting her version of Virgil’s epic, one of the great and canonical works of antiquity, Crenne seems to aim at gaining access to the realm of the learned. Up to this point, she was known as the author of texts that mainly seem to target a female audience, at least if we consider their perspective and address. Now, she seems to aim at a field which was at the time very much dominated by men and to which access may not easily have been granted to a woman. We must not forget that during this period in France, only about 1 per cent of the texts printed were written by women.15 Crenne’s publisher, Denis Janot, is known for having supported female writers.16 Rawles describes works of a ‘feminist nature’ as a ‘strand of publication which was evidently worth exploiting commercially. The author most frequently cited in this area is Hélisenne de Crenne’.17 Janot also made two editions of Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s De la noblesse et preexellence du sexe foeminin.18 On the other hand, a few years before the edition of Crenne’s Aeneid, Janot undertook to publish a text of a totally different nature, Les controverses des sexes masculin et féminin by Gratien du Pont, seigneur de Drusac, originally edited in 1534 by J. Colomiés.19 This work fiercely attacks the female sex, ordinary women as well as female figures from the Bible and antiquity, something which probably did not go unnoticed by Hélisenne de Crenne, whose work also puts forward many of these women, but in a different light. In her ‘Personal and Invective Letters’, Crenne gives a ferocious reply to a male writer called Elenot, who has expressed the view that women should not devote themselves to literary 12 For a discussion about this, see Desrosiers, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne’. 13 According to Linda Hutcheon, adaptation can be an ‘acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works’; a ‘creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/ salvaging’; an ‘extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work’ (Hutcheon and O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 8). 14 ‘traduction’ and ‘traduictz’ respectively (both words figure in the title of the work). Further on, we also find the verb ‘translater’ (Crenne, Les quatre premiers livres des Eneydes, Dedicatory Letter, fol. ã ii vo). 15 Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade, p. 1. 16 According to Chang, he ‘specialized in the publication of French nouveautés. […] his editorial policy generally attempted to attract a broader audience, educated but not elite, and favored a humanism that paired the learned with the sensual’ (Chang, Into Print, p. 163). 17 Rawles, Denis Janot, p. 47. 18 Janot made two editions of French versions of this text, one around 1535 and one in 1537 or later (Rawles, Denis Janot, p. 48). 19 The editions from 1537, 1538, and 1539 probably come from Janot’s publishing house, but the edition of 1540 is the first one to carry his name. (See Bibliographie des éditions parisiennes du 16e siècle.)

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work.20 This altercation can without any doubt be placed in what has later been called ‘La Querelle des femmes’, ‘The Woman Question’, the main issue of this debate being woman’s nature, her position and rights in society, as well as the question whether women are apt to perform intellectual work.21 Wood underlines the fact that Crenne is one of the few women who published her opinions in relation to this debate, as most of the participants in this ‘quarrel’ at the time were men.22 Several editions of du Pont’s text were made by Janot’s printing house, and the assumption that Crenne was familiar with this work seems reasonable. While du Pont thus displays his erudition by enumerating and describing a large number of famous women — at the same time accusing the female sex of different vices — Crenne goes even further in proving her learning by means of her translation of the Aeneid. As for the reception of a woman writer demonstrating her erudition — not only in her version of the Aeneid, but in regard to all of her work, filled with references to figures of antiquity, Crenne has been criticized for using a Latinized language. We would in this context like to remind the reader of the well-known fact that Étienne de Pasquier in 1562 suggested that Crenne had served as the model for Rabelais’s ironic portrait in his Pantagruel, chapter 6, of a student from Limousin who ‘skins Latin’, that is introduces Latin words when speaking French.23 Although Pasquier was obviously mistaken, Rabelais’s Pantagruel preceding Crenne’s first publication by six years, Pasquier’s statement has certainly influenced the image of Crenne over the centuries.24 A more subtle way of criticizing Crenne’s language — which may not be criticism at all, but rather a confirmation of the success of her work — is Claude Colet’s publication in the early 1550s of a modernized version of Crenne’s œuvre, allegedly on the demand of two ladies who found the author’s language difficult to understand.25 If Crenne’s style was part of an attempt to gain status, this strategy seems to have failed, since it was partially turned against her. Considering this extensive use of Latinizing language in Crenne’s work, it seems a paradox that Crenne’s knowledge of Latin should have been put into question.26 While we agree with other scholars on the fact that Crenne, when

20 Epistres familières et invectives (1539), a work presenting letters exchanged between ‘dame Helisenne’ and different persons. Wood, Hélisenne de Crenne, p. 27, believes that Elenot refers to Gabriel Puy-Herbault. 21 See for exemple Claude, La querelle des femmes. 22 Wood, Hélisenne de Crenne, p. 97. 23 Pasquier, Choix de lettres, i, 106. 24 Wood, ‘The Evolution of Hélisenne de Crenne’s Persona’ and Hélisenne de Crenne; Karlsson, ‘(Auto)représentations d’Hélisenne de Crenne’. 25 About ten years after the publication of Crenne’s first three books, in 1550–1551, Claude Colet, at the request of two ladies, made an edition of the work where the Latinizing language is simplified. 26 Scollen-Jimack, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne’, p. 209, arrives at the conclusion that de Crenne used a Latin copy of the Aeneid in the translation process, at the same time using the translation of Saint-Gelais to elucidate ambiguous or complicated passages, whereas Brückner, Die

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giving her version of Virgil’s Aeneid, to a great extent leans on the translation into French decasyllables by her predecessor Saint-Gelais (1509), we think that her account of Virgil’s life in the first chapter of her translation suggests that she did read Latin well enough to translate it. Crenne mentions Alexander Neckam as source for her Vita Virgiliana.27 However, when comparing Crenne’s portrait with that of Neckam, it becomes evident that she must have used other sources as well, possibly Vincent de Beauvais.28 Her brief summary of Virgil’s life and work — above all telling us about Virgil the magician — may thus be based on information from Neckam and Beauvais, but it is even more likely that she used a description by Walter Burley, who combines the information offered by the two before-mentioned authors in a way very close to Crenne’s version (including the reference to Neckam).29 As far as we have been able to find, there exists no French translation of this text and we think it likely that the description found in Crenne’s ‘Vie de Virgile’ is a translation by Crenne of Burley’s description, this way showing that she in fact had a good knowledge of Latin. An effective way of preventing women’s admission into the manly coded field of mediation and interpretation of the classics may have been to simply not mention or discuss their work, a traditional suppression technique. Interestingly, a partial neglect of Crenne’s version of the Aeneid has pervaded its reception until quite recently.30 We say partial because the translation is sometimes briefly mentioned over the centuries in different texts speaking of Crenne,31 but it can be noted that, even in works discussing translations of the Aeneid in the present time, Crenne’s Aeneid is rarely dealt with in any detail if at all. Since the last decades of the twentieth century and onwards, scholars have however shown an increasing interest in Crenne’s work, and modern editions have been carried out of her first three books.32 But an edition of her fourth and last known text, the translation of the first four books erste französische Aeneis, is more inclined to believe that de Crenne was content with using existing material in French. 27 Crenne, Les quartre premiers livres des Eneydes, fol. A i ro Neckam, Alexandri Neckam De naturis rerum libri duo, ed. by Wright, pp. 309–10. 28 Vincent de Beauvais, Miroir hystorial, trans. by de Vignay. 29 Burley, Vita et moribus philosophorum. Scholars have, however, shown that this work probably was not written by Walter Burley. See Grignaschi, ‘Lo Pseudo Walter Burley e il Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum’ and ‘Corrigenda et addenda sulla questione dello pseudo Burley’; and Karlsson, ‘Vergilius som magiker i franskt 1500-tal’. Pseudo-Burley has been pointed out as a likely source of Crenne’s Vita Virgiliana by Paule Demats, Les angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours (1538): Première partie, p. XLI. 30 Amstutz, ‘L’Art de traduire l’Énéide’, only mentions de Crenne’s translation in a footnote, p. 16. 31 For a presentation of the sources mentioning Crenne’s Aeneid over the centuries, see Wood, ‘The Evolution of Hélisenne de Crenne’s Persona’ and Hélisenne de Crenne; Karlsson, ‘(Auto) représentations d’Hélisenne de Crenne’. 32 See for instance Hélisenne de Crenne, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours, ed. by de Buzon; Les epistres familieres et invectives, ed. by Nash; Le Songe de madame Helisenne, ed. by Beaulieu and Desrosiers-Bonin.

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of Virgil’s Aeneid, still needs to be carried out in order to make the totality of the work available to modern readers and scholars.33 The Aeneid, Virgil’s famous epic, is not only the text Crenne chose to translate, adapt, and thereby make available to a contemporary public, but a text which seems to permeate her whole œuvre. In order to establish the nature of Crenne’s achievement when giving her version of the Aeneid, we need to say some words about the source text, Virgil’s Aeneid.

Virgil’s Aeneid Virgil composed the Aeneid between 29 and 19 bce, during the reign of Augustus. The historical connection, particularly to the Greek world, was extremely important during the Augustan age, and the Aeneid owes much of its structure to the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, works which were according to tradition composed by Homer in the eighth century bce. While the theme of the Iliad is the Trojan War, the Odyssey treats Odysseus’s journey home after the war. The Aeneid’s first six books, on the other hand, treat the Trojan Aeneas’s journey away from the burning Troy towards Italy. In Italy, Aeneas must find a new Troy in accordance with plight, destiny, and divine will, and the latter six books of the Aeneid treat the wars fought by Aeneas in Italy. It remains clear that Virgil positions himself against and in competition with Homer in the Aeneid. This was all done in accordance with the principles of imitatio and aemulatio — imitation and competition. Imitatio and aemulatio were the prevailing aesthetical principles in Rome during the classical period. We intend to show how similar principles of imitation and competition may in turn have driven Crenne in her adaptation of Virgil’s work. The Aeneid was much appreciated and studied already during antiquity, but also throughout Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Virgil’s work was thoroughly studied at school and many commentaries were composed which facilitated the interpretation. Servius’s commentaries were the most widespread, dating from the late fourth or early fifth century ce. During the Renaissance, many different commentaries from various times were printed in the margins of the Virgilian text in most editions. The commentaries, together with testimony from different authors, make it clear that the Aeneid’s protagonist, the pious Aeneas — in Latin pius Aeneas — was for many centuries held forth as an ideal example for young men to follow. Particularly praiseworthy were his self-control and his obedience towards his 33 There is however a digital critical edition made by Ellen Delvallée (‘Hélisenne de Crenne’) of Crenne’s book 4, but not of the remaining three books translated by Crenne. This is why we are currently preparing a critical edition of Crenne’s version of the Aeneid. This project, including also Gunhild Vidén, Professor of Latin, is conducted within a three-year project funded by the Swedish Research Council, called ‘Dido’s Anguish in French 16th Century’ (see note preceding footnote 1 above).

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family, fatherland, and gods. So, the Virgilian work which Crenne decided to translate was not only a highly esteemed work, but also a work with a highly gendered reception. From Crenne’s viewpoint, it may also have been relevant that Dido, the female protagonist of the Aeneid’s first four books, was a historical person, whereas Aeneas was purely fictive. The legends about the ‘historical Dido’ precede Virgil’s version, and they moreover seem to agree with Tyrian chronicles.34 According to legend, Dido’s original name was Elissa. This name should be compared to the pen name Hélisenne de Crenne, a name that seems to suggest a close identification between Hélisenne-Dido-Elissa.35 Elissa was a Phoenician princess who had fled from Tyre after her husband’s death by the hand of her brother Pumayatton, or Pygmalion. She cunningly brought her husband’s hidden wealth with her, and through her cleverness she managed to buy land enough to found the city of Carthage in northern Africa. Moreover, unlike the version of her story as told by Virgil, her suicide was motivated not by Aeneas’s departure, but by a wish to remain faithful to her first deceased husband. The ‘historical Dido’ was not a lovesick woman, but a strong and capable regent. Moreover, the ‘historical Dido’ and Aeneas cannot have met at all, since Dido lived about a hundred years before the Trojan War, a circumstance which is also mentioned by Servius in his commentaries.36 Apparently, Virgil’s high prestige version had manipulated the true story of Dido-Elissa.

Crenne’s Version of the Aeneid Crenne’s Aeneid is, as already mentioned, a prose version of the first four books of Virgil’s dactylic hexameters, and in general described as a very free translation. It is hardly surprising that this prose translation is more copious than Virgil’s epic. Each chapter is preceded by an introduction where the events of the following chapter are briefly summarized.37 There are also woodcuts illustrating the text; the inclusion of which, however, may have been the printer’s initiative.38 There is no explanation in the text itself as to 34 In the French prose version of the Aeneid from 1483 (printed by Guillaume le Roy), both the ‘historical Dido’ and Virgil’s version of the queen are enclosed. 35 See de Buzon’s introduction to Crenne, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours, pp. 20–27. 36 Davidson, ‘Domesticating Dido’. The Greek historian Timaeus of Taormina (c. 356–260 bce; the texts are lost), is referred to by Roman historians, such as Junianus Justinus (third century ce). 37 The division into chapters to some extent agrees with the quotations from Virgil that are found in the margins of Saint-Gelais’s versified translation of the Aeneid into French (1509). It is also commonly agreed that Saint-Gelais’s translation was one of Crenne’s prime sources: Brückner, Die erste französische Aeneis, pp. 215–18; Scollen-Jimack, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne’. 38 Marshall, ‘The Aeneid and the Illusory Authoress’, p. 134.

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the choice of the first four books, but one plausible reason is that it allows Crenne to focus on the relation between Dido and Aeneas and the theme of love, which is consistent with the rest of her work.39 Crenne’s translation appeared during a period when the essence and purpose of translation were vividly discussed and reappraised.40 Until then, most translators seem to have felt free to take a great deal of liberty during the translation process. Before Crenne, Octovien de Saint-Gelais (1509) had translated all twelve books of Virgil’s epic into French, using decasyllabic verse. This verse translation was re-edited several times, for example in 1540, that is the year before the edition of Crenne’s version. Much in the same way Crenne does, Saint-Gelais allows himself to embellish the poem here and there, thus to some extent changing it in the translation process. Many of the changes found in Crenne’s version are clearly inspired by Saint-Gelais’s version, which Crenne often follows closely. She does, however, also proceed to make alterations that seem to be of her own invention. Furthermore, there are examples where Crenne’s translation lies nearer Virgil’s text than does that of Saint-Gelais, a circumstance suggesting that she may have used Latin sources in addition to French ones when elaborating her translation.41 Throughout de Crenne’s translation, we also find passages where Trojan or Italian details in Virgil’s text have been removed from the narrative, or where such details are far less emphasized than with Virgil. In addition to this, there are many instances where less well-known mythological or historical names have been removed, or where such names have been replaced with more general names or descriptions. All this not only simplifies Crenne’s narrative, but also gives it an air of universality. As already mentioned, another striking feature of the translation is Crenne’s Latinizing language. Her language frequently even includes Latinisms which do not correspond to similar Latin words in the Virgilian text. Her Latinizing language must have been a challenge for a less learned audience, just as it seems to have been concerning the rest of her work.42 In this respect, we may conclude that, while seemingly wanting to educate readers not being able to read Latin through her French version of the Aeneid, at the same time, 39 After Crenne, Louis Des Masures initially translated the first two books of Virgil’s epic (1547), then added the two following ones (1552), and subsequently translated all twelve books of the Aeneid into French alexandrines (1560). Joachim du Bellay for his part first translated the fourth book (also in 1552) and then added the sixth book (as well as Dido’s complaint as described by Ovid, 1560). 40 The word ‘traduction’ (translation) and its correspondent verb ‘traduire’ had recently come into use at the time of the edition of Crenne’s version of the Aeneid, and gradually came to replace the earlier terms ‘translater’ and ‘translation’ also used by Crenne. See Dolet, La Manière de bien traduire. 41 Scollen-Jimack, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne, Octovien de Saint-Gelais and Virgil’, p. 209; Marshall, ‘The Aeneid and the Illusory Authoress’, p. 66. 42 Wood, Hélisenne de Crenne, pp. 31–34; Marshall, ‘The Aeneid and the Illusory Authoress’, pp. 37–38; Ehrling and Karlsson, ‘A French 16th-Century Edition of Virgil’s Aeneid’, p. 274.

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Crenne’s text contains an intrinsic element of exclusion. Also noteworthy are the comments found in the margins of the text. These comments for the most part explain the identities of deities and mythical figures occurring in the text. Sometimes they clarify ancient customs and sometimes they comment on the alterations made by the translator. Their placement in the margins of Crenne’s text is reminiscent of the layout in many contemporary Latin editions of Virgil’s work, where Servius’s commentary and, frequently, later commentaries were printed in the margins of the Virgilian text.43 Although Crenne’s comments are far less numerous than the Virgilian commentaries, Crenne’s work thus participates in the Latin tradition, not only in terms of the Latinate vocabulary and the inclusion of a Vita Virgiliana, but also in the pages’ layout. Taken together, these traits point towards a deliberate attempt by Crenne to design her version to emulate the Latin editions of Virgil. All this raises questions concerning the public targeted by Crenne’s Aeneid: What kind of reader was it meant to attract? While her first three books seem to address a broad audience of readers of vernacular literature (possibly especially women, who are directly addressed in the beginning of her first work), her version of the Aeneid also may have targeted more learned readers (in particular King Francis, to whom it is dedicated). Some aspects of the book suggest that Crenne hoped that readers, having appreciated her earlier work, would read her translation of the Aeneid too. The effort she makes in explaining the epic’s background, as well as the explanatory comments, the division into chapters for instance, indicates a wish to introduce Virgil’s great work to a less learned public.44 At the same time, as Marshall points out, the publication of the text in folio format, reserved for literature aimed at the humanist community and only rarely used by Crenne’s printer, Denis Janot, shows how he perceived it.45 Rawles describes it as ‘Janot’s most impressive classical translation’.46 Broomhall confirms this, pointing out the fact that ‘almost all women’s works, no matter what the content, were printed in […] smaller formats’, and presents Crenne’s Aeneid as a noticeable exception.47 According to Marshall, the tension ‘between the size of the book and the expectations the reader might have had of a female-authored work, published by a printer of popular literature such as Janot’ may explain why Crenne’s 43 This kind of side comment can be found also with other authors, for instance in Les controverses des sexes masculin et féminin by du Pont (1534). Saint-Gelais’s translation also contains comments in the margin (but no division into chapters), indicating the corresponding verses in the Virgilian text. The reader is thereby repeatedly reminded of the text’s status as a translation. In Crenne’s version, no indications are given as regards corresponding passages in the Virgilian text, neither in the text nor in the comments. This absence too strengthens the impression of an independent work by the hand of Crenne. 44 The prose version from 1483 also uses short headings summarizing the events it then presents, although they are not numbered. 45 Marshall, ‘The Aeneid and the Illusory Authoress’, p. 75. 46 Rawles, Denis Janot, p. 40. 47 Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France, p. 110.

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translation of the Aeneid did not become the success both the translator and the printer must have hoped for, the edition targeting too broad an audience and thereby failing to reach either of the reading communities it was meant to appeal to. This is also the opinion of Broomhall: The folio publication suggests Janot and/or Crenne might have been hoping to attract an audience of university scholars as well as produce an edition of the style and quality necessary to impress the monarch. Yet the work was presented as a novel, with chapters headed by woodcut illustrations. Were Janot and Crenne also attempting to make scholastic literature available to a wider audience? […] The ‘mixed messages’ in the marketing of the work probably contributed to its apparent lack of success; the Eneydes were never reprinted in folio or any other size.48

The Preface and the Dedication As stated above, the choice to focus on the first four books of the Aeneid is most likely mainly motivated by the theme of (illicit) love, which is present in Crenne’s previous œuvre, but there is also a political dimension to Virgil’s text: many European rulers traced their lines back to Aeneas and his followers, as did King Francis I of France; the Aeneid was considered a source for heroic characters, it provided exempla of pietas to imitate. Worth-Stylianou discusses ‘translators’ appropriation of the Aeneid as a statement of national or political identity’ and how translators such as Crenne ‘hold the epic up as a mirror to the aspirations of their own society’. Furthermore, the French translators, according to this scholar, ‘seem to consider the Aeneid a potential passport to royal favour’.49 Worth-Stylianou points out that Crenne, in comparison to Saint-Gelais, who implicitly compared Aeneas’s mission to the aspirations of Louis XII to conquer the duchy of Milan, failed to flatter Francis I when borrowing Lemaire de Belges’s ‘interpretation of the Aeneid as a defence of Troy and thus of France’, since she only translates the first four books, where Aeneas is not yet victorious.50 This is in fact the only one of Crenne’s works to be dedicated to King Francis I, or to contain a dedication at all. Whether the king actually read it or not, this dedication implies that all readers must, at least in part, try to interpret her translation through his lens. In the dedicatory letter, Crenne praises the ‘most eloquent’51 poet Virgil and his ‘heroic style’.52 She further states that Virgil outdoes all other Greek and Roman poets and historians,

48 Broomhall, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France, p. 110. 49 Worth-Stylianou, ‘Virgilian Space’, p. 126. 50 Worth-Stylianou, ‘Virgilian Space’, p. 127. 51 ‘treseloquent poete Virgile’ (Crenne, Les quatre premiers livres des Eneydes, fol. ã ii ro). 52 ‘stile heroique’ (Crenne, Les quatre premiers livres des Eneydes, fol. ã ii ro).

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and that his prime work was the Aeneid. Crenne declares that her aim is to translate the first four books of this work and dedicates her translation to the king. She very humbly, as would be expected in a dedicatory letter of the time, assumes that his splendid genius may find some things added by her in it, especially so in the second book where she retells the tragic death of the Trojan hero Hector, who was held to be the king’s ancestor.53 Crenne furthermore dismisses Homer’s version of Hector’s death, which is the version alluded to by Virgil. She claims that Homer retells Achilles’s triumph over the noble Hector with the purpose of excessively extolling his own nation, the Greeks. In order to amend and eliminate these ‘artificial and coloured lies’,54 Crenne will recount the trustworthy ‘opinions of some reliable authors’,55 such as Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius.56 These two authors were the prime sources of Trojan War material during the Middle Ages, and Crenne’s description of them generally agrees with the beliefs about them of her time, although their authority is beginning to be called into question.57 It is worth noting that Crenne explicitly mentions that Dares was a Trojan, a circumstance which in her eyes seemingly increases his credibility in the present context. Noteworthy is also Crenne’s pretension to veracity. She certainly praises Virgil’s fabulist skills, but claims that she, who relies on more trustworthy authors, in contrast to Virgil, will present the truth in her work. Bearing the dedicatory letter in mind, it comes as no surprise that Crenne gives no less than four different versions of Hector’s death in the second book of her Aeneid. In order to win the king’s ear, it is of course important to give a picture as heroic and trustworthy as possible of Hector. In this passage many of her readers will have recognized similar ones from Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troys, by Jean Lemaire de Belges (1511–49), which may be Crenne’s main source.58 In fact, the political dimension is vital also for a full understanding of Virgil’s Aeneid. Emperor Augustus and his adoptive father Caesar belonged to the gens Iulia, an important patrician family who claimed to descend from Aeneas’s son Iulus. According to legend, and very much emphasized in Virgil’s Aeneid, Iulus’s father Aeneas was the son of Venus, the goddess of love. Thus Caesar and Augustus were not only of Trojan but

53 In the second book of the Aeneid, Virgil briefly touches upon Hector’s death (vv. 268–97), when he tells how Hector’s spirit in a dream warns Aeneas and instructs him to leave the burning Troy. 54 ‘telles artificielles & coulourées mensonges’ (Crenne, Les quatre premiers livres des Eneydes, fol. ã iii ro). 55 ‘les opinions d’aulcuns aucteurs auctenticques’ (Crenne, Les quatre premiers livres des Eneydes, fol. ã iii ro). 56 In her tenth chapter of book 2, Crenne retells these versions of Hector’s death together with a couple of other versions in the same spirit. 57 Marshall, ‘The Aeneid and the Illusory Authoress’, p. 71. 58 Lemaire de Belges, Les Illustrations, ii, 80–84. One of the four versions she gives, is not, however, told by Lemaire de Belges as far as we have found.

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also of divine origin; and a divine origin was certainly very convenient for Augustus’s imperial claims. The cultural contexts in which Virgil’s and Crenne’s works were composed also show other similarities. Both Virgil’s Aeneid and Crenne’s version were written during periods of important political and cultural change in their respective time and countries, the Augustan period in Rome and the French Renaissance; both works were directed to the leaders of these changes, the Roman emperor Augustus and Francis I, king of France; and, finally, both Virgil’s Aeneid and Crenne’s version of its first four songs were the last works to appear under the author’s/translator’s names. These similarities, as well as the aforementioned linguistic, structural, and graphical points of contact, suggest that Crenne moulded her whole translation project on Virgil’s example, not only concerning the context of his epic poem, but also its presentation and address. One may even suspect that Crenne makes an implicit connection between King Francis and Augustus on the front page of her translation, where she describes the recipient of her work as the ‘tres auguste Prince François’.59 The term ‘auguste’ has by extension come to signify a king or prince who promoted letters, and as we know, Francis has gone down in history as one of the most important promoters of the French Renaissance movement.60 Apart from restoring the reputation of King Francis’s ancestor Hector, what were then the political messages of Crenne’s text? How do they differ from Virgil’s, and how do they differ from those put forward by previous translators? In an earlier study, we argue that Crenne’s version enriches the preceding narrative’s inherent discourse on predetermination versus individual responsibility. In Crenne’s version, the gods are more influenced by passions; and the emotional bonds between parents and children are stronger, and described as more natural, than with Virgil. Moreover, the human protagonists Dido and Aeneas are both torn between their emotions and their plights as well as between their divine destinies and their own will.61

Aeneas as Example Another important difference between Crenne, Virgil, and earlier translators is found in how the qualities of an ideal king are defined. These qualities are to be found in the Trojan elder Ilioneus’s description of Aeneas, whom the Trojans at this point of the plot believe that they have lost. 59 The French word ‘auguste’, used to signify the magnificence of a king or a prince, stems from the Latin word augustus carrying the same meaning of ‘majestic, dignified’, later on a title of honour bestowed on Octavianus, the first Roman emperor, and after him part of the nomenclature of all Roman emperors. 60 ‘Roi ou prince ami des lettres’ (Guilbert and others, eds, Grand Larousse de la langue française, s.v. ‘auguste’). 61 Ehrling and Karlsson, ‘Didon et Énée dans le seizième siècle français’, pp. 214–22.

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In Virgil, the Trojan elder describes Aeneas like this (emphasis added): Aen. i.544–45: Rex erat Aeneas nobis, quo iustior alter, nec pietate fuit, nec bello maior et armis.62 So, in Virgil King Aeneas is ‘more just’, iustior, than all others and no one is greater than him ‘when it comes to piety’, pietate. King Aeneas thus possesses the Roman key virtues iustitia and pietas. The Latin word pietas, and words deriving from it, are notoriously difficult to translate. Pietas is connected to loyalty to one’s family, fatherland, and gods; but its exact meaning differs between different authors and times.63 King Aeneas’s third virtue is easier to decode; he is ‘bello maior et armis’ (braver at heart and with his arms than all others). Saint-Gelais translates the passage like this: Roy avons eu quon appeloit enee Juste et piteux plus que personne nee Oncques neut il en armes ou bataille Pareil a luy ne de plus forte taille64 and this is how Crenne translates Virgil’s passage, and its culturally coded assets: Crenne, fols xix vo–xx ro; Dii (emphasis added) Bien vous veulx advertir que preteritement avions ung roy, amy de toutes vertus: car en luy apparoissoient justice, urbanité & clemence plus qu’en nulle aultre personne. Il estoit garny de telle magnanimité & forçe, que nul equiparable à luy se pouvoit trouver. In contrast to both Virgil and Saint-Gelais, Crenne does not mention Aeneas’s name. By omitting the king’s name, Crenne bestows the passage with an air of universality. Therefore, the description which follows may — perhaps even more than the other two versions — be interpreted not only as a description of Aeneas, but also as a general description of what a perfect king must be. A perfect king must be the ‘amy de toutes vertus’ (friend of all virtues). This summative comment too is unique for Crenne in comparison with the other two versions. When it comes to the king’s martial qualities, Virgil states that no one was braver at heart or with his arms than he was. The keywords in the passage are bello, ‘war(fare)’ and armis, ‘weapons’. As Servius points out in his commentary, bello comprises not only strength but also cunning (hence our interpretation

62 All quotations from Virgil’s Aeneid are from the following edition: Virgil, Opera, ed. by Mynors. Emphasis added. 63 For an overview of the meanings of pietas in the shift between the republic and the principate, see ‘Pietas’, in Wagenvoort, Pietas, pp. 1–24. 64 Saint-Gelais, Les énéydes de Virgille. Emphasis added.

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‘braver at heart’), whereas armis only regards the physical realization of the battle.65 Both Saint-Gelais’s and Crenne’s versions mirror Servius’s distinction, but — as throughout the passage — their words differ: ‘armes ou bataille’ (Saint-Gelais), ‘magnanimité & force’ (Crenne). The translations of the culturally coded virtues iustitia (‘iustior’) and pietas (‘pietate […] maior’) are — we think — the most interesting adaptations in this passage. The ideal king is ‘just’ (or shows justice) in all the three versions. This agrees well with the general emphasis on legislation and legal justice in all three works. As for pietas, Virgil’s pietate (from pietas) is carefully translated as piteux by Saint-Gelais, whereas Crenne translates it as ‘en luy apparoissoient […] urbanité et clemence’ (refinement and clemency were seen in him).66 The Roman concept of pietas is a broad one, and ‘Clemence’, clementia — one of the words used by Crenne — is sometimes mentioned together with pietas during the early Empire, as for example in Augustus’s Res gestae, but urbanitas is — we think — not that much of a core value of pietas in the Augustan and early imperial eras.67 Apparently, however, urbanité — whose meaning is more or less the same as the Latin urbanitas — was central for Crenne.68 We believe that Crenne’s addition of urbanité to the ideal royal virtues is best understood in the light of her time, and of King Francis’s role in the French Renaissance movement. As already mentioned, Francis I was a central figure in this movement. He collected art and imported Italian artists and scholars to the court (among others Leonardo da Vinci), he ordered the renovation of several castles into Renaissance palaces (for example Fontainebleau and Chambord), and last but not least, he was a man of letters. Moreover, he bought rare books and manuscripts from Italy and was keen to expand the Royal Library.69 He set up the ‘Collège de France’, an open alternative to the Catholic university of Sorbonne.70 When it comes to elegance and 65 Servius ad locum: ‘bello maior et armis non est iteratio; nam bellum et consilium habet, “arma” tantum in actu ipso sunt. bello maior et armis] hoc est scientia rei militaris et viribus dimicandi, ut aliud animi, aliud corporis’. 66 ‘Sensible à la pitié, ayant pitié, compatissant’: Dictionnaire du moyen français: la Renaissance, s.v. ‘piteux’. 67 Cf. Aug., Res gestae, 34: ‘In consulatu sexto et septimo, postquam bella civilia exstinxeram, | per consensum universorum potitus rerum omnium, rem publicam | ex mea potestate in senatus populique Romani arbitrium transtuli. | Quo pro merito meo senatus consulto Augustus appellatus sum et laureis | postes aedium mearum vestiti publice coronaque civica super | ianuam meam fixa est et clupeus aureus in curia Iulia posi- | tus, quem mihi senatum populumque Romanum dare virtutis cle- | mentiaeque et iustitiae et pietatis caussa testatum est per eius clupei | inscriptionem’. 68 ‘politesse, sociabilité’: Dictionnaire du moyen français: la Renaissance, s.v. ‘urbanité’. 69 Berthelot and others, eds, La Grande encyclopédie. 70 The Collège de France was founded in 1530 by King Francis I and was first called the Collège Royal. The motto of this college is that it teaches ‘everything’, ‘Docet omnia’ — this comprised not only mathematics and Latin, but also Greek and Hebrew, and later on other languages such as Arabic (L’annuaire du Collège de France).

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refinement, Francis certainly differs from his predecessors; even today he is commonly called ‘le Père et Restaurateur des Lettres’ (the Father and Restorer of Letters).71 So: ‘ung roy, amy de toutes vertus: car en luy apparoissoient justice, urbanité & clemence plus qu’en nulle aultre personne. Il estoit garny de telle magnanimité & forçe, que nul equiparable à luy se pouvoit trouver’ — what description could be more suitable to the ‘tres auguste Prince François’ (the very auguste – Augustus? Monarch Francis).72

Dido as Example An important issue to be considered is also the role of the translation in Crenne’s œuvre as a whole, as well as the use of Dido as a model. Crenne’s version of the Aeneid can be perceived as a key to her earlier work.73 In Crenne’s adaptation of Virgil’s text, love is allowed to have an even greater impact on the characters than in Virgil: passion rules. In all of Crenne’s earlier books women are warned of the dangers and disastrous consequences of illicit love, although this aim is partly contradicted in the course of reading. Like Dido, Hélisenne, the protagonist and first person narrator in the major part of ‘The Torments of Love’74 constitutes a twofold example: both women are at the outset of the narration faithful to their husbands — living or dead — but will eventually be trapped in the snares of love. They are both in this way made ambiguous examples, emblematic of unfortunate love.75 It is possible to consider Crenne’s first three books as a whole, as narratives on different diegetic levels forming a coherent story — there are several traits motivating such a reading — Hélisenne’s fate in this case distinctly differing from that of Virgil’s Dido, who chooses death after Aeneas has abandoned her.76 Hélisenne’s death in the end of the first book, ‘The Torments of Love’, can actually be read in a figurative sense, allowing for the resurrection of a

71 Anquetil, Précis de l’histoire universelle, vii, 290. 72 McGowan, The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France, p. 71, mentions a portrait of Francis I dressed as a Roman emperor at the front of an unfinished work, ‘Des Antiquitez romaines’, dedicated to the king. 73 Chang prefers to see the printer’s hand in this and that ‘the convergence of Helisenne and Dido in the Eneydes [might be] the final moment in a larger writer and publication plan architected by Janot’ (Chang, Into Print, p. 165). 74 In part two and three of ‘The Torments of Love’, Hélisenne speaks through her beloved Guénélic, before his faithful friend Quezinstra concludes the work. 75 See Wood, Hélisenne de Crenne, pp. 143–46. 76 One trait suggesting that it would be possible to read Crenne’s first three books as a whole is that at the end of the third book, ‘Madam Hélisenne’s Dream’, the protagonist wakes up evoking the forest situated close to the tower where she was held prisoner by her husband at the end of part one of the first book, ‘The Torments of Love’, suggesting that everything happening between these two points of narration is to be understood and read at another diegetic level (Karlsson, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne et la tradition de l’exemplum’).

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strong, independent Hélisenne later in the work, replacing the weak, lovesick Hélisenne disposed of earlier.77 Dido is not the only figure of the Aeneid to find a counterpart in Crenne’s earlier work: there are reflections of Aeneas, too, just as complex and multilayered as those of Dido. The figure of Aeneas seems to split into two characters in the earlier work of Crenne, that of Hélisenne’s beloved Guénélic, and that of Guénélic’s friend Quezinstra. In the first of three parts of ‘The Torments of Love’, Guénélic is depicted as the handsome young man who falls in love with Hélisenne, but he is also boastful and disloyal. This is to be compared to Crenne’s insisting on the treacherous character of Aeneas, who, without telling Dido, decides to leave Dido and Carthage in order to found a new Troy in Italy.78 At the end of this part, Hélisenne is imprisoned in a tower in the woods by her husband, upon which Guénélic decides to set out in search for her accompanied by his friend Quezinstra. This quest is narrated in parts two and three of ‘The Torments of Love’, but in spite of the fact that Guénélic has here suddenly turned into a hero crossing the seven seas — the parallel with Ulysses and Aeneas is obvious — in order to rescue his beloved, he is wanting in force and determination, and constantly needs his friend Quezinstra to come to his rescue. On the other hand we find the loyalty, resourcefulness, and valour of Quezinstra, who after the death of Guénélic and Hélisenne turns into a kind of wise hermit. The fact that this character, who never falls in love in spite of all the beautiful ladies he meets, should be the one to survive at peace with his fate, fits into the totality of Crenne’s first three works seen as a whole, since at the end of the third book, ‘Madam Hélisenne’s Dream’, the female protagonist, probably representing Hélisenne, is in the end — with the help of the goddess Athena — set free from the burden of sensual love. Crenne’s first three books then seem to point to how the story of Dido and Aeneas should be read and interpreted by her contemporary readers. In Crenne’s version, focus shifts from Aeneas to Dido as examples to emulate, these figures being mirrored by Hélisenne and Guénélic (and Quezinstra), representing characters contemporary to the readers. Like Dido, Hélisenne is put forward as a person existing in reality, since she is presented both as the author of this same œuvre and as the main character of the greater part of it.79 This constitutes a forceful means of persuasion when it comes to convincing her audience of the importance of the examples and models put forth. The epic Dido, a strong queen falling victim to love, could be seen to correspond to the Hélisenne symbolically dying in ‘The Torments of Love’, whereas the forceful and strategic Hélisenne, presented as both protagonist

77 Karlsson, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne didacticienne’. 78 See Ehrling and Karlsson, ‘Didon et Énée dans le seizième siècle français’. 79 The act of writing is stressed and problematized throughout ‘The Torments of Love’, and even more explicitly so in ‘Personal and Invective Letters’.

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and author of the work, fiercely defending women’s rights in ‘Personal and Invective Letters’ has her counterpart in the historic Dido.

Conclusion We hope that our forthcoming edition of Crenne’s Aeneid will in due time provide a clearer picture of Hélisenne de Crenne. So far, we can see that she uses her sources — French and, with all probability, Latin ones — to adapt the literary tradition to her own ends, thereby incorporating them in her own time and in her own œuvre as a whole. The result of her adaptation of Virgil is a version of the Aeneid with multiple underlying layers, which emerge with different intensities at different points of the story. Crenne’s own hand is seemingly most involved with the power of passion; thereby her translation project is firmly linked with her previous work and her previous readers. This focus on illicit love and its consequences, however, does not exclude other readings, where Crenne comes forth with versions which differ not only from Virgil’s, but also from readings of Virgil by her contemporaries. Crenne’s translation/adaptation of Virgil’s Aeneid seems to have a threefold aim: to challenge the male dominance in the practice of translation and edition of prestigious texts, to diffuse knowledge about antiquity to readers not able to read Latin, and to provide examples of strong women outside (Crenne) and inside the text (Dido). The last claim is also true for her other works: in her ‘Personal and Invective Letters’, we may observe in the fourth invective letter, addressed to the aforementioned Elenot, how she is using a technique paralleling that of, for example, Christine de Pizan when she is enumerating wise and intelligent women throughout history, ending up with Marguerite de Navarre, the king’s sister. The image evoked is a beautiful one, as Crenne likens this massive crowd of women to a sea of learned women, so vast that anyone who wished to cross it would spend more time than Ulysses did in his voyages.80 It may even be that her visions of love and of ideal lovers in a larger frame harmonize with her political visions. From Crenne’s previous œuvre and from the translation we learn that an ideal male lover should be prudent and discreet; from the translation we learn that an ideal king is in part characterized by his refinement — a notion which is not semantically very far from prudence and discretion. The female lover Hélisenne develops into a strong and independent woman, and in Crenne’s translation of the Aeneid we meet a capable queen, a Dido who is — more than with Virgil — Aeneas’s match.

80 ‘qui vouldroit vaguer par la mer des dames scavantes, s’eforcant de exhiber leurs louables oeuvres au recit d’icelles, plus de temps se consumeroit, que ne fist Ulixes en ses penibles & fatigables peregrinations’ (Hélisenne de Crenne, Les Epistres familieres et invectives, ed. by Nash, p. 152).

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Exemplarity and role-modelling thus appear to have been powerful driving forces, not only expressed in Crenne’s first work, ‘The Torments of Love’, but also when it comes to her edition of the Aeneid. In her translation, Crenne certainly praises Francis I by connecting him with Augustus, Aeneas, and Hector, but Virgil’s famous epic in an oblique manner also lends credibility to Crenne’s example of forceful independent women in her first three books, and the image then develops of Hélisenne’s persona as a capable and strong woman of her time — a truthful Elissa carefully connected to the reality of her contemporary readers.

Works Cited Primary Sources Anquetil, Louis-Pierre, Précis de l’histoire universelle ou tableau historique, 9 vols (Paris: Lesguilliez frères, 1799) Beauvais, Vincent de, Miroir hystorial, trans. by Jean de Vignay (Paris: Galliot Du Pré, 1531) [accessed 1 June 2021] Billon, Françoys de, Le Fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe féminin, construit par Françoys de Billon Secretaire (Paris: J. d’Allyer, 1555) [accessed 1 June 2021] Crenne, Hélisenne de, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours (1538): première partie, ed. by Paule Demats (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1968 [1538]) ———, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d’amours, ed. by Christine de Buzon (Paris: Champion, 1997 [1538]) ———, Les epistres familieres et invectives, ed. by Jerry C. Nash (Paris: Champion, 1996 [1539]) ———, Le Songe de madame Helisenne, ed. by Jean-Philippe Beaulieu and Diane Desrosiers-Bonin (Paris: Champion, 2007 [1540]) ———, Les Quatre premiers livres des Eneydes du treselegant poete Virgile, Traduictz de Latin en prose Francoyse, par ma dame Helisenne (Paris: Denys Janot, 1541); Paris (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Rés., Fol. B.L.613); Geneva (Bibliothèque de Genève, Hélisenne de Crenne Hd 91 Rés (2012-0310, Cote BGE Cxb 7699; 2e cote BGE Hd 91)); Berlin (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, 4” Wd 810) ———, A Renaissance Woman: Hélisenne’s Personal and Invective Letters, ed. and trans. by Marianna M. Mustacchi and Paul J. Archambault (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986) ———, The Torments of Love, ed. by Lisa Neal, trans. by Lisa Neal and Steven Rendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) ———, Le songe, trans. by Lisa Neal, in Writings by Pre-Revolutionary French Women: From Marie de France to Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, ed. by Anne R. Larsen and Colette H. Winn (New York: Garland, 2000), pp. 63–105

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———, ‘La Translation du quatrième Livre des Énéides de Virgile’, ed. by Ellen Delvallée, Exercices de rhétorique, 5 (2015) [accessed 7 July 2021] Dolet, Étienne, La manière de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre, d’advantage de la punctuation de la langue françoyse, plus des accents d’ycelle (Lyon: E. Dolet, 1540) [accessed 7 July 2021] Du Pont, Gratien, Les controverses des sexes masculin et féminin (Toulouse: J. Colomiés, 1534) Lemaire de Belges, Jean, Les Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troye, 4 vols (Leuven: Stecher, 1882–91 [1511–49]) Le livre des Énéydes compilé par Virgille, lequel a esté translaté de latin en françois (anonymous trans.) (Lyon: G. Le Roy, 1483) [accessed 1 June 2021] Neckam, Alexander, Alexandri Neckam De naturis rerum libri duo, with the Poem of the Same Author, De laudibus divinae sapientiae, ed. by Thomas Wright (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1967) Pasquier, Étienne, Choix de lettres sur la littérature, la langue et la traduction, ed. by Dorothy Thicket (Droz: Geneva, 1956 [1562]) Saint-Gelais, Octovien de, Les énéydes de Virgille, translatez de latin en françois, par messire Octavian de Sainct Gelais, reveues et cottez par maistre Jehan d’Yvry (Paris: A. Verard, 1509) [accessed 1 June 2021] Virgil, Opera, ed. by R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969) Secondary Studies Amstutz, Patrick, ‘L’Art de traduire l’Énéide: cinq grandes étapes dans l’art de traduire l’Énéide en français’, Revue des études latines, 80 (2002), 13–24 L’annuaire du Collège de France, online: [accessed 1 June 2021] Berthelot, André, and others, eds, La Grande encyclopédie: inventaire raisonné des sciences, des lettres et des arts (Paris: Lamirault, 1886–1902) Bibliographie des éditions parisiennes du 16e siècle, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, [accessed 1 June 2021] Broomhall, Susan, Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002) Brückner, Thomas, Die erste französische Aeneis: Untersuchungen zu Octovien de Saint-Gelais’ Übersetzung (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1987) Burley, Walter, Vita et moribus philosophorum: Mit einer altspanischen Übersetzung der Eskurialbibliothek (Tübingen: Gedruckt für den litterarischen Verein in Stuttgart, 1886) Chang, Leah L., Into Print: The Production of Female Authorship in Early Modern France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009)

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Claude, Catherine, La querelle des femmes: la place des femmes des Francs à la Renaissance (Montreuil: Le Temps des cerises, 2000) Davidson, James, ‘Domesticating Dido: History and Historicity’, in A Woman Scorn’d: Responses to the Dido Myth, ed. by Michael Burden (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), pp. 65–88 Delvallée, Ellen, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne: traduire, réécrire, amplifier Virgile au xvie siècle’, Exercices de rhétorique, 5 (2015) [accessed 7 July 2021] Desrosiers, Diane, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne et la traduction des quatre premiers livres de l’Énéide’, Réforme, Humanisme, Renaissance, 85.2 (2017), 171–90 Dictionnaire du moyen français: la Renaissance (Paris: Larousse, 1992) Ehrling, Sara, and Britt-Marie Karlsson, ‘Didon et Énée dans le seizième siècle français: la version d’Hélisenne de Crenne de l’Énéide’, Milli Mála: Journal of Language and Culture, 7 (2015), 199–224 ———, ‘A French 16th-Century Edition of Virgil’s Aeneid: Hélisenne de Crenne’s Version of the First Four Books’, in Allusions and Reflections: Greek and Roman Mythology in Renaissance Europe, ed. by E. Wåghäll Nivre and others (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2015), pp. 271–85 Grignaschi, Mario, ‘Corrigenda et addenda sulla questione dello pseudo Burley’, Medioevo, 16 (1990), 325–54 ———, ‘Lo Pseudo Walter Burley e il Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum’, Medioevo, 16 (1990), 131–90 Guilbert, Louis, René Lagane, and Georges Niobey, eds, Grand Larousse de la langue française (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1971–78) Hutcheon, Linda, and Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2013) Karlsson, Britt-Marie, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne et la tradition de l’exemplum’, in Paroles sur la langue: études linguistiques et littéraires, ed. by Eva Ahlstedt, Ingmar Söhrman, and Christina Heldner, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 67 (Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet, 2009), pp. 247–65 ———, ‘Hélisenne de Crenne didacticienne — une femme savante au xvie siècle’, in Actes du XVIIIe congrès des romanistes scandinaves: Actas del XVII congreso de romanistas escandinavos, ed. by Eva Ahlstedt and others (Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet, 2012), pp. 425–40 ———, ‘(Auto)représentations d’Hélisenne de Crenne. Portraits intra-, inter- et épitextuels’, in Stratégies autofictionnelles: estrategias autoficcionales, ed. by Anna Forné and Britt-Marie Karlsson (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 37–66 ———, ‘Vergilius som magiker i franskt 1500-tal. Hélisenne de Crennes Vita Vergiliana’ [‘Vergil as a Magician in the French Sixteenth Century. Hélisenne de Crenne’s Vita Vergiliana’], in Språkens magi: En festskrift för Ingmar Söhrman, professor i romanska språk, ed. by Andrea Castro and others (Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet, 2017), pp. 117–26 Lecointe, Jean, ‘Du récit moralisé au récit moralisant: les Œuvres d’Hélisenne de Crenne et l’Amant ressuscité de la mort d’amour’, Réforme, Humanisme, Renaissance, 77 (2013), 153–79

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Marshall, Sharon, ‘The Aeneid and the Illusory Authoress: Truth, Fiction and Feminism in Hélisenne de Crenne’s Eneydes’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Exeter, 2011) McGowan, Margaret M., The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) Rawles, Stephen, Denis Janot (fl. 1529–1544), Parisian Printer and Bookseller: A Bibliography (Leiden: Brill, 2017) Réach-Ngô, Anne, L’écriture éditoriale à la Renaissance: genèse et promotion du récit sentimental français (1530–1560) (Geneva: Droz, 2013) Reid, Martine, ed., Les Femmes dans la critique et l’histoire littéraire (Paris: Champion, 2011) Rumet, Nicolas, Nicolas et François, maïeurs et historiens d’Abbeville au xvie siècle: De Abbavilla, capite comitatus Pontivi, excerptum ex Historia Picardiae Nicolai, et suivi d’Extraits de la Chronique du pays et comté de Ponthieu, de François, ed. by Ernest Prarond (Paris: Picard, 1902) Scollen-Jimack, Christine M., ‘Hélisenne de Crenne, Octovien de Saint-Gelais and Virgil’, Studi Francesi, 26 (1982), 197–210 Wagenvoort, Hendrik, Pietas: Selected Studies in Greek and Roman Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1980) Wood, Diane S., ‘The Evolution of Hélisenne de Crenne’s Persona’, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 45 (1991), 140–51 ———, Hélisenne de Crenne: At the Crossroads of Renaissance Humanism and Feminism (Madison-Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000) Worth-Stylianou, Valerie, ‘Virgilian Space in Renaissance French Translations of the Aeneid’, in Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance, ed. by Phillip John Usher and Isabelle Fernbach (Cambridge: Brewer, 2012), pp. 117–40

Lewis Webb

(Re)presentations — Reflections and Concluding Remarks

These four studies have uncovered the numerous material, bodily, and literary (re)presentations involved in gendered status competitions from ancient Rome through early Islamic Arabia to Renaissance France. In their claims to elevated status, women (Livia and Hélisenne de Crenne) and men (Prudentius, the Church Fathers, and ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa) engaged and expanded on pre-existing standards and traditions, including various structures and symbols of authority, sanctity, desirability, masculinity, and literary mastery. Livia, Prudentius, and the Church Fathers were objectively successful in their status competitions, as their claims to authority and sanctity were recognized and accepted in their lifetimes and thereafter: Livia became known as femina princeps, divi filia, and priestess of her husband and adoptive father Divus Augustus, while Prudentius and the Church Fathers reified the duplex corona as a symbol of the elevated status of virgin martyrs and Christians vis-à-vis non-Christians. Both of their claims were materialized in various objects, including temples, shrines, sculpture, coins, a fresco, a sarcophagus, and a mosaic, some of which remain extant. These surviving material representations continue to reproduce their status claims to this day. Part of their success may be traced to their use of traditional structures and symbols, including priestly office and status symbols for Livia and the corona for Prudentius and the Church Fathers; these authorized their claims and catalysed new forms of status competition, including female priesthoods for Livia as Diva Augusta and competitions in virginal sanctity among Christian communities. The poet ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa achieved glory in his life and thereafter: his poems remain sung today. Yet any connection between his claims to status within his poems and his status thereafter is elusive, for his claims are fantasies, expressed through ventriloquized women. While ʿUmar’s poems build on some of the themes in earlier pre-Islamic poetry, namely love and Lewis Webb    is a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Oxford. Gender and Status Competition in Pre-Modern Societies, ed. by Martha Bayless, Jonas Liliequist, and Lewis Webb, HDL 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021) pp. 333-336 © FHG10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.126155

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boasting, they are also strange and singular (for his time) in the way they play with time and reality, especially when he inhabits and ventriloquizes his female admirers. Through these women, he boasts of his desirability and masculinity: they are his ego made manifest. But his claims ring hollow, for he makes love to, and competes with, himself: a narcissist’s contest for unknown stakes. To invoke Ovid on Narcissus, ‘se cupit inprudens et, qui probat, ipse probatur, | dumque petit, petitur, pariterque accendit et ardet’ (unknowingly, he desires himself, and he who approves is himself approved, | even while he pursues he is pursued, and he inflames and burns equally).1 But to what end? Perhaps it was mere play. By contrast, Hélisenne de Crenne appears to have been somewhat less successful in her lifetime. With her erudite prose translation of the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid, she aimed at challenging male dominance in translation, at a broad audience, at pleasing King Francis I, and at glory within the literary realm. She too built on conventions in her field, especially on the alterations and expansionism present in the verse translation of Octovien de Saint-Gelais, but she also innovated by including numerous Latinisms and commentaries, by drawing connections between Hector, Aeneas, and King Francis I, and by centring Dido and themes of love. Yet this fourth and final work, unlike her previous successful ones, was not re-edited. Her work perhaps met the fate of so many other female works that dared to trespass in supposedly male domains: suppression. Her translation’s neglect recalls Virginia Woolf on the fatality of a female authorial persona in her own day: ‘it is fatal for a woman […] in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death’.2 Yet, while her status claims may have failed in Renaissance France, her words have been, and will be, revived by Karlsson and Moding. As we saw in the previous section on performances, in their status competitions, men often spoke for, or effaced, women. Indeed, women, real and fictive, were often the means by which men competed with each other for status in their patriarchal societies. In the mouths of Prudentius and the Church Fathers, the deaths of female virgin martyrs like St Agnes became masculine and their ‘virtus supra naturam’ (virtue [lit. manliness] beyond their nature);3 they were examples to imitate ‘si te virorum exempla non provocant’ (if the examples of men do not challenge you).4 Indeed, Ambrose enjoined men to marvel at the female martyrs and their virginity, ‘mirentur viri’ (let men marvel), and argued that his virgins were superior to non-Christian virgins Quanto nostrae virgines fortiores, quae vincunt etiam quas non vident potesatates: quibus non tantum de carne et sanguine, sed etiam de ipso

1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, iii.425–26. 2 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Grafton, 1977), p. 112. 3 Ambrose, De virginibus, i.5. 4 Jerome, Epistulae, cxxx.5.

(r e )p r e s e n tat i o n s — r e fl ect i o n s an d co nclu d i ng re mark s

mundi principe saeculique rectore victoria est […] Aetate utique Agnes minor, sed virtue major, triumpho numerosior (How much stronger are our virgins, who conquer even those powers which they do not see: to whom the victory is not only over flesh and blood, but also over the prince of the world himself and ruler of the age! […] In age Agnes indeed was lesser, but in virtue [manliness] she was greater, triumphing over more).5 The emphasis on virtue/manliness (virtus) and the martial language (fortior, potestas, caro, sanguis, princeps, victoria, triumphare) deliberately masculinizes these women and represents them as Christian soldiers. Yet we hear nothing from these women themselves; their glory was not their own but appropriated by the Church more broadly. Beyond masculinization, the bodies of these female virgin martyrs become vivid, sexualized spectacles, products of a decidedly male gaze; indeed, Prudentius famously ventriloquizes St Agnes’s desire for death at the hands of the trux vir (fierce man) with a mucro nudus (naked sword) in erotic terms hic, hic amator iam, fateor, placet: | ibo inruentis gressibus obviam, | nec demorabor vota calentia: | ferrum in papillas omne recepero | pectusque ad imum vim gladii traham (this one, this lover now, I confess, pleases me: | I shall meet his stride as he rushes at me, | nor will I delay his inflamed desire. | I shall receive his whole blade in my breasts | and draw the force of his sword into my deepest bosom).6 In male hands, these women become their virginal deaths; their lives and personalities erased in an orgy of violence. Their coronae were commandeered. Similarly, the women in ʿUmar’s poetry are fantasies, conjured and ventriloquized by the poet to massage his own ego. Paradigmatic is the praise of the unnamed women at his sudden arrival at dusk: Our lover, sent us by Fate in the nick of time, unswerving. | He has come just as night, like a camel, is about to kneel and settle. | All bright and fresh in musk-perfumed robes dampened to cool them: | Our desire has come to us, driving all stuffy bores away!7 In another poem, a woman weeps after ʿUmar abandons her, ‘Her eye pours tears that run jewel-like strings down both her cheeks’. Rather than functioning as a reproach, her tears and subsequent words are boasts, for ʿUmar-as-woman emphasizes his own desirability: ‘Do I have eyes for anyone but you, my only

5 Ambrose, De virginibus, i.5. 6 Prudentius, Liber Peristephanon, xiv.74–78. 7 ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, Diwan, ed. by ʿAbd al-Hamid, no. 33, trans. by Julia Bray.

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worldly thought and care?’.8 Herein we gain little insight into the minds or lives of historical women in early Islamic Arabia, but significant insight into the towering ego of a celebrated poet. Ultimately, ʿUmar’s ventriloquized women are illusory flights of fancy. These male fantasies aside, the example of Livia indicates that some women could confound gender norms and attain unrivalled status in patriarchal societies. Through the formalization of her position after Augustus’s death, the accumulation of various priestly privileges and status symbols, conspicuous patronage, and adroit religious ‘branding’ in her iconography, Livia accrued more power and status than any of her republican predecessors. Notably, her adoption and use of the status symbols and privileges of the Vestal Virgins allowed her to transcend the roles and status of other senatorial women, for the lictors and privileged seats of the Vestals were otherwise reserved for elite men (particularly magistrates and senators). Individually, these various processes were not egregious violations of republican traditions, but collectively they innovatively transformed a senatorial woman into a femina princeps. By a multitude of material representations of authority and sanctity, Livia successfully laid claim to power and status, as her husband had throughout his career.9 A few lines from the Consolatio ad Liviam (of uncertain authorship and date) serve as a fitting paean to Livia’s superlative status and as a coda to this section on (re)presentations: ‘Ad te oculos auresque trahis, tua facta notamus | […] An melius per te virtutum exempla petemus, | Quam si Romanae principis edis opus?’ (You [Livia] draw our eyes and ears to you, we notice your deeds […] Can we find better examples of virtues in you than when you perform the work of a Roman princeps?).10

8 ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa, Diwan, ed. by ʿAbd al-Hamid, no. 20, trans. by Julia Bray. 9 Cassius Dio, lvi.47.1. 10 Consolatio ad Liviam, 351, 355–56.

Index of Subjects

competition definition (general) of: 10–11 themes and means: aemulatio, mimetic desire: 65, 71, 81, 86, 137, 175, 317 as analogues to war: 187–90 banquets, hosting of: 53, 265 board games: 185–207 boasting: 66–67, 117, 281, 299– 300, 302, 309, 327, 334–35 certamen: 64–65 challenges: 84, 93–100, 128, 130–32, 135, 141–50, 192, 300, 302 conspicuous display: 43–47, 53–55, 57, 60–65, 69–71 see also status, symbols of domains: 43–47, 50, 53–55, 61, 67, 70 drinking rituals: 139–47 exaequatio: 64, 71 levelling: 64–65, 67, 71 praise and self-praise: 85, 88, 91, 93, 179, 182, 277, 282–84, 304–05, 321–22, 329 provocations: 95–97, 99, 101, 131, 137, 146–49, 280 raillery and joking: 147–51, 153 ridicule and mockery: 102, 120, 139, 146, 311 rivalry: 10, 80–81, 93–94, 96–97, 100, 137, 144, 175, 177, 232, 235, 238 triumph and success: 60, 61, 64, 66–67, 71, 151, 287, 292 verbal affronts: 93–98, 101–02, 113, 141–42, 148, 160

emotions and emotional practices anger and rage: 91, 95, 143, 147, 152, 167 body-language, gestures and face: 84, 86–87, 90, 94, 98–102, 128, 134, 140, 147, 181, 183, 234 devotion: 171, 227–32, 234–35, 237–39, 284 fear: 82–89, 92, 95, 102, 112, 230, 278, 287 gratitude: 181, 227, 230, 233 hatred and animosity: 93, 102 humility: 227, 230–31, 234–36 jealousy: 167–83 laughter: 135, 139, 141, 146, 151, 178–79, 217 mourning: 57, 210–16, 222–24 pride: 116–17, 141, 213, 216, 234–35, 237 shame: 87, 94–95, 99–100, 116 –17, 121, 135, 142, 153, 279 shedding tears, weeping: 88, 119, 147, 217, 335 gender definition of (general): 10 gender norms, challenged, transgressed and reassessed: hair and shaving: 200–02 masculinization: 269, 284 women as administrators of material resources: 19–21, 36–39 women as board game players: 193–202 women as warriors: 195, 198–99

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women and writing: 299, 305, 311, 314 practices and associations: board games associated with the masculine: 187–89 brotherhood and confraternities: 114, 115, 140, 143, 145–47, 153 qualities: courage, bravery, fortitude: 79, 81–85, 87–89, 92, 97–98, 102, 130–31, 146, 148, 160, 284, endurance of pain: 82–83, 87, 107 see also sex and sexuality; sex, penile erection femininity: 238–39, 301, n. 8 masculinity and manliness: 81–82, 87, 101, 113, 116–17, 150–52, 187–89, 300 stereotypes, male vs female: 133–36 unmanliness: cowardice: 93, 96–97, 100, 130–33, 146, 154 cuckoldry: 150 see also sex and sexuality; sex, impotence submissiveness, allusions to: 135, 139 see also sex and sexuality; sodomy, shame and receptive family, marriage, and household concubine: 168, 213, 215–24 filial piety: 210 household authority: 151–53 marriage, in class and age competition: 114 patriarchal: 25 polygamy: 216 polygyny: 168 spouse: 209, 212, 215, 220–24 honour: and status: 115–16, 120, 127–33 and gender: 120, 133, 137–38

definition of (general): 127–28 vs infamy: 127–28, 132–33 literary texts, authors and translators: adaptation vs. translation: 313–14, 319 Hélisenne de Crenne, author/ pen-name/ translator: 311–29 Les Angoysses douloureuses (1538 ce): 313, 326–27, 329 Les Epistres familières et invectives (1539 ce): 313, 315–16, 328 Le Songe de Madam Hélisenne (1540 ce): 313 Les Eneydes (1541 ce), transl. of the four first books of Aeneid : 313, 318–20, 328 Liu Xiang (79–78 bce), Biographies of Women: 168, 176–78 Marguerite Briet (1510–1552 ce): 311–12 military trea tises and biographies of condottieri : 80–83, 91 Virgil (70–19 bce), Aeneid : 317–18 poetry and poets themes and genres: 82, 89, 112, 117, 174, 177, 181–82, 188, 194–95, 210–16, 281, 287, 299–308, 319, 323 early Islamic Arabia: ʿUmar ibn Abi Rabīʿa (643/4– 711/2 ce): 252–53, 299–310 as feminist: 302 and manliness: 300 boasting (fakhr): 299–300, 302, 304–06, 309 courtship poems: 302, 308 letter-poems: 305, 306, 308 love themes: 300, 303 male audience: 307 pseudo-autobiography: 299

i nd e x o f su b ject s

seventeenth-century China: elegiac poetry and epitaphs: 209–24 Huang Zongxi (1610–1695 ce): 210 Mao Qiling (1623–1716 ce): 216–22, 224 Mao Xiang (1611–1697 ce): 213–15 publishing and popularity of: 210–11 Qu Daqun (1630–1696 ce): 213–15, 223 social function of: 212, 213, 214, 215 social networking: 209, 215, 218, 221–22 religion and religious cults Augustus (63 bc–14 ce) death of: 257–59, 265 temple to: 263–64, 270 as pontifex maximus: 261, 264, 269 Christian sainthood and virginity: Agatha of Sicily (c. 231–251 ce) saint and martyr: 282, 283 Agnes of Rome (291– c. 304 ce), saint, and martyr: 276–92, 289, 291 Birgitta of Sweden (1303– 1373 ce), saint: 233–35 canonization process: 227–37 Cecilia (200–230 ce), saint and martyr: 283 Nicholas of Tolentino (1245–1305 ce), saint: 229–30, 236–37 Pelagia, (300/400 ce) saint and hermit: 283 rituals: 227–28, 234–35, 238–39, 276–78, 290

virginity and martyrdom: 275–83, 285, 287–88, 290, 292–93 Virgin Mary: 192 Livia (58 bce– 29 ce): 255–70 adoption of: 257–61 deification of: 258, 269–70 as Augusta: 259–61 as Augustus’ daughter: 258–59 as priestess: 256, 261–63, 265–68 Vestal virgins: 266, 268–69, 287–88, 289, 336 sex and sexuality erotic love and attraction: male to male: 119–20, 221–22 seduction, male fantasies, and staging of female conquest: 150–51, 238–39, 302, 304 sexual jealousy: 167–68, 182 prostitution: female: 110–11 male: 113–14 sex: impotence, allusions to: 117, 120, 150, 154, 354 see also sex and sexuality; unmanliness penile erection:111, 113–14, 150 see also gender; masculinity and manliness sodomy: age-structured: 118–19 as a nefarious crime and sin: 109–11 and male honour: 113, 115, 120 and masculinity: 113 and patriarchy: 115

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and social hierarchies: 111, 115 in class and age competition: 116–17, 119 pride and insertives: 113–14, 116–17, 120 seduction and cruising: 111, 112–13, 118–19 shame and receptive: 116, 113–14, 117, 120–21 and violence: 119 status definition (general) of: 43, 125–27 elite groups: Condottieri military captains: 82, 85, 87, 89, 91, 94–100 Italian late medieval elite families: 231–38 Literati: 214–15, 218, 220–22 Roman elite: 43–65, 67–68, 70–71 Roman elite women, ordo matronarum: 49–51, 55, 57, 60–63, 66–68, 70–71 hierarchies: military: 79–82, 102, 126 political and social: 24, 44, 50, 111, 114–16, 119, 125, 132, 142, 151–52, 224, 229, 232 religious: 126, 227, 275–76, 281, 283, 286, 292–93 regulations of: censorial actions: 44, 46–49, 54, 58–62, 65, 70–71 censors: 44, 46, 48–49, 58–62 legislation: 44, 46–48, 54–58, 60–71

lex Oppia de mulieribus: 46–48, 54–58, 60–71 lex Valeria Fundania de lege Oppia abroganda: 63 orders of precedence, titles, and personal address: 126 social position and reputation: prestige: 10, 20, 23–24, 37, 43, 93, 115, 120, 126, 135, 138, 151, 161, 185, 211–12, 216, 220, 228, 234–35, 239, 263, 293, 318 rank: 43–44, 46, 49–51, 63, 116, 126, 138–39, 141, 144–46, 187–88, 190, 228–29, 256, 279, 293 symbols of: 44, 46–47, 50–51, 54–55, 57 beard: 140–41, 150 blood sacrifice of martyrdom: 277, 281 bloodstained personal objects: 100, 144 double crown: 276, 280–83 gold: 45, 50–51, 54–57, 59–60, 62, 64–67, 69–71 hat, cane, rapier: 142–44 purple clothing: 51, 55, 57, 60, 62, 64–67, 69–71, 89–93 rings: 50, 54–57, 62, 67 scars: 89–93 seals: 38–39 vehicles, carpentum: 51, 55, 57, 60, 62, 64, 70–71, 268–69 violence duels: 93–101, 143–46 rape, romping, sexual abuse: 115, 150–51, 282

History of Daily Life (800–1600)

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field.

Titles in Series Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Gender, Miracles, and Daily Life: The Evidence of FourteenthCentury Canonization Processes (2009) On Old Age: Approaching Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. by Christian Krötzl and Katariina Mustakallio (2012) Objects, Environment, and Everyday Life in Medieval Europe, ed. by Ben Jervis, Lee G. Broderick, and Idoia Grau Sologestoa (2015) Jenni Kuuliala, Childhood Disability and Social Integration in the Middle Ages: Constructions of Impairments in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Canonization Processes (2016) Intricate Interfaith Networks in the Middle Ages: Quotidian Jewish-Christian Contacts, ed. by Ephraim Shoham Steiner (2016) Nancy van Deusen, Folk Songs and Material Culture in Medieval Central Europe: Old Stones and New Music (2019) Robert Kurelić, Daily Life on the Istrian Frontier: Living on a Borderland in the Sixteenth Century (2019) Games and Visual Culture in the Middles Ages and Renaissance, ed. by Vanina Kopp and Elizabeth Lapina (2020) Material Exchanges in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Archaeological Perspectives, ed. by Magdalena E. Naum, Jette Linaa, and Sergio Escribiano Ruiz (2021)

In preparation The Rural World in the Sixteenth Century: Exploring the Archaeology of Innovation in Europe, ed. by Idoia Grau-Sologestoa and Umberto Albarella