Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages: Commented Readings of Medieval Texts [1 ed.] 1527581063, 9781527581067

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Index

Citation preview

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages: Commented Readings of Medieval Texts By

Pedro Carlos Louzada Fonseca

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages: Commented Readings of Medieval Texts By Pedro Carlos Louzada Fonseca This book first published 2022 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2022 by Pedro Carlos Louzada Fonseca All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book 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 copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-8106-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8106-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ..................................................................................................... viii Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 The Imaginary of Maleficent Medieval Women References........................................................................................... 17 Chapter One .............................................................................................. 19 Misogyny in Ancient Science and Medieval Legacy Aristotle .............................................................................................. 19 De generatione animalium ............................................................ 19 Galen ................................................................................................... 23 De usu partium corporis humani................................................... 23 Saint Isidore of Seville ........................................................................ 25 Etymologiae................................................................................... 25 Saint Anselm ....................................................................................... 28 Monologium .................................................................................. 28 Saint Thomas Aquinas ........................................................................ 30 Summa Theologiae ........................................................................ 30 Summary ............................................................................................. 32 Sources ................................................................................................ 33 References........................................................................................... 34 Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 35 The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature References........................................................................................... 64 Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 69 The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers Saint Jerome........................................................................................ 69 Adversus Jovinianum..................................................................... 71 Saint Augustine ................................................................................... 84 De Genesi ad litteram ................................................................... 87 Sources ................................................................................................ 91 References........................................................................................... 92

vi

Table of Contents

Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 94 The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers Gratian ................................................................................................ 95 Decretum ....................................................................................... 95 Abelard and Heloise .......................................................................... 102 Historia calamitatum................................................................... 105 Gottfried von Strassburg ................................................................... 108 Tristan ......................................................................................... 109 Anonymous ....................................................................................... 111 Ancrene Riwle ............................................................................. 111 Sources .............................................................................................. 117 References......................................................................................... 118 Chapter Five ........................................................................................... 120 The Misogynist Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin Andreas Capellanus .......................................................................... 120 De amore ..................................................................................... 120 Sources .............................................................................................. 134 References......................................................................................... 134 Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 136 The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation Jean de Meun .................................................................................... 137 Le Roman de la Rose ................................................................... 138 Geoffrey Chaucer .............................................................................. 160 The Wife of Bath’s Prologue ....................................................... 162 Sources .............................................................................................. 182 References......................................................................................... 182 Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 185 The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature Anonymous ....................................................................................... 187 The Thrush and the Nightingale .................................................. 187 Marbod of Rennes ............................................................................. 191 De matrona.................................................................................. 192 Peter Abelard .................................................................................... 197 Letter 6: Auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium ........ 198 Albertano of Brescia ......................................................................... 202 Liber consolationis et consilii ..................................................... 202 Anonymous ....................................................................................... 207 Response to Richard de Fournival’s Li Bestiaire d’Amour ............... 207

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages

vii

Anonymous ....................................................................................... 209 The Southern Passion .................................................................. 209 John Gower ....................................................................................... 213 Confessio amantis ....................................................................... 214 Anonymous ....................................................................................... 215 Dives and Pauper ........................................................................ 215 Summary ........................................................................................... 225 Sources .............................................................................................. 228 References......................................................................................... 229 Index ....................................................................................................... 232

PREFACE

As is reflected in its title, this book is dichotomously constructed, insofar as it proposes to analyze the presence of women in medieval literature at representative moments of their defamation and defense of their historical, social and moral reality. Without intending to synonymize this representation of the medieval feminine as naturally misogynistic, one of the most dangerous reductionisms in gender studies in medieval literature, the book is divided into two parts. It starts with an exposition of the medieval misogynistic tradition, followed by its laudatory counterpart, in an attempt to understand the scope of this kind of ‘response’ to the conventional degrading treatments of the female reality. In this respect, the book examines modes of authorial writing about women in medieval literature in Western Europe. Based on this proposal, it aims to present a comprehensive study of anonymous and masculine authorship in praise of women. This modality of writing encompasses texts of various natures, from treatises to dialogical fiction and epistolography. Through them, a thematic study of positive values of images and feminine references is developed. It is in this sense that the study understands ‘praise’ as opposed to the traditional misogyny that established a negative defamation of women in the Middle Ages. The book’s interest in the themes of the defense and praise of women by anonymous and masculine authorship in the medieval period resides in the fact that this kind of literature has received relatively little attention in medieval studies, revealing the necessity for more research in this subgenre aspect. The merit of the research is justified by the finding that medieval texts of female authorship are most responsible for the emancipation and recognition of women in literature. Nevertheless, this verification perhaps forgets, maybe with a certain dose of prejudice, the fact that anonymous and even declared men have intended to speak in defense of women defamed by misogynist thinking and attitudes firmly rooted in the culture of the Middle Ages. In this context, it is to be considered that the praise of women throughout the medieval period has become synonymous with the defense of women against the misogynist harassments suffered by them. Medieval literature of female authorship has been extensively explored from the perspective of gender studies, recognizing the importance of

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages

ix

women in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that because of this important initiative in rescuing brilliant medieval women writers ‘sequestrated’ from medieval societies, anonymous and maleauthored literature about women in the period has received relatively little attention. Finally, the book’s choice to investigate this type of defense completes the typological modes of praising/defending women, namely the anonymous, male, and female authorship modes. Thus, without considering this kind of laudatory literature, views about women in Middle Ages literature would necessarily remain incomplete. The corpus constitutes a list of works and authors selected with the justification that they, through preliminary investigation, presented themselves as frequently referenced items so as to be a representation of the category studied in the book. Thus, for the question that the book proposes, namely the study of women’s presence in medieval literature of anonymous and masculine authorship, the corpus has conditions of exemplary sufficiency. Nevertheless, some dissatisfaction may occur concerning the critical evaluations used to form the anthological corpus of the book in general; for example, the non-inclusion of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, the justification of which is found in the chapter that analyzes The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Similarly, Petrarch and Dante Alighieri were not included in the praising part of the book because the author did not intend to conduct a critical analysis of what he considers as the praise of women in pre-Renaissance medieval humanism, a subject that deserves a separate study. Regarding the non-inclusion of Christine de Pizan, given her importance as a stronghold in the defense of women that she openly proposes, unusual for the time that she wrote, the author considers that her case would be better contemplated in the context of medieval women writers. As mentioned before, the study of these authors and works revealing their significant representation of and contributions to the medieval praise of women is preceded by chapters that, in a comprehensive way, examine some paradigmatic names and misogynistic works in so-called Latin Patristic literature and its legacy. This approach was necessary to establish the intertextual background with which that praising literature dialogues, that is, the misogynist literary tradition of the Middle Ages. In the context of these considerations, the book suggests some intriguing questions that should pique the readers’ interest in further studies. One of them is the possibility to mark masculine gender traits in literature praising women of anonymous authorship from stylistic, rhetorical and thematic comparisons with characteristics found in texts of masculine authorship. Another question is the possibility of establishing, in anonymous

x

Preface

texts, other peculiarities that escape masculine marks. In this case, this property and its characteristics would be considered as material for reflections on and approximations between medieval literature of female authorship and misogynist literature of masculine authorship. This would investigate the hypothesis of a feminine writing in medieval literature uncontaminated by the male misogynist counterpart. Contrary to the previous questions, the proposed book’s approach could still contemplate argumentations about the real existence of a laudatory literature of women in the Middle Ages, anonymous or even male-authored, considering the ideological relationship between misogyny, praise and the assumption of authorship. Whether this incipient type of praising literature was merely a rhetorical fallacy at the service of the prevailing misogynist status quo is another question deserving special attention in this context. Considering the scope of the book, it has the possibility to open new approaches in the thematic series of studies about women in medieval literature. One initial reaction to the scope of the book may be that it would be very difficult to coherently cover such a wide-ranging topic addressed in writings from such a variety of disciplines (philosophy, medicine, theology, literature), written over such a long chronological period (from the classical period to the early modern period), and written in such a variety of European languages (from ancient Greek and Latin to medieval Romance languages). However, it must be observed that the book proposes to present commented readings with a critical-analytical character and a comparative approach. As a result, this censored variety in terms of disciplines, languages, and the long chronological period is quite useful not only for the identification of the topoi of women’s misogyny and defense but also for setting the limits and ideological intentions of these topological narrative strategies. Furthermore, the commented readings present only the portions of texts that the author considers central to the study of misogynist attitudes and/or laudatory characteristics of women in some influential texts of the Middle Ages. In selecting the texts on which to comment, the author used texts from the anthology Woman Defamed, and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts edited by Alcuin Blamires, because he considers it one of the best anthologies on the subject. However, with due recognition and respect for the excellent work carried out in Blamires’s anthology, the author seeks in his study to go beyond its format insofar as it is criticalanalytic and comments, in the presentation of the texts, why such texts are predominantly characterized by one of the two conflicting typologies (misogyny versus women’s praise). The author’s book selects key points from the texts to analyze and criticize, even in a comparative way, the

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages

xi

defamation and defense of women in the Middle Ages literature, seeking to guide the reading in the evidence of misogyny and apology for women in the medieval view. Despite the contrapositive methodology of the laudatory and misogynist texts considered in the book, the author believes that the praise of women has run side-by-side with the denigration of women from the beginning, since the Scripture tradition. The author marks this counterpoint in the book, reinforcing that although the Old Testament and the letters of Saint Paul are sources of pervasive negative views of women, this Testament also provides models of two persuasive and powerful women who are referred to repeatedly in medieval literature, Esther and Judith. Women also play a positive role in the New Testament. Therefore, misogyny toward and the praise of women form a two-way street, starting from the medieval axiom of religious origin that guides women’s dual configuration in the biblical anthropogony Eva-Ave. The book opens with an introductory study of the imaginary of the supposed maleficent women’s reality and considers the founding importance of the misogynist complex rooted in the religious and secular worldview of the medieval mind. This introduction, entitled “The Imaginary of Maleficent Medieval Women,” presents a general portrayal of women considered as derogated by the severity of inflicted judgments reducing them to breeders and to being responsible for the introduction and preservation of spiritual and material harm to the world and men. This kind of propitiating function, as a result, engendered a connection between women, toward the end of their ‘pernicious’ career in medieval times, with the forces and agents of the demonic evil. The introduction provides an overview of figures ideologically constructed to represent the feminine as a dangerous conduit for masculine integrity, from mythological imagery to superstitious and religious realities. Chapter 1 presents the seminal roots of medieval misogyny traced back to the ancient world. Entitled “Misogyny in Ancient Science and Medieval Legacy,” the chapter studies the influential work of Aristotle and his followers Saint Isidore of Seville (c. 570–636), with his Etymologiae (Etymologies), and Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), with his Summa Theologiae. This legacy mainly concerns Aristotle’s anatomist and physiologist ideas about composing aspects that have served in the formation of misogynist prejudices over time, mostly concerning the inferior nature of the female body. The restrictive view of women continues, now represented in literary and formal production, in Chapter 2. Bearing the title “The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature,” the chapter deals succinctly but

xii

Preface

comprehensively, given the vastness of the corpus of this study, with some of the most significant sources of women’s defamation in the medieval period. To this end, it lists some classic Middle Ages writers’ pronouncements that are striking for their defamatory tone. In them, the emphasis falls on bad women from Patristic literature and its medieval legacy to the misogynist vernacular adaptations of the late Middle Ages, from Tertullian (c. 160–c. 225) to Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400). Considering the extreme importance that the so-called Fathers of the Church had in the radicalization of misogyny within the scope of medieval Christian religious culture, Chapter 3 deals in detail, under the title “The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers,” with misogynist reflections of so-called Patristic literature. Here, Saint Jerome (c. 342– 420), with Adversus Jovinianum (Against Jovinian), and Saint Augustine (354–430), with De Genesi ad litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis), represent this literary subgenre. These two very selective authors of Patristic literature in the Middle Ages are followed in Chapter 4, entitled “The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers,” by a study of meaningful names and works that represent the legacy of this doctrinal kind of religious writings. Gratian (12th century) with Decretum, Abelard (c. 1079–1142) and Heloise (1101– 1164) with Historia calamitatum (The History of My Calamities), Gottfried von Strassburg (c. 1180–1210) with his Tristan, and the anonymous Argus Riwle (1230) (Rule for Anchoresses) are the selected authors. Chapters 5, entitled “The Misogynist Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin,” examines the developments of this Patristic literature. Here, the misogynist satirical tradition in the Medieval Latin of Andreas Capellanus (12th–13th centuries) with De amore (On Love) (c. 1185) is displayed. The exemplary misogynist contribution of vernacular adaptations in the late Middle Ages is considered in Chapter 6 with Jean de Meun (c. 1240–c. 1305) with Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) and Geoffrey Chaucer with The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Beginning in Chapter 7, entitled “The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature,” and over the course of several subchapters, the book deals with some of the most significant and interesting ‘responses’ to medieval misogyny, duly recognizing women’s values. Herein lies the special contribution of the study to the critical views toward and representation of women in medieval literature. These sections, like those on the names and works of the misogynist literature, take the form of commented and paraphrased readings of praiseworthy texts of the female figure. Each one of these sections is a monographic study that examines points of view concerning the positive values of women from the authorial perspectives

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages

xiii

discussed earlier in this preface. In this sense, these values understand praise as opposed to the traditional misogyny that occurred in the defamation of women in the medieval period. The corpus of the study comprises authors and works of two types: (1) References to the literary tradition in Medieval Latin, namely, Marbod of Rennes (c. 1035–1123) and De matrona (The Good Woman), Abelard and De auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium (On the Origin of Nuns), Albertano of Brescia (c. 1193–c. 1260) and Liber consolationis et consilii (The Book of Consolation and Advice), and John Gower (1325?– 1408) and Confessio amantis (A Lover’s Confession); and (2) References in the Romance literature of the Middle Ages, namely, the anonymous The Thrush and the Nightingale (13th century), the response to Richard de Fournival’s Li Bestiaire d’Amour (c. 1250), The Southern Passion (c. 1290), and Dives and Pauper (1405–1410). As mentioned before, the importance of research into medieval literature of female authorship focusing on the perspective of gender studies to recognize the importance of women in the Middle Ages is an undeniable fact. It has promoted significant interest in rescuing brilliant medieval women writers silenced by the historical and cultural androcentrism of medieval societies. Nevertheless, maybe because of this, little attention has been given to anonymous and male-authored literary writings in praise of women from the period. The justification for choosing to investigate this authorial perspective in defense of women completes the essential trio regarding the issue of women’s laudatory authorship and its narrative effects, namely, the anonymous, masculine and feminine modes of authorial representation. Thus, without considering this anonymous and male laudatory literature, views about women in Middle Ages literature would necessarily be incomplete, as commented before. Some final words, still related to the purpose of presenting the book, are needed to clarify the methodology used to indicate references to the consulted sources and bibliographies. Thus, to indicate the passages cited, only the book, section, chapter, paragraph, or line are cited just after the year of the edition.

INTRODUCTION THE IMAGINARY OF MALEFICENT MEDIEVAL WOMEN

That social relations reveal the presence of a fixed ideology about gender is an unquestionable premise. From the perspective of gender, one can perceive the tricky realities of a discourse of power masking the prerogatives of the dominant sex. In this structure, the sexual other is the dominated other, whose subjection is armed and sustained through discrimination and prejudice, formations that always appear linked to the ideology of inferiority of the other. Through the lens of gender, one can readily observe this dominant discourse’s nature that symbolically masks the prerogatives of the masculine. Unavoidably and consistently, this discourse treats the sexual other’s identity as inferior and, thus, subject to discrimination, control, and domination. In the Western socio-cultural tradition, this discourse of power that engenders is born and maintained within the patriarchy, whose discourses of power are constructed by means of androcentric resources and strategies. Furthermore, this dominant masculinist rhetoric is embodied through a complex system of hierarchical binarisms that exclude the subordinate’s autonomy. Recognizing this strategy is essential to understand that this hierarchical paradigm model operates under the sign of violence, not simply manifesting itself, as Cora Kaplan comments, as pure binary forms, since such a procedure presents itself “always, already, ordered and broken up through other social and cultural terms, other categories of difference.”1 Therefore, these categories of difference can perfectly include any combination of class, race, age, and particular history of sexuality. Thus, configuring the complexity of the study of gender only in terms of mere sexual difference, without considering these other implied distinctions, “obscures and

1

Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), 148.

2

Introduction

legitimizes,” in the words of Catherine Mackinnon, “the way gender is imposed by force.”2 The existence of a gender discourse in the view of the Fathers of the Church and their medieval legacy is a premise as sustainable as the one about the relationship between gender and ideology mentioned at the beginning of this introduction. That the Patristic view about gender is strongly marked by misogynist attitudes charged with decisive ideologies and political order is what R. Howard Bloch seems to have identified as redundant when describing the misogyny of the Middle Ages as ‘medieval.’3 Indeed, it is perfectly verifiable that a strong biunivocal correspondence links the meaning of these two terms in the period. It does not seem too visionary to consider that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the ideology of misogyny was born with the very creation of the world and humanity, based on the Holy Scriptures. Furthermore, it seems that the cornerstone of this misogynist ideology starts from an essentialism of verbal nature in which the word is the reality and the meaning of the thing. Stigma or not, this is the context in which women were named ‘women’ forever. In the domain of gender relations, this essentialist notion of Creation marks the principle of etymological wisdom in the biblical episode of the legitimation of the power of naming the animals attributed by God to Adam. Adam is a divine adjunct in the creation of the world, including the woman. Therefore, man’s supremacism has always been the reason for women’s subservience. This premise is perhaps one of the most glossed themes from the Bible and the misogynist exegesis: how to build the hermeneutics of female obedience according to the modes of the patriarchy of religious and cultural Jewish-Christian ancestry. The tropology repertoire of this patriarchal discourse is quite variable. However, it is also binary and its politics hierarchical. This is why this discourse balances between the euphoria and dysphoria of the female presences ambivalently considered according to ideological projects. In this way, woman has oscillated since her creation and the beginning of her existence, maintaining a precarious balance, between Eva, the bad woman, and Ave, Maria, the good woman. Bloch ironically calls this precarious equilibrium “the paradox of perfection.” It is interesting, however, to note that both sides of this balancing are mainly ideological.

2

Catherine Mackinnon, Feminism Unmodi¿ed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 32. 3 R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

The Imaginary of Maleficent Medieval Women

3

In the imagination of the Middle Ages, the triumphalist side of this bifocal vision of female engendering is represented, among other modalities, in the fruitful tradition of travel literature, as exemplified by John Mandeville, Marco Polo, and Odoric of Pordenone in the fourteenth century. In them, the masculinist character fulfilled its intention through the trope of the feminization of peripheral geographies. This is just one of the processes of this Western discourse that colonizes and dominates studied by Edward W. Said in his book Orientalism.4 However, the utopian benefits of female engendering, as mentioned above, are not always achieved without adversity and difficulties. In a difficult conquest, the more the androcentric merit is endangered, the better it increases itself with a heroic sense of victory. This motif of probation is well dealt with in La Salade, by Antoine de la Sale (1385/86– 1460/61),5 in the conquest of Queen Sibyl’s feminine paradise located in distant parts of the Apennines. Mircea Eliade gives this type of initiation rite the generic name of “Symplegades.” Because they always present themselves as obstacles in the form of interlocking parts, they reminded medieval people of the figure of the vagina dentata (toothed vagina), the gateway to the uterus of Mother Earth, an ambiguous place of death and pleasure.6 According to Barbara G. Walker, “Medieval Christianity made the vagina a metaphor for the gate of hell and revived the ancient fear-inducing image of the toothed vagina that could bite off a man’s penis. On the other hand, men have always desired, and sometimes even tried to appropriate for themselves, the life-transmitting and pleasure-providing functions of the vagina.”7 Katherine M. Rogers recognizes, in this context of the perpetuation of prejudices against women, the strength of erudition and learned knowledge that nurtured the culture and wisdom of the Middle Ages taking place largely because of the peculiar influence of the so-called auctoritatis formulae (formulas of authority). Thus, the history of misogyny and its femmephobic correlation are presented not only as formations typical of the Judeo-Christian culture of the Middle Ages but also as constructions rooted in the findings of classical antiquity, since “medieval men, with 4

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Randon House, Inc., 1979). Antoine de la Sale, “La salade,” version B, in Ouevres Completes, vol. 1, ed. Fernand Desonay (Paris: Librairie Droz, 1935–1945), 63. 6 Mircea Eliade, Initiations, Rites, Sociétés Secrètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 116– 118, 140–142, and passim. 7 Barbara G. Walker, The Woman Dictionary of Symbols & Sacred Objects (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988), 328. 5

4

Introduction

their love of authorities and ancient examples, drew almost as heavily from the classical storehouse of misogyny as they did from the Bible and the Church Fathers.”8 In early modern times, even the breath of renewal of Renaissance humanism failed to replace what medieval Christianity had established regarding the derogatory and slanderous view of the female figure. Indeed, humanism and Christianity, mainly in countries with a strong Catholic tradition, formed a kind of ideological collusion, in which true humanism would be that represented by the figure of a man, like Christ, and not by the image of a woman, such as the Virgin Mary. Louise Labé analyzes the apparently humanist openings of the Renaissance concerning women. She says that this humanism, despite having overcome powerful beliefs and prejudices, did little for the situation of women. Ambiguity and conflict were marks of a time that “fights internal resistance to the new and first conceptions of the modern world, which seem to propose the premises of women’s emancipation, and at the same time abandon it in a waiting room, oscillating between an open and a closed world.”9 Simone de Beauvoir, commenting on the subject, condenses the entire traditional misogynist stance established by the doctors of the Church by saying that with Saint Paul, the Jewish-Christian tradition was fiercely “antifeminist”: St. Paul commands self-effacement and reserve from women; he bases the principle of subordination of women to man on the Old and New Testaments. “The man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man”; and “Neither was man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” And elsewhere: “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church.” In a religion where the flesh is cursed, the woman becomes the devil’s most fearsome temptation. Tertullian writes: “Woman! You are the devil’s gateway. You have convinced the one the devil did not dare to confront directly. It is your fault that God’s Son had to die. You should always dress in mourning and rags.” St. Ambrose: “Adam was led to sin by Eve and not Eve by Adam. It is right and just that he whom she led into sin, she shall receive as master.” And St. John Chrysostom: “Of all the wild animals, none can be found as 8

Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 6–7. 9 Louise Labé, Amor e loucura, trans. Felipe Fortuna (São Paulo: Siciliano, 1955), 17–18; my translation.

The Imaginary of Maleficent Medieval Women

5

harmful as woman.” When canon law is written in the fourth century, marriage is treated as a concession to human failings, incompatible with Christian perfection. “Take up the hatchet and cut the roots of the sterile tree of marriage,” writes St. Jerome. In the time of Gregory VI, when celibacy was imposed on priests, woman’s dangerous character was more harshly asserted: all the Fathers of the Church proclaim her wretchedness. St. Thomas will remain true to this tradition, declaring that woman is only an “occasional” and incomplete being, a sort of failed man. “Man is the head of woman just as Christ is the head of man,” he writes. “It is a constant that woman is destined to live under the authority of man and has no authority of her own.”10 One of the most feared aspects of female nature was ancestrally attributed to its natural and incontinent disposition toward the appetites of the body, maximally expressed by the lustful desire of the flesh, understood as compromising the moral and spiritual integrity of men. This is the engine of the Original Sin introduced into the world by the vice of Eve’s superb gluttony, who, in disobedience to God, ate of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. However, it makes perfect sense to say that woman has been subject to sin due to her natural imperfection since her creation. However, the medieval woman’s sense of imperfection is not the same as that of her classical counterpart. Morality and philosophical treatment have different departments of investigation. The medieval mentality, in different sectors of its thinking, dealt with women with a reductionist tendency arising from dogmatisms of religious thought. This medieval ideology knew well how to Christianize the auctoritas of the classical world in an exemplary ideological and political way. One of the topoi that most approximate to this sense of feminine theological ‘imperfection’ in the biblical tradition is the Aristotelian pseudo-scientism founded in the notion of Matter versus Form. It is interesting to review this seminal notion that was so greatly appreciated by the patriarchal thought of the Middle Ages. Aristotle (384–322 BC) conceived masculine perfection as being centered on the idea of Form in combat with Matter, the prerogative of the feminine. In De generatione animalium (Generation of Animals), the Greek philosopher, engaging in physiologist studies, established that animal and human beings are the result of an interactive struggle between Form and Matter. It is up to the male to begin the reproduction process, since he is the Efficient Cause. 10

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Shiila M. A. Lovan (New York: Vintage Books, Random House Inc., 2009), 133–134.

6

Introduction

Also characteristic of this masculine principle is that it is a Formal Cause, that is, a maker of the direction followed by the process. All beings would essentially be marked by this principle, which acts on Matter, which, by its nature, is feminine. The male principle is identified with male semen, and Matter is the female residue, a substance associated with menstrual blood.11 In the verified interaction between Form and Matter, if the male principle were to win, the male embryo would have its origin. Otherwise, it would remain as Matter or be destroyed. The scenario of Matter’s primacy would be a departure from the masculine ideal, and the further the departure, the greater the imperfection that, in extreme cases, might not even have a human appearance, revealing itself as a monster. Therefore, following this Aristotelian reasoning, the woman was halfway to such a monstrous nature due to her imperfection compared to the male.12 This imperfection, an open path to monstrosity because of its dissimilarity from the ideal or male norm, was qualified as sterility or castration. It is not unrelated, in this sense, that the idea of monstrosity included, among others, anomalies and mutilation.13 Despite this commented discrepancy of the feminine, according to Aristotle, the female is a natural necessity for the continuity of life in the natural order of divinely created things.14 The monstrous and destructive perception of the feminine is part of ancestral and ancient mythic cosmogonies. It was, however, in the medieval period, mainly toward its end, that this perception increased with the aggregation of demonological motifs. A classic example of this is the case of the sirenae (sirens). The medieval bestiary portrayed them as hybrid monsters, deadly creatures, half woman and half bird, which, putting the sailors to sleep with their melodious songs, attacked and tore them to pieces. The moralization regarding these feminine hybrids qualified them 11

Aristotle. On the Generation of Animals (De Generatione Animalium), trans. Arthur Pratt (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1908), https://onemorelibrary.com/index.php/en/books/science/book/biology-204/on-thegeneration-of-animals-de-generatione-animalium-745, accessed February 12, 2021. The references are to this edition, and they can also be checked in Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), IV, i, 766b. In this and the following references, only the books and sections are referred. 12 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, I, xx, 728a. 13 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, IV, iii, 769b. 14 Octavio Armand, “América como mundus minimus,” Hispania 4 (October 1992): 830; Pedro Fonseca, “Caminha e a carta de ‘achamento’ do Brasil: Ideário e estratégias narrativas confrontados em Colombo,” Luso-Brazilian Review 4 (Summer 1996): 99–120.

The Imaginary of Maleficent Medieval Women

7

as possessing beautiful voices, which deceived the ignorant and unwary, who let themselves be carried away by ostentations, pleasures, and licentiousness, making them lose their mental vigor, thus allowing them to be at the mercy of attacks by the Enemy (i.e., the Devil).15 Therefore, the metaphor of the siren-woman here identifies attributes complementary to the derogation of the feminine in the medieval misogynist perspective when her destructive and seductive power operated through the seditiously deceitful mask of beauty and pleasure. From the thirteenth century onward, in a period coinciding with the flourishing heyday of the medieval bestiaries, the siren became a symbol of evil love. Brunetto Latini (1220–1294) was responsible for this translation, mixing two legendary traditions: that of the Greco-Roman siren-bird and that of the Celtic tradition. Like Saint Isidore of Seville, in the seventh century, Latini called the siren a meretrix (whore), opening the way to various figurative elaborations. Latini says that, according to the story, sirens had wings and nails to represent Love, volatile and fierce. They lived in the waters of pleasure like harlots, painting their love with shame and lust. Moreover, lust, here rescuing the feminine archetype of ancestral origins, was considered to be made of moisture, the principlestate of lubricity.16 If the siren used to seduce by the fatal malice of her singing, no less seductively destructive was considered the feminine glance in general, which, associated with the fertile and licentious imagination of woman, could destroy man or even corrupt his fertilizing seed, generating monstrous creatures. Although the bestiary does not refer directly to the malefic powers of the female eye, it is believed that a fabulous creature, depicted in it, could serve as an example of this malignancy. This was the basilisk, which, being a hybrid of a cock with a snake’s tail, was capable of killing a man simply by staring at him. The female component of this basilisk property was found in the snake that harmonizes with Eva due to her natural vulnerability to seduction and deception. Like mermaids with fish tails, serpent-women entered the medieval imagination, feeding tradition and folk tales for many centuries. An example of this is the Melusine legend. The legend of Melusine first appeared in Romanesque literature with Jean d’Arras (14th century) in Le noble histoire de Lusignan, written around 1392–1393. However, the theme predates that work, going back to Gervase of Tilbury (c. 1150–c. 15 Theodore H. White, ed., The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century (New York: Dover Publications, 1984), 134–135. 16 Brunetto Latini, Jeux et Sapiences du Moyen Âge, ed. Albert Pauphilet (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 780.

8

Introduction

1228) and Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1190–c. 1264). One version of the legend was written by Henri Dontenville (1973). The maleficent view of the snake woman is clearly exposed in Saint Isidore of Seville, the author of one of the most influential encyclopedic sources of medieval knowledge and imaginary. In Etymologiae, while commenting, albeit skeptically, on the fabulous human portents, Saint Isidore refers to the Gorgons as “meretrices” whose hairs were snakes and turned those who looked at them to stone. They were endowed with a single eye, which was common to all of them. Actually, they were three sisters of a single extraordinary beauty, and a single glance, we would say, made in such a way to those who contemplated and admired them, could make one think that they had been ‘turned to stone.’17 Saint Isidore, right after this comment about the Gorgons, dealt with the mermaids and, demystifying tradition, said that these two types of creatures were nothing more than harlots, whose fame had placed them in the domain of the fabulous. Despite the saint’s effort to rationalize, his considerations about the harm that could be represented by the seductive framework of the feminine gaze directed at the man incognizant of her dangers were not exempt from misogynist connotations. If this were not so, how could one interpret that extremely derogatory comment on dangerous and harmful female menstruation, on the menstrual blood, which by simple contact corrupts, according to the beliefs, herbs and fruits, wears out iron, blackens bronze, dissolves bitumen and makes dogs go crazy?18 Here, female nature did not simply compromise man; it reached wider dimensions of the natural world. As previously mentioned, the basilisk, in this misogynist repertoire, had been associated with menstrual blood, with the common belief that this beast could be born from the hair of a woman in menstruation, buried in the soil.19 While the bestiary does not make a demonological treatment of beasts and monsters considered in their feminine nature, aiming more at an edifying and catechetical purpose through its moralizing metaphors and allegories, the same did not happen with a certain type of censoring and inquisitorial literature, fabulous or para-scientific, that appeared by the end of the Middle Ages. An examination of the misogynist derogation— guided by an animalizing view of the feminine in the medieval period— would not be complete if it did not end with the demonological 17 Saint Isidoro de Sevilla, Etimologías, vol. 2, trans. J. Oroz and M. A. Marcos (Madrid: B. A. C., 1982–1983), 53. The references are to this edition, and the translations are mine. 18 Saint Isidoro de Sevilla, Etimologías, vol. 2, 38–39. 19 Walker, The Woman Dictionary of Symbols & Sacred Objects, 235.

The Imaginary of Maleficent Medieval Women

9

monstrosity of women. Persecuted, condemned, and annihilated, they were the subject of, and pretext for the most terrible historical fiction of the masculinist mentality that had never existed before in Western culture, that is, the hunting and extermination of witches, which occurred in gigantic proportions from the fifteenth century onward. Given the vastness of the subject, whose field of investigation goes beyond the limits of this introduction, what is intended for the moment is just an overview of some positions regarding the demonization of women in the process of making her monstrous at the end of the medieval period. In general terms, it can be seen that the corpus to serve as a basis to outline the notion of monstrosity in the Middle Ages is also very vast. In addition to travel narratives, tales, myths, legends, and literary texts, the subject extends to works of cosmography, didactic treatises (such as those by Solino or Saint Isidore of Seville, for example), zoological or pseudonatural history treaties (such as the famous Physiologus from which, in addition to its numerous versions in various languages, were derived the well-known bestiaries), encyclopedic summaries (such as those of Albertus Magnus (1193/1206–l280), Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1190–c. 1264), Thomas of Cantimpré (1201–1272) and Bartholomeus Anglicus (c. 1203– 1272), among others), theological summaries (such as that of Saint Thomas Aquinas), several chronicles, and much more. Moreover, it is within this general corpus that important references and passages that dealt with women in the form of monsters are located. An essential part of this corpus concerning the demonization of women, programmatically political and conferred in the process of their monstrous transformation, the well-known Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of Witches)—one of the first manuals of the Inquisition (written in 1484, by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, by papal order)—should be considered as a work of maximum reference. Among the various processes by which the transformation of women into monsters took place, perhaps the most important of them were the metamorphoses, prodigious phenomena that had the most affinity with monstrosity. Especially toward the end of the Middle Ages, the belief spread that the devil transmitted to the woman, made a witch, the power to metamorphose not only herself but also other living beings within her reach. In this context, the Malleus maleficarum was an excellent demonological treatise, the first of its kind, and extremely characterized by its misogyny. The treatise was famous for proposing very refined and biased theses and hypotheses on the subject, solving questions of witchcraft in a very entangled and complicated way through arguments containing great manipulation and rhetorical effects.

10

Introduction

However, before the appearance of the Malleus maleficarum, some ideological and imaginary positions of the Middle Ages already envisioned women as being related to magic and shamanism. Such postures were naturally inherited by Christianity from the tradition of several ancient civilizations. In this tradition, the feminine principle was outlined with secrets and mysteries proper to pagan cosmologies and cosmogonies concerning matriarchal conceptions about the natural origin and destiny of life. If such views could not be properly classified as belonging to the demonological imaginary, as was manifested toward the end of the Middle Ages, however, they did not lack a malicious and suspicious ingredient aimed at the derogation of the feminine. In this ingredient, in an incipient way, certain demonic considerations about women had already appeared in a superstitious medieval Europe influenced by reports from travelers to the East, which occurred from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. According to the established religious doctrine, though demons were not allowed by God to directly generate descendants among humans, they resorted to a cunning method, very characteristic of their deceitful and perfidious nature. They collected the semen of a man, making themselves a succubus, and passed it on to a woman as an incubus. This is what exposes, in an institutionalized way, the Malleus maleficarum when dealing with the subject, talking about a list of monstrous beings from different origins, coming from the paternity of silvanos and fauns. Such creatures, commonly called incubi, were confirmed and witnessed by trustworthy people as shameless women seducers consummating their demonic union with them.20 Malleus maleficarum, more specifically in Question III of Part One, categorically resolves this question of the procreation of human beings by incubus and succubus demons, saying that the affirmative answer was of Catholic creed and that the negative was contrary not only to the words of the saints but also of Holy Scripture. Therefore, in order to reach this conclusion, it relied on biblical assumptions, pronouncements of holy doctors of the Church like Saint Augustine (354–430), and many other learned authorities like Guillaume d’Auvergne (1190–1249) and Thomas of Cantimpré (1201–1272).21 If the devil could seduce both sexes, transforming into a succubus for the man and incubus for the woman, to obtain his monstrous and infernal offspring, it was the woman to whom greater fallibility was attributed. The natural power of the female imagination was considered uncontrollably 20 Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Male¿carum: Le Marteau des Sorcières, trans. Armand Danet (Paris: Plon, 1973), 166–167, 169. 21 Gilbert Lascault, Le Monstre dans l’Art Occidental (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973), part 5, chap. 1, 168.

The Imaginary of Maleficent Medieval Women

11

dispersed and fantasy-like, if not hysterical. It was capable of generating anomalies and monsters, even without the knowledge of conscience, by a kind of connection between different and intermingled elements. To defend this judgment attributed to the power of feminine imagination, commentators resorted to biblical authority, finding support in Genesis in the passage on Jacob and the reproduction of his uncle Laban’s flock. Jacopo da Varazze, in the thirteenth century, resumes, in one of his sermons on the stigmas of Saint Francis of Assisi, this biblical episode that discussed, with supreme force of authority, the question of the interrelationship between vision, imagination, and body, glossed by medieval thought, mainly in reference to women.22 The Sacred Scripture does not comment, in this passage, on any interference of evil power in the act of conceiving the young. However, the same does not happen with an analogous comment made by Saint Augustine in De civitate Dei (The City of God) regarding the offspring reproduction of the famous ox, Apis, mentioned by Varro. The effect of vision and imagination on the body constituted a hypothesis for Saint Augustine to discuss the demons’ uses to deceive men through ghosts (phantasia), giving rise to nocturnal excrescences. With Saint Augustine, it is evident that the power of female imagination had become susceptible to being used by the devil for his wily creations, contrary to the normal procedures instituted by God in nature, generating the most hideous creatures and teratological phenomena. The power of female imagination and its interference in the conditions of the formation and birth of the fetus, recognized since antiquity, was a subject taken up by Ambroise Paré (1510–1590), an inveterate and fertile creator of monsters from the sixteenth century. Paré dedicated Chapter IX of De monstres et prodiges (On monsters and prodigies) to the prodigious women’s imagination when they became pregnant. Toward the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times, more concrete and experimental experiences began to dare to investigate the human body. However, it is apparently surprising that it was from the fifteenth century that a new wave of demonization of the female body took place. A relative explanation for this differentiated recrudescence could consider the political fear of secularization that happened in the late Middle Ages. Through an analogy explained earlier, the teratological also takes place without disregarding the ancient overdetermination between the demonic, the monstrous, and the woman. 22

Jacopo da Varazze, “Sermo III de stigmatibus S. Francisci,” in J. Lemmens, Testimonia minora saeculi XIII de s. Francisco Assisiensi collecta (Ad Claras Aquas: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1926), 113 and passim.

12

Introduction

The old idea, current in the long medieval centuries, that the monster had a cosmological and natural reality, inhabiting remote and distant parts of the globe, gave way to a growing conception of its existence as an individual phenomenon, more historically and geographically located. The prodigious creations in the late Middle Ages were a result of the interferences of monsters to signify circumstances and current realities, speaking in the name of God or allowing themselves to be ruled by his rival, the devil. In this amalgam of the monstrous with the diabolical, the ab origine woman, ‘deformed’ since her creation in the Garden of Eden by the sin of pride combined with vanity, becomes a consort (like a witch) or a victim of the Enemy of Hell. This feminine sin is found, in a mixture of misogyny and moralization, in an enormous and rich quantity of illustrations from the late Middle Ages. One of these illustrations, quite exemplary for its wealth of detail, is that which is presented by Sebastian Brant (1458–1521) in Das Narrenschyff ad Narragoniam (Ship of Fools). The picture shows a woman who is full of herself, well dressed, looking in a mirror. She is sitting on a split stick like a fork, held by a demon in the shape of a hideous bird with claws of prey. Underneath the woman, the engraving shows a grid, under which the flames of hell are drawn.23 From the medieval perception, the representation could not be more evident. The vain and proud woman who moved away from the path of virtue represented easy prey for lust and hypocrisy, like harlots, always stalked by a monstrous hellish beast. Therefore, the path from vanity to the excitement of lust in the teratological field is largely directed toward the demonic in medieval religious culture. If it is true that male and androgynous demons also represent medieval lust, it is, however, the female demon that seems to have had more representativeness in the symbolization of the demoniac besides the animalistic and monstrous, particularly the snake. In this way, women become potentially diabolical. They had the genealogical conditions to descend into witchcraft, practicing, in themselves and others, monstrous operations assisted by the Enemy of Hell. In this semantic amalgam, the woman could not be easily distinguished from the monstrous and the latter from the demonic, and the correspondence could be read in any direction of the equation. The medieval view that there is a natural female propensity for the libidinous corresponded to the representation of the woman’s sexuality linked to monstrosity. However, it is necessary to emphasize that female sexuality did not always suppose, in ancient thought, the monstrosity 23 Franz Schulz, Faksimile der Erstausgabe von 1494. BNUS alsatiques M 135 087 (Estrasburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1913).

The Imaginary of Maleficent Medieval Women

13

considered in its malevolent side. Some of the many examples present in the most diverse mythologies show that several female deities, including mother goddesses associated with fertility, were represented with monstrous features. Examples of those not precisely monstrous in their body but closely related to the teratological are Eleusis and the Great Mother, whose rite, celebrating its mysteries, indicated the mystical union with the serpent, a symbol that, in Paleo-oriental and Mediterranean cultures, replaced the phallus.24 In Christianity, these figures ceased to mean the creative force of nature, which was expressed through the combination of the feminine and masculine principles, to indicate the monstrous sexuality only related to the malevolent side of the female lust and libido associated with the demonic. This is the case of the seven-headed dragon of the Book of Revelation (2:1–17), the ancient serpent, devil, or Satan (12:9), identified as one of the forms of the beast, and the Whore (17:15), representing the impure Babylon, the great fornicator (18:3). This association of the serpent with the destructive woman is ancient. It dates back to myths of different civilizations, in which heroes were often swallowed up by snake monsters, reminiscent of the image, quite cultivated by the Middle Ages, of the vagina dentata mentioned above. This was an urgent matter for the medieval mentality, but it was, however, in the Renaissance, for reasons previously explained, that the Giza sphinx came to be considered an appreciated symbol of lust. Andrea Alciato (1492–1550) had already interpreted the sphinx as a pleasured figure, and his commentator Minos explained that, like her, pleasure is sweet and happy at first, but bitter and sad after being experienced. This short circuit between the monstrous and the sexual conferred on the feminine became a religious and moral obsession corresponding to eschatologies that addressed the end of times overwhelmed by the demonic apocalyptic. It was previously commented in this introduction that there was a difficulty with distinguishing the woman and, progressively, the witch from the monster, and the monster then from demons. This evolution, which reached its peak at the end of the fifteenth century, is clearly expressed in the theses developed by the aforementioned Malleus maleficarum. Among other more subtly constructed reasons, a strong misogynist ingredient responsible for the woman’s endorsement as a witch was her projection as an image of a consummate impurity. Moreover, this had to do with the monster, an image of corruption and deviation from the 24

Gilbert Durand, Les Structures Anthropologiques de l’Imaginaire (Paris: Bordas, 1969), 367.

14

Introduction

purity of form, especially when such deviations were carried out by demonic intervention. The strategy of women’s pollution, consummated in the image of the witch, had as an obvious result their condemnation to a condition of accused, whose judgment would dictate the need not only for the purge of the evil that they contained but also for their very extermination. Thus, the sorceress became the projection built to represent, in a complete and propitious way, the night face, the “black continent” that Gilbert Lascault identified as female sexuality, capable, through its erotic conquests, of being an open door for the formation of the monstrous.25 The sorceress copulated with demons, and from this union with the world below, chthonic monsters were born. This was the demonic facet of female impurity seen in the night orgies of the Shabbat, in which parodic perversions of sexual acts reversed their normal and natural conditions necessary for the preservation of the purity of species, thus generating abnormal and monstrous beings. Actually, this medieval imaginary composition of the impurity of the female body and blood existed before and after its derivation for the demonic. With regard to the relationship of impurity with the monstrous, Ambroise Paré, drawing on the authority of Ezra and commenting that menstrual blood could contaminate women, recommended men not to have carnal union with a menstruating woman. Moreover, it was understood, following the pronouncement of Saint Isidore of Seville, that menstrual blood—vicious, dirty and venomous, capable even of generating monsters—discharged something filthy and corrupt that existed in the woman’s body and blood before her purgation.26 If the condition of the woman’s natural impurity could, through her menstrual blood, generate monsters, women, as a source of malignity, could also become monsters. The classic example of this is the Chimera. Fulgentius (5th–6th centuries), whose mythology studies were ultimately the source of most medieval interpretations of the Chimera, already said that the love aroused by women possessed a spectacular strength worthy of this monster. It allegorized this brutal force of love based on the three heads of the monster, which represented the phases of the beginning, development, and end of love. The Chimera’s leonine nature represented the violence with which love could invade the soul; the goat’s nature, the insatiable appetite for lust, and the dragon’s nature, the poison of sin that

25

Lascault, Le Monstre dans l’Art Occidental, part 5, chap. 1. Ambroise Paré, Des Monstres et Prodiges, ed. Jean Céard (Geneva: Droz, 1971), 6–7, 152. 26

The Imaginary of Maleficent Medieval Women

15

the allegorical monster-love transmitted to its victims.27 Echoing this monstrous fatal power of the woman, Ecclesiastes, in dealing with her lust, identified her as the most deadly of the existing monsters. However, the definite pronouncement of the equivalence of woman to monster, who used to kill those they enchanted, came from Malleus Maleficarum due to its strength as a legalized inquisitorial instrument. The manual says that woman is a kind of Chimera. The treatise was so hopelessly misogynist and derogatory for its time that it competed with Ecclesiastes and the Church in its lament of women being more bitter than death, that is, than the devil himself, whose name, according to Revelation 8:8, means death (plague). The book ends by saying that men have been divinely preserved from the evil inclination to women, from this scourge, since God wanted to be born and suffer as a man.28 This innate curse of the woman that transformed her into a witch at the maximum stage of impurity began with the responsibility attributed to her for the introduction of Original Sin into the world. Moreover, the inseparable companion of this Original Sin was another vice no less capital than this inaugural sin, the vice of lust, which, in a state of exacerbation, could derivate to demonic monstrosity in the praxis of abnormal sexual practices. Malleus maleficarum refers to this by quoting the book of Proverbs. This says that, in the world, there were only three things that never got enough and four that never said enough. The three things were Sheol (the dark underground world, believed by the Hebrews to be the abode of the dead), the barren womb of the earth that no water satiated, and the fire that was never satisfied. To these three things, Malleus maleficarum added a fourth: the female vaginal lips that played with demons.29 Hence, the women most predisposed to witchcraft were those most infected by carnal appetites, adulterers, and fornicators.30 As a result, witches would have a greater dominion over genitalia, to the point of making men unable to copulate and women to conceive.31 This evil power of witches over sexuality was exercised not only over the sexual act itself, but also over the creative act in general, since, by failing sexually, the offspring was compromised. On this subject, Malleus maleficarum, quoting Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), comments that God allowed greater curses on sexual acts because it was through sex that

27

Lascault, Le Monstre dans l’Art Occidental, part 5, chap. 1, 295. Kramer and Sprenger, Malleus Male¿carum, 207–208. 29 Kramer and Sprenger, Malleus Male¿carum, 208. 30 Kramer and Sprenger, Malleus Male¿carum, 223–229. 31 Kramer and Sprenger, Malleus Male¿carum, 356. 28

16

Introduction

sin entered the world, making man a slave of Evil.32 The book, dogmatizing this malevolent power, discusses the seven methods used by witches to infect and magically corrupt the venereal act and the conceived fetus. The last method, that of witches offering children to demons, reveals the book’s demonological character. The witches’ evil powers over men extended to all of nature, causing various damages to animals and fruits of the earth.33 Sorceresses had dominion over human offspring and nature, compromising the continuity of life or enabling the emergence of monstrous lives through their demonic harms. They consecrated the newborns to demons or killed them, before baptism, to make ointments, with which they anointed their brooms or the like to transport themselves to Shabbat or from one place to another. This demonic imagery was not, however, a gratuitous mental conception. It had a corollary linked to antiJudaism in the refusal of the mystery of the Eucharist, in which transubstantiation also configured the presence of the baby Jesus in the consecrated host. This was demonstrated in countless narratives that touched on the subject, presenting the infant God appearing terrified, in tears, by the tortured host.34 This collusion of the Jew with the witch woman and the devil was a presence much seen in medieval religious idiosyncrasies.35 However, all this evil-demonological worldview of women conferred in the Middle Ages did not happen unprepared. It was, above all, the result of a long process of discursive and factual defamation that, revealing roots in classical antiquity and the ancient Jewish tradition, characterized the models of medieval misogyny, from its Patristic contribution to the dissemination of its legacy throughout the medieval period. As explained in the preface of this book, and considering the importance of this Patristic literature and its legacy in the context in which some voices emerged in defense of women, the following chapters present a kind of literary survey of that misogynist medieval tradition, considering some of the most significant points of its orientation. Following this concise literary history of medieval misogyny, the successive chapters are devoted to the presentation and reading of some of the most representative male and anonymous authors in defense of women in the misogynist Middle Ages. 32

Kramer and Sprenger, Malleus Male¿carum, 209–210. Kramer and Sprenger, Malleus Male¿carum, 209. 34 Norman Cohn, Les Fanatiques de l’Apocalypse (Paris: Julliard, 1962), 79. 35 Freddy Raphaël, “La Représentation des Juifs dans l’Art Médiéval en Alsace,” Revue des Sciences Sociales de la France de l’Esaint Strasbourg (1972): 38. 33

The Imaginary of Maleficent Medieval Women

17

References Aristotle. On the Generation of Animals (De Generatione Animalium). Translated by Arthur Pratt. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1908. https://onemorelibrary.com/index.php/en/books/science/book/biology204/on-the-generation-of-animals-de-generatione-animalium-745. Accessed February 12, 2021. Aristotle. Generation of Animals. Translated by A. L. Peck. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943. https://archive.org/details/generationofanim00arisuoft/page/100/mode/ 2up. Accessed February 12, 2021. Armand, Octavio. “América como mundus minimus.” Hispania 4 (1992): 828–835. Augustine, St. De civitate Dei, Documenta Catholica Omnia, XVIII, V. 1993–1996. http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/0354-430. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Shiila M. A. Lovan. New York: Vintage Books, Random House Inc., 2009. Bloch, R. Howard. Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Cohn, Norman. Les fanatiques de l’Apocalypse. Paris: Julliard, 1962. Durand, Gilbert. Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire. Paris: Bordas, 1969. Eliade, Mircea. Initiations, Rites, Sociétés Secrètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. Fonseca, Pedro. “Caminha e a carta de ‘achamento’ do Brasil: Ideário e estratégias narrativas confrontados em Colombo.” Luso-Brazilian Review 33, no. 4 (1996): 99–120. The Holy Bible. Translated from the Vulgata Latina. Belfast, 1892. Isidoro de Sevilla, St. Etimologías, vol. 2. Bilingual edition translated by J. Oroz y M. A. Marcos. Madrid: B. A. C., 1982–1983. Kaplan, Cora. Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism. London: Verso, 1986. Kramer, Heinrich and James Sprenger. Malleus male¿carum: Le Marteau des Sorcières. Translated by Armand Danet. Paris: Plon, 1973. Labé, Louise. Amor e loucura. Translated by Felipe Fortuna. São Paulo: Siciliano, 1995. Lascault, Gilbert. Le Monstre dans l’Art Occidental. Paris: Klincksieck, 1973. Latini, Brunetto. Jeux et Sapiences du Moyen Âge. Edited by Albert Pauphilet. Paris: Gallimard, 1951.

18

Introduction

Mackinnon, Catherine. Feminism Unmodi¿ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Mandeville, Jean de. Mandeville’s Travels. Edited by Malcoln Leets. London: Hakluyt Society, 1953. Odoric of Pordenone. Les voyages en Asie au XIVe siècle du Bienheureux Frère Odoric de Pordenone. With an introduction by Henry Cordier. Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1891. Paré, Ambroise. Des monstres et prodiges. Edited by Jean Céard. Geneva: Droz, 1971. Polo, Marco. “Livre des Merveilles.” In Recueil de Voyages et de Mémoires Publié par la Société de Géographie, vol. I. Paris: Société de Géographie, 1824. Raphaël, Freddy. “La Représentation des Juifs dans l’Art Médiéval en Alsace.” Revue des Sciences Sociales de la France de l’Esaint Strasbourg (1972): 26–42. Rogers, Katharine M. The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Randon House, Inc., 1979. Sale, Antoine de la. “La salade,” version B. In Ouevres completes, vol. 1. Edited by Fernand Desonay. Paris: Librairie Droz, 1935–1945. Schulz, Franz. Faksimile der Erstausgabe von 1494. BNUS alsatiques M 135 087. Estrasburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1913. Varazze, Jacopo da. “Sermo III de stigmatibus s. Francisci.” In J. Lemmens. Testimonia minora saeculi XIII de s. Francisco Assisiensi collecta. Ad Claras Aquas: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1926. Walker, Barbara G. The Woman Dictionary of Symbols & Sacred Objects. San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988. White, Theodore H. The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century. Made and edited by T. H. White. New York: Dover Publications, 1984.

CHAPTER ONE MISOGYNY IN ANCIENT SCIENCE AND MEDIEVAL LEGACY

Aristotle De generatione animalium In the formation of what is known as misogynist thought in the literary culture of Western Europe, both in its origins in classical Greco-Roman antiquity and in the elaboration of its standpoints in the Middle Ages, Aristotle’s (384–322 BC) postulates about the generation or procreation of animals were of fundamental importance. It seems that, in the context of the different periods of medieval Judeo-Christian religious culture, the influence of the Greek philosopher, if not rivaling, was parallel to Sacred Scripture. Such Aristotelian postulates as were consistently formulated in De generatione animalium (On the Generation of Animals) exposed the anatomical and physiological principles of the generation of males and females of animal species, including humans. If the presence of Aristotelian roots during the Middle Ages influenced many of its thinkers’ positions, it was mainly from the twelfth century on that Aristotle’s writings become disciplinarily studied at the University of Paris. His presence resulted in what was known as Thomism or neo-Aristotelianism, which was represented by the findings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274). The sources of medieval misogyny, disregarding the impression of their location more and more regressively in the history of Western ideas and culture, exist in two directions, one leading to ancient Hebrew law and the other to the dawn of Greek culture. Here, Hesiod (c. 750 BC) had already blamed the woman for the introduction of evil into the world.1 The legacy of Aristotle’s pronouncements on the female gender was not always unquestionable, despite the weight of the auctoritas that the philosopher had acquired by the Middle Ages. In more than one moment, 1 Sr Prudence Allen, RSM, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC–AD 1250 (Montreal: Eden Press, 1985), 14–15.

20

Chapter One

doctors and commentators argued about the most derogatory deductions that Aristotle’s physiology had established for the female body, especially those that referred to it as a kind of deformed male body that had had its procreative purpose distorted by nature. The Aristotelian reduction of women’s role in procreation was that it was responsible for the contribution of raw material, an inactive and formless seed, waiting for the forming and animating principle found in man’s semen. To examine, albeit succinctly for the moment, the importance that Aristotle’s physiologist precepts had in the linguistic, rhetorical, and imaginary construction of the female figure, the following selection of points in his discussion of semen, menstruation, and the contribution of women to procreation may be of great help. Aristotle comments on male semen as a type of nutritional substance in the form of blood, of high potency, obtained thanks to a special, more intense caloric preparation in the male’s body. In a contrastive manner, he talks about the female residue, less prepared in terms of nutrition, expelled from the female body in higher fluidic amounts, like blood, of weaker potential value because of the lower amount of heat produced in inferior creatures such as females. The physiologist concludes that what is less caloric in nature is weaker in reality and that females match this description.2 Following his comments on the procreative secretions produced by the male and the female, Aristotle arrives at his famous binomial postulates of form/soul and matter/body. These realities, respectively, characterize the contribution in the generation of descendants of the formative and animating properties of male semen, highly nutrient because of its calorific nature. The contribution of female nutrient residue is thus passive and nonformative due to the coldness of her nature. He comments that the female’s contribution to reproduction is the material that is in the menstrual fluid. In this respect, he concludes that a woman is like an “infertile man” and that she is like that because “it lacks the power to concoct semen out of the final state of nourishment … because of the coldness of its nature…. The male provides the ‘form’ and the ‘principle of the movement,’ the female provides the body; in other words, the material.”3 Continuing these reflections, Aristotle comments that the female’s contribution to reproduction, her weak seminal residue, is responsible for the production of deformed males, that is, female descendants, as they lack the principle of the soul, only found in its entirety in the male sex. 2

Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 726b, 727a, 727b, 728a, 729a, 737a, 738b, 775a. 3 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 728a, 729a.

Misogyny in Ancient Science and Medieval Legacy

21

Therefore, the non-production of males appears to be due, in principle, to the kind of performance of the female parent. According to him, the female residue contains only potentially, and not actually, the parts that distinguish the two sexes. The reason for the generation of a female individual is, according to Aristotle, that the female is like a deformed male and “the menstrual discharge is semen, thought in an impure condition; i.e., it lacks one constituent, and one only, the principle of Soul.”4 In the following passage, Aristotle explains that the Soul of each living body is an endowment of the male parent. In contrast, the body, the physical part of the creature, comes from the female parent since only the male semen can carry the Soul. The Soul is the essence printed in each body to give its material substance a shape. He concludes, “necessity requires that the female should provide the material part … a quantity of material, but not that the agent which uses them should do so since necessity does not require that the tools should reside in the product made, nor that the agent which uses them should do so.”5 The philosopher, continuing his reflection on the condition of the female’s natural deformity, says that, due to the coldness of her nature, she develops in a weaker and more quickly perishable way, since inferior things fulfill their order more quickly. However, when inside the mother, the female develops more slowly due to her coldness “since development is a sort of concoction, the concoction is effected by heat, and if a thing is hotter, its concoction is easy.”6 In this brief selection of Aristotle’s pronouncements about the female vis-à-vis the highly positive considerations of the male, there is a greater derogation of the female image. It concerns her inability to process the nutrient converted in a more refined way, especially into the blood that does not fully reach its final state of seminal nutrition because of the insufficient heat that characterizes her nature. For this reason, menstrual fluid is seen as a kind of semen in an impure condition lacking a single constituent—the Soul’s principle. Thus, since the Aristotelian tradition, such functioning of the female body has seen menstruation viewed very negatively in medicine and medieval religion. Albeit not Aristotelian, the unclean condition of menstruation indicated the female’s dirtiness, which was reflected not only in physiology but also in moral and religious concerns about the subject. Among other superstitions, the medieval imagination built the idea that if a man had sex with a 4

Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 737a. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 738b. 6 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 755a. 5

22

Chapter One

woman in menstruation, he would be at risk of contracting leprosy.7 This physiological aspect of woman repressed her complete human development, making her unable to match man. Unlike man, woman’s body system showed her most anomalous inefficiency, that is, to clean herself periodically of a dirty residue. However, the pseudo-scientific beliefs derived from the pronouncements of the Aristotelian tradition on the physiology of menstruation range from the most naive to the most gross, grotesque, and evil ones. In a thirteenthcentury book, De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women), very popular and spuriously attributed to Saint Albert the Great (1193/1206– 1280), the author addresses the most bizarre comments about women in the menstrual state. In general, people considered this sexual anomaly very poisonous, especially in a woman menstruating irregularly or at an old age. In them, their deteriorated menstrual system could transmit harmful fluids looking for a way out through the eyes, thereby having the ability to poison young children.8 Characteristic attributes of menstruation like these, along with many others overdetermining the feminine nature, created a real universe of traditional femmephobic beliefs indicating an ingrained idea of biological adversity in women’s power over the life of men in their attraction and sexual exercise. Andreas Capellanus (12th century) exemplifies this in the commentary he makes about having once read that sexual activity makes men grow older than the natural in a treatise on medicine. Commenting in De amore (On love, c. 1185) about the damage caused to man in sexual intercourse with a woman, he says that a man induced to sexual acts loses his sound senses. He is not able to use them to control his sexual instincts or even circumvent their lethal activities.9 This opinion, very common in Patristic literature in the Middle Ages, is well represented by Saint Jerome (c. 342–420) in the misogynist book Adversus Jovinianum (Against Jovinian, c. 393). The saint says that a man’s love for a beautiful woman buries reason and keeps him on the verge of madness.10

7 Danielli Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. M. Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 186. 8 Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, 75–76. 9 Andreas Capellanus, Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (London: Duckworth, 1982), III.61. 10 Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” in The Principal Works of St Jerome (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 6), ed. P. Schaff, trans. W. H. Fremantle (Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892), 779–907.

Misogyny in Ancient Science and Medieval Legacy

23

Galen De usu partium corporis humani In Aristotle’s footsteps, Galen (Claudius Galenus, 131–201) considered male semen as a highly refined bloody residue of potent vitality in determining gender in the reproduction of animal and human species. This unique property, whose effects on procreation are also found in Aristotle’s formulations, was transmitted by Galen in the Middle Ages of Arabic influence. These formulations even contributed to assumptions of ‘reasonable’ explanations. It was a popularized opinion among medieval doctors and physiologists that sexual activity, practiced very frequently, could drain the vitality of man’s blood, perhaps weakening his brain or even the eyes.11 As discussed before, such misogynist testimonies originated from the Aristotelian postulation that the female was a kind of incomplete, deformed male. Her generation had not been satisfactory because her body—being, by nature, colder—fails to refine the seminal fluids in the same way as the male body. Facilitated by the natural heat of his body, the male produces semen, which differs from the female fluid, whose accumulation in the form of menstruations requires periodic purges. Linked to the Aristotelian ideas about the physiology of the male and female sexual systems, Galen developed exciting points of view about the anatomy of the ‘deformity’ of the female genitalia. Galen was a court physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius and wrote extensively on medicine and anatomy. During the Middle Ages, what he wrote, originally in Greek, was transmitted by Arabic writings. Galen confirmed the hierarchical theory of the sexes coined by Aristotle. When commenting on the temperature difference between the female and the male body, he believed that the female’s low heat was caused by her generative organs having remained internalized in a position inverse to those of the male body. To assess the importance of Galen’s physiologist and anatomist precepts based on Aristotle’s exposition in De generatione animalium, the following selection extracted from De usu partium corporis humani (On the Parts of the Body, late 2nd century) presents essential points of his

11

Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 726b; A. Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. F. Pheasant (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 12–20; Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, 55–56.

24

Chapter One

contribution to the development of the Aristotelian tradition on the question of male and female generation.12 Differentiating himself from Aristotle, Galen is more sympathetic in recognizing the greater participation of the female in reproduction, for example, the presence of her seed in the coitus as a contribution to conception. He discusses body heat perfecting male animals and humans. Females, according to Galen, are not perfect like males in their genital tract because of their insufficient body heat that does not allow the fullness of an external manifestation. In compensation, Galen points out that this mutilation is advantageous, as it validates the need for the female’s presence in the process of reproduction.13 In what follows, Galen gives the female’s sense of mutilation a certain natural dignity and tries to rationalize the facts. If the female is imperfect due to a lack of perfect heat not found in her body, that same caloric insufficiency, not favoring the dispersion of the nutrient, keeps it in the form of an abundant material for the uterine life of the fetus. Thus, naturalizing the female’s more frigid constitution, Galen comments that her insufficient body heat kept the scrotal genitalia retracted inside, forming the uterus to shelter the fetus, promoting the generation and continuity of the species. In this way, the female’s existence stems from a simple natural adjunctive need.14 Following his reflections on women’s imperfection as a necessity planned by the Creator’s wisdom for the generation of creatures, Galen arrives at a peaceful agreement regarding the relevance that both males and females have in their descendants. Accordingly, concerning the anatomical constitution of the sexual parts of the male and female, he analogizes these parts to the point of saying that the woman has testicles (ovaries), like men, and that both produce semen, more perfect in these and imperfect in those. However, even this imperfection of the female’s sexual parts has a compensatory function arising from the needs of nature in the generation of animals. He even addresses the anatomy of the female reproductive system by building an inversion analogous to that of the male. In this sense, he says that the female “has imperfect semen and a 12

Claudii Galeni, “De anatomicis administrationibus,” in Claudii Galeni, Opera Ominia, ed. D. Carolus Gottlob Kühn, Liber 2, 280–339, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.17443628&view=1up&seq=8. The references to De usu partium corporis humani II.299, II.300 and II.301 are from this source and they can be checked in Galen: On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, trans. Margaret Tallmadge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). 13 Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, 1986, II.299. 14 Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, 1986, II.300.

Misogyny in Ancient Science and Medieval Legacy

25

hallow instrument to receive the perfect semen; that since everything in the male is opposite [to what is in the female], the male member has been elongated to be most suitable for coitus and the excretion of semen; and that this semen itself has been made thick, abundant, and warm.”15 The comments made so far about Aristotelian postulates referring to aspects and the importance of the physiology of the reproduction system, both in animals and humans, have presented the image of the female sex in general, and the woman in particular, in a position of discriminated inferiority when compared to the male. Such comments served as the basis for the formation of a traditional misogyny, whose most profound and outrageous remarks appeared during the Middle Ages, especially in religious thought. Following these ideas about the derogation of the female body and sex, R. Howard Bloch asserts that “in the misogynistic thinking of the Middle Ages, there can, in fact, be no distinction between the theological and the gynecological.”16 This peculiar gynecology of the medieval feminine ended up materializing the woman as a reality oriented mainly by the corporeal. Moreover, it finally succeeded in promoting a type of medieval theological reductionism of the woman to the domain of the matter and senses. Exemplarily, Saint Ambrose (340–397) conceives this condition in his well-known allegorical representation of the Fall, where the serpent is a type of pleasure of the body, the woman represents our senses, and the man, our mind.17 With this in mind, the discriminatory influence of the misogynist thought in Etymologies, by Saint Isidore of Seville, a work supposedly impartial and innocent in terms of prejudiced affiliation, appears in the seventh century in the most complete encyclopedic study ever written in the Middle Ages.

Saint Isidore of Seville Etymologiae Saint Isidore of Seville (Isidorus Hispalensis, c. 570–636) grew up in Spain during the Visigoths’ rule. Of monastic education, he was ordained, later reaching the position of Bishop of Seville. His Etymologiae (Etymologies) became famous for this nomenclature because of the massive 15

Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, 1986, II.301. R. Howard Bloch, “Medieval misogyny,” Representation 20 (1987): 1–24. 17 Saint Ambrose, Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel (FOC XLII), trans. J. J. Savage (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1961), XV.73, 351. 16

26

Chapter One

emphasis given to derivations of keywords that appear under each subject heading for treatment. The encyclopedia of Saint Isidore—because of the enormous philosophical and theological valuation given to the word (verbum) as a carrier, in its root or etymology, of the meaning of the substance and the reality of the thing (res)—gained enormous influence and popularity throughout medieval Europe, being cited for many centuries afterward. The medieval question of the knowledge and identification of the essential reality of the things created by God from the word designated to name them has its origin in the Bible itself, in the episode in which the Creator delegates to Adam the function of naming the animals. This epistemological procedure of signifying things from their very names, explored in Saint Isidore’s etymological method, is present in the medieval bestiary, one of the most important literary productions of the Middle Ages. As a verification of Aristotle’s misogyny in De generatione animalium, whose influence moved from physiology to the domain of language in the Etymologiae of Isidore, an example of this interdisciplinary procedure can be found in the so-called Cambridge Bestiary, which is currently in the library of the University of Cambridge (England), listed as MS. II.4.26. This biased misogynist bestiary compares, using the etymological method, the nature and qualities of man with those of woman, transcribing and expanding with moralizing preaching the following passage of Saint Isidore’s Etymologiae that deals with the same subject. In this segment, the word man (vir) has, in its etymology, the meaning of value (virtus) and strength (vi) associated with courage, while the word woman is associated with the idea of weaker (mollior). Woman (mulier) has correspondence with female (femina), which comes from femur, the upper part of the thigh, where the appearance of sex is different from that of man.18 The above pronouncements, evidently extracted from the Etymologies, echoing the ideas of Aristotle and other thinkers of the Middle Ages, clearly indicate a figurative and ideological expansion of physiologist postulates to the moral terrain, revealing edifying characteristics in patriarchal terms supported by religious doctrines about gender representation. Ideologically committed to the moral edification and salvation of man and symbolically aided by the exemplary praise of the virtues of animals and the condemnation of their vices, the bestiary addresses this issue of gender by pointing out the excellences in man to the detriment of woman’s qualities. Gratian (12th century), for example, among others who tuned the 18

Theodore H. White, ed., The Book of Beasts. Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century (New York: Dover Publications, 1984), 222–223.

Misogyny in Ancient Science and Medieval Legacy

27

pronouncements of Saint Isidore of Seville and the bestiarist about the superiority of man, maintains that man (vir) does not derive only from strength (vi), but from a special force, that of the mind (virtus animi). As for the woman (mulier), he comments that the word came from the softening of the mind (mollities mentis).19 Saint Isidore of Seville considered the hypothesis that femina (woman) came etymologically from the Greek to mean burning strength (i.e., from the Greek word fos) because of the higher intensity of sexual desire found in the female sex. This situation led the defenders of women to prefer to link the etymological meaning of the word mulier to mollities (i.e., weaker, softened). From the notion that femina received this name because the female is more libidinous among animals and humans, there derived the use of effeminate (femineus) for those who manifested an excess of love. This notion was so widespread in the Middle Ages that Andreas Capellanus advised his protégés to repress physical pleasure (voluptatem) and instead act like real men (viriliter).20 The following comments from Etymologiae identify the influence of the traditional view of the inferiority of female nature. Elaborated by Aristotle’s physiology, this notion found support and transmission, in an ideologically sympathetic way, from priests and religious thinkers, mostly misogynists of the Church and people of several institutions of medieval secular society. In this sense, Saint Isidore, being one of them, translates into the domain of language knowledge the findings that Aristotle made in the domains of physiology and science. He comments on the name man coming from vir because it is associated with vis (strength) and the name woman (mulier) being associated with mollites (softness), as in mollier, that, by deleting or changing letters, would result in the name mulier. He also says that strength is higher in man so that woman can support him in his carnal desires. Moreover, he makes the same misogynist references to the etymological meaning of the word femina (female) associated with the sin of lust.21

19

Aemilius Friedberg, Corpus Iuris Canonici, part 1: Decretum Magistri Gratiani (Graz, 1955), i, col. 1145. 20 Capellanus, Andreas Capellanus on Love, III.50. 21 Sancti Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi, https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/02m/0560-0636,_Isidorus_Hispaliensis,_ Etymologiarum_Libri_Viginti,_MLT.pdf. The references are to this edition, and they can be checked in Saint Isidore of Seville, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi, Etymologiarum sive Originum livri xx, vol. 2, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), XI.II.17–19, XI.II.23–24.

28

Chapter One

However, both in Aristotle’s physiology and in the etymology of Saint Isidore of Seville, the common tonic is that of the derogation of the feminine. This denigrating feature reaches its highest degree when, in Etymologiae, the menstrual fluid, from a simple state of a dirty and unprofitable seminal discharge of an organism not naturally perfect enough for Aristotle, becomes a diabolical substance destructive of things, man, and nature.22 Pliny had approached this issue before. However, it was through Saint Isidore that this real litany of the misfortune of menstrual blood entered the imagination of medieval superstitions, acquiring increased virulence at the end of the Middle Ages when women became objects of an obsessive demonization process. In addition to Saint Isidore, among others in antiquity, Aristotle’s physiology—concerning the participation of male and female in the generation of animals and, by analogy, of man and woman in the generation of their offspring—left an influential legacy in the thinking of the most important religious people of the Middle Ages. This was especially the case when it concerned the issue of gender definition linked to Aristotelian ideas of matter and form, respectively used to indicate the properties of the feminine and the masculine. Despite the varied range of medieval writings based literally or metaphorically on the Aristotelian postulates reasoned on these ideas of generic qualification, the writings of Saint Anselm and Saint Thomas Aquinas exemplify a sufficient approach to the subject in the medieval period.

Saint Anselm Monologium Saint Anselm (Anselmus Cantuarensis, 1033–1109), a Benedictine monk who became Archbishop of Canterbury, is a curious figure, mainly because his writings bring a not very orthodox imagery regarding the question of gender transferred to the realm of the sacred. He composed a lyrical prayer to Saint Paul where the symbolic metaphors of the generation and nourishment of a new life, much appreciated in Christianity, imagined the figure of Jesus Christ as a true mother.23 In terms of philosophical analysis, Saint Anselm, challenging canonical prejudices, discusses the gender of the sacred in his main work, Monologium (The Monologion). 22

Saint Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive Originum livri xx, XI.i.140–141. Sr Allen Prudence, RSM, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC–AD 1250, 265–266. 23

Misogyny in Ancient Science and Medieval Legacy

29

Saint Anselm, approaching this sui generis idea with a curious reasoning, plays with the gender of the central concept of words used to define the attributes of the Supreme Spirit (God) and his Son, Jesus. And he concludes that both can be, regardless, called father and son or mother and daughter, since both equally have, in their most supreme content, spirit (i.e., spiritus, in Latin, a word of masculine gender) and truth and wisdom (i.e., veritas and sapientia, words of feminine gender in Latin). However, after this instigation, which recalls the etymological method of Saint Isidore of Seville, Saint Anselm steps back in his conclusion. In this, he remembers the Aristotelian concept of the father’s role as the main cause of generation (a principle that is very much in accordance with the biblical postulate of Adam’s precedence over Eve in the Creation) and states, definitively, that the Supreme Spirit could only be male, as his Son is united in Spirit to the Father. Saint Anselm, in Chapter 42 of Monologium, elaborates a figurative and ideological derivation of Aristotle’s physiologist ideas and Saint Isidore’s etymological notions about the reasons why the father would take precedence, as the first cause of generation, since he is the principle of Soul, responsible for the form and movement. The mother comes in second place, entering with the material for the corporeal composition of her descendants. On this question of the father as the primary cause, Saint Isidore, in Etymologiae, also says that the father (pater) is the origin and the head of the family (paterfamilias), being so-called because he procreates a son to place in the world to perform accomplishments (patratione).24 On this question of the precedence of the father and son, the author of Monologium concludes, in a misogynist way, that, concerning the Supreme Spirit and the Word, it is better to call them Father and Son. Moreover, this happens because, among the natural things that are sexualized, it is characteristic of the father and the son to be the best sex and the mother and daughter the inferior one. Thus, “if the paternal cause always in some way precedes the maternal cause, then it is exceedingly inappropriate for the name ‘mother’ to be applied to that parent whom no other cause either joins or precedes for the begetting of offspring.”25 24

Saint Isidore of Seville, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi, Etymologiarum sive Originum livri xx, vol. 2, IX.v.3. 25 Sancti Anselmi Cantuariensis, Monologium Et Proslogion: Nec Non Liber Pro Insipiente Cum Libro Apologetico. (London: Forgotten Books, 2018), chap. 42, I.55–56. The references are to this edition, and they can be checked in Saint Anselm, “Monologium,” in Anselm of Canterbury, ed. and trans. Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson (London: SCM Press; Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1974), vol. 1, chap. 42.

30

Chapter One

Saint Thomas Aquinas The Aristotelian postulates referring to the physiologist equivalence of woman to matter reached the thirteenth century and found, in the scholastic thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), significant repercussions and interest. Perhaps what most instigated the theologian, in his search for a pragmatic explanation for the mysteries of theology, was the question of Christ not having contracted the Original Sin, despite having been conceived from a woman’s womb. The explanation found its perfect support in the Aristotelian principle that considers the male being the transmitter of the semen to form and animate the descendant. Since, according to the Bible, Christ had no human father, he was free from the transmission of the Original Sin.26 In Summa Theologiae, it is even discussed whether the Virgin played any part in the conception of the body of Christ.

Summa Theologiae Some questions presented in Summa Theologiae (1266–1272, also known as Summa Theologica), regarding the Thomist view of woman, refer to her responsibility in the introduction of the Original Sin in the world, its exemption in Christ, and issues that resume the traditional and debated biological, moral and spiritual inferiority of women. Saint Thomas Aquinas shares the Augustinian idea that Eve’s sin was more severe than Adam’s because of the presumption that made her believe in the serpent.27 In Summa Theologiae, the author tries to reconcile the virulent Patristic pronouncements against women with Aristotle’s studies about the female. His opinion is that, even if the woman were judged an imperfect male in reproduction, the Church still should recognize her as a creation of God regarded as indefectible, since the Supreme Creator had not made any mistake in Creation. Approaching the question of whether someone should love the mother more than the father, Saint Thomas Aquinas adheres to the previously 26

Kari Borresen, Subordination and Equivalence: The Nature and Role of Women in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, trans. C. H. Talbot (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981), 219–222. 27 S. Aurelii Augustini, “Genesi ad litteram duodecim libri,” in Aurelii Augustini, Opera Ominia, IX.3.5, XI.37.50, XI.42.58, https://www.augustinus.it/latino/genesi_lettera/index2.htm. The references are from this edition, and they can be checked in Saint Augustine, St Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, vol. 2 (Ancient Christian Writers n. 42), trans. John Hammond (New York and Ramsey: Newman Press, 1982), 175–176.

Misogyny in Ancient Science and Medieval Legacy

31

commented Aristotelian postulates about the primacy of the male as the first and most efficient cause in the generation of animals. Not disregarding the fact that both father and mother are necessary principles for human origin, he says that the soul force, coming from the paternal seed and shaping the being, has a superior role that the descendants should recognize and value the most. In 1a. 92, Article 1 of Summa Theologiae,28 Saint Thomas takes up comments made by Aristotle and Saint Augustine (354–430) about the female gender. They deal with the Aristotelian concept of the woman as a failed and imperfect man.29 Saint Thomas also questions the woman’s participation in the original production of things. He concludes that she could not have participated in the Creation because everything in it was created perfect, according to divine omniscience and omnipotence. Therefore, the conclusion is obvious: the woman is inferior in capacity and quality to the man, not only because she did not participate in the original creation of things, but also because she presumably promoted the introduction of sin in the world. She must, therefore, be kept in a state of submission because inferiority is the result of the one who sinned first (Genesis 3:16). Recalling Saint Augustine, he says that the highest honor rests with the active cause, which is a male prerogative.30 This condition is another reason why God did not produce the woman in the original creation of things that occurred before sin. However, Saint Thomas, as previously commented, does not rule out the need for the woman to have been created not only in the likeness of the man (Genesis 2:18) but also to accompany and assist him in the procreation of his descendants.31 On the other hand, agreeing with Aristotle, he explains that the female sex is only produced either by a weakness of the male seed’s active power or due to the woman’s seminal material or because of external factors.32 Saint Thomas also says that the female defect is an individual issue that does not refer to the tendency of the nature of the human species as a whole. However, he does not 28

S. Tuomae de Aquino, “Summa Theologiae,” in Opera Omnia, Prima pars, Quaestio 92, Articulus 1, https://www.corpusthomisticum.org/sth1090.html. The references to Summa Theologiae are from this source, and they can be checked in St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Thomas Gilby, trans. Edmond Hill OP (London: Blackfriars, in conjunction with Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1963), 35–39. 29 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 737a. 30 Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, XII.16. 31 Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, IX.5. 32 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 766b.

32

Chapter One

eliminate the presence of woman’s participation in procreation, despite performing a second-order expedient, which places her on a secondary and discriminatory plane.33 Next, Saint Thomas, discussing the types of lawful subjection to the superior leader, comments that women are not only inferior and subject to men for sinning but also because of the natural order of human groups. In addition to sin, Saint Thomas explains that the most intelligent and the most discerning power commands and enslaves, domestically or civilly, the less able.34 Thus, in a natural, mental, and theological manner, women are inferior to men and owe them obedience and subjection to their will and command. “Such is the subjection in which woman is by nature subordinate to man, because the power of rational discernment is by nature stronger in man.”35 Saint Thomas Aquinas, facing the question of woman’s origin, continues in his considerations about her, defending Eva as being born of man because, man being made in the image of God, there is nothing more dignified and honorable than woman being born of man, who is, thus, her chief. Thus, ensuring the condition of a woman’s secondary status in Creation, he presents arguments about the originality (principium) of man over his species, analogous to God’s originality over the entire universe. He concludes that it is good that the woman has originated and belongs to man to guarantee love between the spouses and establish a life at home. There, quoting Aristotle, “‘man and woman work together at some things, and in which the man is head of the woman,’ so the woman was rightly formed from the man, as her origin and chief.”36

Summary This succinct comparative collection examined the disseminating influence of Aristotle’s physiology on some of his followers. These Aristotelian disciples, in time, became fundamental pillars of the medieval misogynist tradition not only in the field of religious philosophy, as in the cases of Saint Anselm and Saint Thomas Aquinas, but also in the interesting domain of etymological knowledge, as exposed in the Etymologiae of Saint Isidore of Seville. Thus, Aristotle’s physiology and the etymology of Saint Isidore, both attuned to postulates that defined traditional misogyny, 33

Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, XIII.35–39. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, XI.37. 35 Summa Theologiae, 1a. 92. Article 1. 36 Summa Theologiae, 1a. 92. Article 1. 34

Misogyny in Ancient Science and Medieval Legacy

33

are two of the many founding ideas of this discriminatory tendency of women in the thought and culture of Western man.

Sources Anselm, St. “Monologium.” In Anselm of Canterbury, vol. 1, edited and translated by Jasper Hopkins and Herbert Richardson. London: SCM Press; Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1974. Anselmi Cantuariensis, Sancti. Monologium Et Proslogion: Nec Non Liber Pro Insipiente Cum Libro Apologetico. London: Forgotten Books, 2018. Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologiae, vol. XXXIV. Edited by Thomas Gilby, translated by R. J. Benton. London: Blackfriars, in conjunction with Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1975. Aquino, Thomae de, S. Opera Omnia, Prima pars, Quaestio 92, Articulus 1. https://www.corpusthomisticum.org/sth1090.html. Accessed February 13, 2021. Aristotle. Generation of Animals. Translated by A. L. Peck. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943. https://archive.org/details/generationofanim00arisuoft/page/100/mode/ 2up. Accessed February 12, 2021. Aristotle. On the Generation of Animals (De Generatione Animalium). Translated by Arthur Pratt. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1908. https://onemorelibrary.com/index.php/en/books/science/book/biology204/on-the-generation-of-animals-de-generatione-animalium-745. Accessed February 12, 2021. Galen. Galen: On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body. Translated by Margaret Tallmadge May. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968. Galeni Claudii. “De anatomicis administrationibus.” In Claudii Galeni, Opera Ominia, edited by D. Carolus Gottlob Kühn. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.17443628&view=1up&seq=8. Accessed February 16, 2021. Isidoro de Sevilla, St. Etimologías, vol. 2. Bilingual edition translated by J. Oroz y M. A. Marcos. Madrid: B. A. C., 1982–1983. Isidore of Seville, St. Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi: Etymologiarum sive Originum libri xx. Edited by W. M. Lindsay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. White, Theodore H. The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century. Made and edited by T. H. White. New York: Dover Publications, 1984

34

Chapter One

References Allen, Sr Prudence, RSM. The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC–AD 1250. Montreal: Eden Press, 1985. Ambrose, St. Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel. Translated by J. J. Savage. FOC XLII. New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1961. Andreas Capellanus. Andreas Capellanus On Love. Edited and translated by P. G. Walsh. London: Duckworth, 1982. Andreas Capellanus. De amore libri tres. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/capellanus.html. Accessed February 12, 2021. Augustine, St. St Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, vol. 2. Translated by John Hammond. Ancient Christian Writers 42. New York: Ramsey and Newman Press, 1982. Aurelii Augustini, S. “De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim.” https://www.augustinus.it/latino/genesi_lettera/index2.htm. Accessed February 16, 2021. Bloch, R. Howard. “Medieval Misogyny.” Representations 20 (1987): 1– 24. Borresen, Kari. Subordination and Equivalence: The Nature and Role of Women in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Translated by C. H. Talbot. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1981. Friedberg, Aemilius. Corpus Iuris Canonici, part I. Decretum Magistri Gratiani. Graz, 1955. Jacquart, Danielle and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Translated by M. Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. Jerome, St. “Against Jovinian.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 779–907. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. Rousselle, A. Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity. Translated by F. Pheasant. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.

CHAPTER TWO THE DEFAMATION OF WOMEN IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Without intending to reproduce a litany of disparaging things said about women, this chapter begins with some unfortunate and outrageous misogynist pronouncements written in the Middle Ages, either by people connected with religious life or by others responsible for secular or profane writings. Moreover, it proposes to guide itself by the apparent reason that, throughout the medieval period, in its own characteristically patriarchal formation, a far greater number of misogynist texts can be found than sympathetic ones expressly written in defense of women. Despite the risk of generalization, one might consider that a basic disposition in medieval misogyny was an ideological delight in tabulating woman as slipping into an animalized status, remembering that since the beginning, she has consorted with the serpent or other creatures just as or more poisonous. In addition to this strategically naturalizing characteristic, the tradition of this misogyny had other favorite images remembered from a fabulous inventory of the most evil and perverse feminine traits. Of the immense number of attributes morally denigrating the nature and character of women in the medieval context, it seems constant to see them as jealous creatures carried by envy and terrible intemperance and usually abrasive and virulent speech. Women were no less frequently criticized for being intolerable creatures, often compulsive, selfish, frivolous, sly, and stupid, lacking in the knowledge and understanding of things that required higher intellectual and spiritual competence. From the large number of medieval misogynist texts repeating ad nauseam obsessive points of censure and condemnation of the women, it is pertinent to consider Theophrastus (c. 372–288), Saint Jerome (c. 342– 420), and Walter Map (1140–c. 1209) as classic references in medieval literature. What they all have in common is a severe unwillingness toward marriage, with their views even becoming, in the case of Saint Jerome, a reasonably theological antimatrimonial doctrine. The influential but little-known antimarriage book Liber de nuptiis (Book on Marriage) by Theophrastus was, with invoked authority, quoted

36

Chapter Two

Schulz and appropriated by Saint Jerome in Adversus Jovinianum (397).1 In the book, the saint convincingly dissuades true Christians from marriage2 and even motivated great pro-celibacy works, such as Peter Abelard’s (1079–1142) Theologia christiana (c. 1124) and Policraticus (c. 1159) by John of Salisbury (c. 1120–1180). Walter Map is not far behind in this misogynist list with the no less virulent Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat (c. 1180) (The Letter of Valerius to Rufinus, against Marriage).3 Even though many books of the Bible treat this subject negatively, Ecclesiastes has the upper hand on women’s matrimonial inconvenience because of its compositional tone that characterizes it as one of the saddest books of wisdom in the Holy Scripture.4 Concerning this central theme of marriage, it becomes clear from this small prototypical sample of literary concern that, as voiced in so many later misogynist works, married domestic life is a real disgrace. In contrast, celibacy should be regarded as a condition of moral, intellectual, and spiritual excellence to be sought by men of principle and belief. In political terms, it is evident that this entire ideological issue was no more than an instance to perpetuate the male celibate monopoly of literary culture represented by godly men and virtuous women devoted to the Christian life. Although, as previously indicated, there is a consensus that considers Holy Scripture, the work of Saint Jerome, and Patristic literature, despite their thematic peculiarities, as original sources for the study of medieval 1

S. Eusebii Hieronymi, Adversus Jovinium. https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/04z/z_0347-0420__Hieronymus__ Adversus_Jovinianum_Libri_Duo__MLT.pdf.html. The references are from this edition, and the can also be checked in Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” 779–907. 2 Phillippe Delhaye, “Le Dossier Antimatrimonial de l’ Adversus Jovinianum et son Influence sur Quelques Écrits Latins du XIIe siècle,” Mediaeval Studies 13 (1951): 65–86; Charles B. Schmitt, “Theophrastus in the Middle Ages,” Viator 2 (1971): 259–263. 3 Walter Map, “De Nugis Curialium,” in Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves, vol. 1 (The Primary Texts), ed. Ralph Hanna III and Traugott Lawler (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 121–148; Walter Map, “The Letter of Valerius to Rufinus, against Marriage,” in De Nugis Curialium, Courtiers’ Trifles, rev. ed., ed. and trans. M. R. James, C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 287–313. 4 Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. Michael MacLagan, trans. E. C. Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), 42–44; Robert A. Pratt, “Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves: Medieval Antimatrimonial Propaganda in the Universities,” Annuele Mediaevale 3 (1962): 5–27.

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

37

misogyny, severe restrictions exist regarding the question of fundaments. The first one concerns the inquiry of whether misogyny, classical or medieval, indeed constitutes a history, or rather, if it ever formed a tradition. Moreover, if this is the case, a second reflection necessarily arises linked to the need to investigate which texts would be the founders of this Western medieval misogyny, that is, which passages are considered obligatory for the fixation of its main propositions and modus operandi. Although the subject is vast, when one investigates the roots of this medieval misogyny, an original obligatory passage to consider from ancient Greek culture is that where Hesiod (c. 750 BC) blames the woman for the cursed plague of evil introduced into the world.5 Remaining in this search for ancient roots, influential in many attitudes and judgments of medieval misogyny, there are cases of chronological discontinuity. This is the case with Ovid (43 BC–18 AD), whose ancient misogyny was temporarily forgotten in the medieval period. Nevertheless, whether by luck or another historical explanation, he had his name bequeathed as a mandatory reference in the long list of ancient and traditional satires against women. As previously seen, two major factors that had a striking impact in their ideas on medieval misogyny were the studies on physiology of Aristotle (384–322 BC) and those on etymology by Saint Isidore of Seville, and both sources were widespread and reworked to meet the political-religious ideology of the period. Aristotle in De generatione animalium6 and Galen in De usu partium corporis humani7 considered the female body as secondary, given the excellency of the male body with its effective generative and intellectual properties.8 5 Sr Prudence Allen, RSM, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC–AD 1250 (Montreal: Eden Press, 1985), 14–15. 6 Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals. The references are to this edition, and they can be checked in Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 726b, 727a, 727b, 728a, 729a, 737a, 738b and 775a. 7 Claudii Galeni, “De anatomicis administrationibus,” in Claudii Galeni, Opera Ominia, ed. D. Carolus Gottlob Kühn, Liber 2, 280–339. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.17443628&view=1up&seq=8. The commented references to De usu partium corporis humani II.299, II.300 and II.301 are from this source and can be checked in Galen: On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, trans. Margaret Tallmadge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), II.630–632. 8 A. Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. F. Pheasant (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 12–20; Danielli Jacquart, and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. M. Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 55–56.

38

Chapter Two

Through a kind of skillful short-circuit based on the analogical method, widely used as a form of knowledge in the Middle Ages, Aristotelian condemnations of the female nature and physiology corresponded to misogynist pronouncements instructed by linguistic understanding. In this respect, as seen before, the influential encyclopedia Etymologiae of Saint Isidore of Seville was a unique example of the origin and formation of words related to the nature and sexual physiology of women. Therefore, the kind of physiologist misogyny of Aristotle and Galen found ideological correspondence in the epistemological knowledge method developed by Saint Isidore. His great encyclopedia acquired phenomenal popularity throughout medieval Europe and continued to be cited for many centuries afterward. The following comments identify the influence of the traditional views about the alleged inferiority of the feminine nature elaborated by Aristotle’s physiology. These Aristotelianinherited views about females as imperfect and incomplete organisms disseminated rather powerfully ideologically throughout the Middle Ages. Furthermore, they did so corresponding to the interests and political order of misogynist thought, mainly represented by priests and religious thinkers of the Church. In this sense, Saint Isidore, being one of them, translated what Aristotle had done in the domain of physiology and science into the domain of the knowledge of language. For example, the saint says in Etymologiae that the word vir (man) is spelled this way because it comes from vis (force), while mulier (woman) comes from mollitie (softness), associated with mollier (softer). Therefore, it is clear from the etymology of their names that the virtuous and robust nature of men opposes the weak and vicious nature of women, who are naturally thought to be predisposed to being commanded by their partners.9 Thus, defamations of feminine nature and physiology, through skillful analogies, came to correspond with misogynist pronouncements instructed by linguistic understanding, as in the method of etymological knowledge of Saint Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae. In the part which presents the female constitution,10 the book deals with the origin of words related to the nature and sexual physiology of women while commenting on the 9 Sancti Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi. https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/02m/0560-0636,_Isidorus_ Hispaliensis, _Etymologiarum_Libri_Viginti, _MLT.pdf, accessed February 16, 2012. The references are from this edition, and can be checked in Saint Isidore of Seville, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi, Etymologiarum sive Originum livri xx, vol. 2, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), XI.III.17–19; XI.II.23–24. 10 Saint Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, XI.II.17–19, 23–24.

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

39

destructive, evil, and enormous power of menstrual blood.11 In this regard, the saint was not only following what Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) said on the subject in Naturalis historia but also propelling an unbroken tradition of names that dealt with the damage caused by menstrual blood. This female impurity received the most piteous approach in De miseria conditionis humane (On the Misery of the Human Condition) by Pope Innocent III (1198–1216).12 Taking advantage of the impurity of menstruation, voices of the religious canons of the Middle Ages posited that sexual intercourse with women in this state would risk men becoming ill and even contracting leprosy.13 In the field of Aristotelian physiology, scientific considerations about the female body and functions already spoke of menstruation as women’s inability to evolve into the fullest form of human development, that is, men. This is because, unlike men, women evidenced an inefficient body system that had to flush itself of some sort of residual or dirty fluid.14 Beliefs derived from what were considered to be scientific observations about menstruation ranged from the mildest to the most grotesquely sinister, for example, that any woman could be poisonous during menstruation. However, as commented earlier, in the irregular menstruation or the deteriorating system of an older woman, poisonous fluids looking for a way out could be transmitted through the eyes and could poison young children. This is what was said in a popular twelfth-century study called De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women).15 Several voices of medieval misogyny extensively commented on the destructive and corruptible nature of menstrual blood. However, Saint Isidore of Seville’s commentary on the subject is of a rather severe character, as shown above, which explores the evil nature and destructive properties of this harmful female residue.16 It was not only what women’s impurities expelled that was the reason for men’s femmephobic paura. The female in general and the inexorable power of seduction she exerted upon men were not only biologically adverse but also had a certain destructiveness. Despite prohibitions imposed by religious doctrine on the investigation of human anatomy and physiology in the Middle Ages, authorities of certain scientific thoughts 11

Saint Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, XI.I.140–141. Pope Innocent III, Lotario dei Segni, De miseria condicionis humane, ed. and trans. R. E. Lewis (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1978), I.4.100–101. 13 Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, 186. 14 Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, 27. 15 Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, 75–76. 16 Saint Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, 1962, XI.I.141. 12

40

Chapter Two

elaborated in antiquity were conveniently retained by intellectuals. One of them referred to the excellence of male semen, explained by the higher heat naturally present in men’s bodies. With the rediscovery of Aristotle’s writings, this and other postulates about the generation of the species had a considerable impact from the twelfth century onward. The Greek philosopher had reduced the role of women in reproduction to that of raw material awaiting the forming or moving action of men’s semen. The discriminatory idea of the passivity of women in procreation because they are considered as deformed males, contributing only with their inactive seed, and this idea’s cultivation are of Aristotelian origin. The considerable authority of Aristotle and his followers was certainly responsible for the medieval preservation of the equation of women to Matter. At the same time, men were responsible for the Form, which, equated to the Soul, was superior only in males. For these and other reasons, Aristotle’s and Galen’s physiology about the male excellence over the female precariousness and defects prevailed during the medieval period. This influence is confirmed in the gynecological treatise De secretis mulierum, spuriously attributed to Saint Albert the Great (1193– 1206).17 The popularity of the book demonstrated how widespread this text was in the Middle Ages,18 representing a kind of echo of what Saint Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, no less maliciously, had already said about the subject. Throughout the history of Western misogyny, among the pronouncements of Aristotle, none were so harmful as those dedicated to the inferior nature of the woman, that women were a kind of deformed male contributing to the process of generation only as inactive seeds. Favored by the principlebased system of knowledge, the so-called auctoritatis formula, much appreciated and practiced in the Middle Ages, Aristotle’s wisdom indeed substantiated the prejudiced equation of women to matter. Among Aristotle’s comments on the subject in De generatione animalium, the following deserve special attention here, albeit in an abbreviated form. Male semen is a highly refined blood-shaped nutrient residue purified by the high calorific action of the male body. Females, weaker due to their lower body heat, produce a residue, larger in fluid quantity discharged in the form of menstrual blood. They do not actively contribute to generation because they supply only the matter found in the 17 Helen Lemay, “Some Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Lectures on Female Sexuality,” International Journal of Women’s Studies 1 (1978): 391–400. 18 Lemay, “Some Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Lectures on Female Sexuality,” 392.

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

41

menstrual fluid-forming substance. In generation, the males contribute to the shape and principle of movement. Upon entering the womb, the semen fixes the residue produced by the females, giving it the same movement that endows it. The female generation happens because of the degree of impurity and deformity of matter provided by her mother. The females always provide the material, while the males are responsible for organizing the material into a form, giving it a soul, the essence of the whole body.19 These and other comments by Aristotle were taken up and followed by Galen, whose authority during the Middle Ages, mainly conveyed through Arabic writings, became legendary. Galen differed from Aristotle only in some respects. For example, he reinstated the presence of the female seed in intercourse precisely because he knew the reality of ovaries, a fact that his predecessor did not have the opportunity to know. While openly endorsing the Aristotelian theory of the hierarchy of the sexes, Galen based his medical thinking on the existence of a temperature gradation. This difference, he believed, gave rise to a complementarity system of the generating organs, in which women’s genitalia are the reverse of those of men. In connection with this and other related matters, the following comments by Galen in De usu partium corporis humani deserve special mention. Men are the most perfect because of their excess of heat, the primordial instrument of Nature. The imperfection of women extends to the generating parts, which do not protrude outward because of insufficient heat. However, this kind of natural mutilation is necessary for the breeding of the species. That part that would form the scrotum, by remaining inside the female body, became the womb’s substance, a suitable instrument for receiving and retaining the male semen, nourishing and perfecting the fetus. Another advantage of women’s colder nature is that they do not concentrate all the nutrients they produce, making the womb a more fluid and nourishing environment for the fetus. Unlike male semen, the colder semen produced by females is unable to generate. Thus, from the principle devised by the Creator in his wisdom that females are not perfect like males, all these useful things for generation derived. Among them were the beliefs that females accumulate an excess of useful nutrients, have imperfect semen, and have a hollow instrument to receive the perfect male semen. Since everything in males is in opposition to what is in females, the male member receives a lengthening to be more appropriate for coitus and semen excretion, and this semen itself is made thick, plentiful, and hot.20 19 20

Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 726b, 727a, 727b, 728a, 729a, 737a, 738b. Galen, On the usefulness of the parts of the body, II.299–301.

42

Chapter Two

Medieval knowledge and science were in the hands and dominated by the masculine theocracy, women being largely excluded from universities in the Middle Ages. This situation made women incapable of refuting such brutal excesses of philosophical and medical thoughts against them more formally. In this sense, the existence at the time of feminine-authored treatises on the subject is questionable. Even the authenticity of the writings of a woman known as Trota, who medicated in Salerno (11th– 12th centuries), a unique event amid this tight androcentric barrier, is difficult to establish. However, in any case, she does not appear to have raised any serious challenge to the masculine hegemony.21 Some traditional beliefs concerning the physiology of men’s bodies implied that women’s power over life and its functioning, exercised through sexual attraction, was biologically adverse to the males. Andreas Capellanus (12th–13th centuries), in De Amore (c. 1185) (On Love), recalls once reading in a treatise that sexual activity made men age faster.22 Since men’s semen was considered as a kind of highly refined blood residue, the medical opinion conveyed by Aristotle assumed that frequent sexual activity would drain men’s blood and body of its vitality. Perhaps it could shrink their brains or weaken their eyes.23 Perhaps the ultimate metaphor coined to figure the symbolically destructive sense of the female body was, as commented in the introduction to this book, that ancient fear of the so-called vagina dentata (toothed vagina) to signify the Gate of Hell of the medieval religious imagination. This was an image evidently associated with the arcane psychosexual fear of male castration by the female.24 As far as is presently known, in terms of news recorded in the Middle Ages, no woman before Christine de Pizan (1365–c. 1430) textually ever attempted to point out the absurdity of the immense quantity of derogatory thoughts about the feminine nature. For this reason, a parenthesis to present this incipient yet defiant attitude to misogyny is deserved here to demarcate de Pizan’s contribution as a 21 John F. Benton, “Trotula: Women’s Problems, and the Professionalism of Medicine in the Middle Ages,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (1985): 30–53. 22 Andreas Capellanus, De amore libri tres. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/capellanus.html, accessed February 12, 2021. The references are to this edition, and they can be checked in Andreas Capellanus. Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (London: Duckworth, 1982), III.61. 23 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 725b, 726b; A. Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, 12–20; Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, 55–65. 24 Barbara G. Walker, The Woman Dictionary of Symbols & Sacred Objects (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988), 328.

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

43

unique contrast against that misogynist derogatory hegemony. In Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405–?), as in her other writings, de Pizan’s wisdom and rhetorical ingenuity in dismantling many key moments of this misogynist discourse are truly admirable,25 as is the fact that, quite possibly, no woman before her considered the lies of misogyny praised in De secretis mulierum with such textual scrutiny, eloquence, and intelligent disdain. In Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, de Pizan, considering what De secretis mulierum says about Nature being ashamed of having produced the feminine gender with so much imperfection, criticizes the misogynist prerogative of male superiority, women’s resentment over their relegated condition of inferiority, and the question of the shame felt by Nature about women. All these three factors perpetuated the traditional misogynist legacy in the Middle Ages that was so vehemently treated in the exemplary case of Les Lamentations de Matheolus (The Lamentations of Matheolus, c. 1371–1372) by Jehan Le Fèvre (14th–15th centuries).26 It has been previously commented that, according to the information available, no woman before Christine de Pizan attempted to point out the absurdity of the many derogatory thoughts about the female nature, as she did in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames.27 Following the Augustinian tópos of the building of the ideal city, de Pizan wrote her book based on the same motif. Saint Augustine had written De civitate Dei (421–427) to consider it in a virtuous condition of contraposition to the little town of this world. However, by writing about the establishment and construction of a city devoted solely to honorable dames, de Pizan, going beyond allegorical retouching, showed her ambition and seriousness of purpose to critically portray her city as a defensive structure against misogynist attacks. In this way, images of the reputation of women remarkable for their intelligence and unblemished morals built this city of dames. In this sense of strong competence and character, Le Livre de la Cité des Dames is a presentation directly opposed to the cynical and ironic vision of Ovid perpetuated in Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose, c. 1275) by Jean de Meun (c. 1240–c. 1305). The Roman poet comments that the female fortress can only defend itself by strategically utilizing the property of indolence as a fundamental characteristic of women who, thus, behaving with their usual laziness and negligence, defeat all. 25

Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E. J. Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), I.9.2, 23–24. 26 Jehan Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, ed. A.-G. Van Hamel (Paris: Bouillon, 1892–1905), II.4095–4142. 27 Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, I.9.2.

44

Chapter Two

To construct, in terms of character delineation, her city of ladies, de Pizan relied extensively on the remarkable female examples in Giovanni Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus (Famous Women, 1313–1375). Through these examples, she illustrates the impertinence of many misogynist slogans in her book, thus questioning traditional sources of misogyny. For example, she questions, with superior reasoning, the economic disadvantages of a family desiring only male offspring, thus dismantling the tradition of the noble patriarchal lineage. Elsewhere in the book, she crushes all the hustle and bustle of women’s clothing with the clear assertion that people’s conscience is not to be judged by what they wear.28 Although de Pizan’s book is a response to a large stock of misogynist texts, listed in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames,29 the author specifically chooses Les Lamentations de Matheolus, probably in Le Fèvre’s translation, to maintain a clever dialogue. On the subject of the compulsory misogyny contained in the book, de Pizan comments that she is astonished that so many men of illustrious knowledge were able to make such wicked insults against women, all agreeing to judge their behavior as beset by the most harmful vices. Analyzing and carefully judging the conduct and character of so many well-known, noble, or popular women, she concludes that the misogynist claims could not be true. However, ironically, she says that having read and understood so many learned pronouncements against the women of history, it would be impossible not to admit that God had actually formed a vile creature when he created them.30 Christine de Pizan’s intelligent arguments on this subject touch on the undisputed fact that almighty God is greater than the Nature he created. However, he created woman from one of man’s ribs, placing them in Paradise, to mean that she should be by his side as a mate and never lie at his feet like a slave and that he should love her as his flesh. Both would also be divine in soul and worth alike because men and women, in whom the greatest virtues reside, are the superior beings of all Creation. Neither greatness nor lowness is according to sex but in the perfection of one’s conduct and virtues.31 This defense of the equalitarian origin of women forms the well-known tópos of Adam’s rib, the hallmark of some pronouncements in defense of women in the medieval period. Following the shrewd argument in favor of

28

Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, II.62.1. Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, I.9–I.10. 30 Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, I.1. 31 Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, I.9.2. 29

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

45

the elevation of woman’s paradisiacal origin made by de Pizan,32 it is also defended in Commandment VI, Chapter 4 of the anonymous Dives and Pauper (1405–1410).33 All this discrimination against the female nature and physiology appeared, in the misogynistic thinking of the Middle Ages, as being associated with the theological view of women, with practically no distinction being made between the female sex and its theological moralization.34 Saint Augustine, one of the pillars of Christendom, only apparently did not discriminate against women’s pitiful bodily state when following the teaching of Galatians 3:26–28 about the theological equivalence of the two sexes. Instead—and not fully agreeing in De Trinitate (On Trinity) with the equation of the woman to the body—he considered the thoughtprovoking feminine predisposition to material and sensory solicitations as disturbing to the serenity and spirituality of the male mind.35 Saint Ambrose (c. 339–397), in De Paradiso (Paradise, c. 375), proposed an interesting allegory for the Fall of Adam and Eve, in which the woman represents the senses of the body and the man, those of the mind. The saint completed this thought by saying that pleasures stir the senses, which in turn affect the mind.36 The issue of women’s closeness and companionship was especially problematic for the early Fathers of the Church, reflecting Saint Paul’s considerations about the distraction that marriage and the family might represent not only for the institutional consolidation of Christianity but also for the achievement of men’s mental and spiritual excellence. Saint Jerome also comments on this in Adversus Helvidium (383).37 Grounded in Matthew 19:12, the saint says, in Adversus Jovinianum, of the sublime 32

David L. D’Avray and Martin Tausche, “Marriage Sermons in ad status Collections of the Central Middle Ages,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 47 (1980): 71–119. 33 Anonymous, Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscilla H. Barnum, EETS 280 (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), vol. I, part. 2, 66–72. 34 R. Howard Bloch, “Medieval misogyny,” Representation 20 (1987): 20. 35 Kari Borresen, Subordination and Equivalence: The Nature and Role of Women in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, trans. C. H. Talbot (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981), 25–30. 36 St. Ambrose, Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel (FOC XLII), trans. J. J. Savage (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1961), XV.73, 351. 37 Saint Jerome, “Against Helvidius,” in The Principal Works of St Jerome (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 6), ed. P. Schaff and trans. W. H. Fremantle (Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892), 758–778. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf.

46

Chapter Two

happiness of men that, instead of serving a wife, they serve God by becoming eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven.38 This advisement meant adhering to the celibacy taught by Theophrastus in the Liber de nuptiis. In Adversus Jovinianum, Saint Jerome leaned heavily on this book to build his doctrine against matrimony, recommending spiritual emasculation.39 Thanks to the exceptional sharpness of his treatise in incorporating classical sources and, above all, to the inclusion of a vehement and memorable misogynist passage attributed to Theophrastus, which argued that intelligent men should not marry, Saint Jerome’s work was claimed as valuable by subsequent writers.40 Theophrastus was a crucial pagan philosopher who followed in Aristotle’s footsteps. The Liber de nuptiis, from which Saint Jerome said he was quoting, is unknown. Thus, there are uncertainties about the authorial attribution of that misogynist and antimatrimonial passage, which could have been a lost work of Seneca or Tertullian. In any case, it seems to be valid evidence that celibacy is not a modern Christian invention. As far as Theophrastus’ sayings are concerned, shreds of evidence exist that they had a phenomenal influence on the evolution of medieval misogyny, being circulated by writers of recognized stature, such as Abelard in Theologia Christiana41 and John of Salisbury in Policraticus.42 In the first six chapters of Adversus Jovinianum, Saint Jerome identifies marriage and virginity as key issues that godly men should address. While denying that he disbelieved in marriage, he places it third in the field of spiritual concessions, after virginity and widowhood. Discovering that his heretical opponent Jovinian had resorted to Corinthians 1:7, among other biblical evidence, he based his counterattack on the interpretation of the same text. The following passage from Adversus Jovinianum, commenting on the desirable preeminence of virginity and the spiritual neutralization of sexuality, says that Christ loves virgin people more because they willingly give what was not ordained, that is, chastity. Echoing Matthew 19:10, he also says that the Apostles believed in the disadvantage of marriage 38

St. Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” 779–907. St. Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” 779–907. 40 Phillippe Delhaye, “Le Dossier Antimatrimonial de l’Adversus Jovinianum et son Influence sur Quelques Écrits Latins du XIIe siècle,” Mediaeval Studies 13 (1951): 65–86; Schmitt, “Theophrastus in the Middle Ages,” 259–263. 41 Pierre Abelárd, “Theologia Christiana,” in Petri Abaelardi opera theological, Corpus christianorum (continuatio mediaevalis), vol. 12, ed. E. M. Buytaert (Brepols: Turnhout, 1969), II.94–106. 42 John of Salisbury, Policratici sive De nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum, ed. C. C. Webb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), VIII.11. 39

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

47

burdened by wives. Then, commenting on the incompatibility between marriage and the attainment of the kingdom of heaven, he speaks of the Lord’s preference for eunuchs who face this condition after deliberation.43 This matrimonial and family distraction could well be prevented by celibacy. In practice, however, what complicated it was women’s near reduction to an unstoppable arsenal of vices and lewd invitations to men to sin, damaging their souls.44 This spiritual harm resides in the mere fact of women’s existence, appearance, or countenance. The biblical tradition metaphorically pictured her as a deadly drawn sword and a dangerous, uncovered pit that was ready to disgrace men’s lives.45 This terrible misogynist imagery can be found, among other sources, in Tertullian (c. 160–c. 225), namely in De cultu feminarum (On the Apparel of Women, 1st or 2nd century),46 and Ancrene Riwle (Rule for Anchoresses),47 an anonymous treatise from the thirteenth century or earlier. Tertullian, in the cited book, condemns women for arousing harmful desires in men, which, according to Matthew 5:28, have the same penalty as sexual intercourse. The mere wishful thinking provoked by women is already adulterous. The woman who even involuntarily commits such a provocation through appearance and makeup becomes a sword drawn against men. They do not love their neighbor, as commanded by Matthew 19:19 and Corinthians 10:24. Since everyone tends to desire beauty when increased with devices of cosmetology and decoration, women in particular must admit that they reject the preparation of false and provoked beauty. Moreover, they should remove the splendor of natural beauty by hiding it or ignoring it as it is dangerous to the sight of men’s eyes. Indeed, there is no fault in beauty when considered a great thing placed in the body by nature as an additional gift of the divine creation and as a suitable garment for the soul. Nevertheless, one must be careful with beauty because of the insults and violence it brings to those who seek it.48 43

St. Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” 779–907. Gerald R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 395. 45 David L. D’Avray and Martin Tausche, “Marriage Sermons in ad Status Collections of the Central Middle Ages,” Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Llittéraire du Moyen Âge 47 (1980): 102. 46 Tertullian, “The Apparel of Women,” trans. E. Quain, in Tertulian: Disciplinary, Moral and Ascetical Works, trans. Arbesmann et al., FOC, xl (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959), XI.II.2. 47 Anonymous, Ancrene Riwle, trans. M. B. Salu (London: Burns & Oates, 1955), part 2, 23–25. 48 Tertullian, “The Apparel of Women,” XI.II.2. 44

48

Chapter Two

As indicated earlier, alongside the metaphor of the feminine appearance as an unsheathed sword, the anonymous Ancrene Riwle uses the no less glaring metaphor of women as open pits. Due to the danger of men falling into them, the old law of God says that such wells should be covered, and the penalty should be harshly applied. The uncovering of the wells is women’s exposed appearance, their beautiful faces, white necks, and bright eyes, raised hands in men’s sight, uncontrolled speeches, and any other things that belong to women and may arouse a sinful love. These are all called wells by the Lord, and he commands these womenpits always to be covered with lids so that those men who are unconcerned with God and are in disuse of reason do not fall into them and perish in mortal sin. The judgment of the women who discovered the wells is very severe, being blamed before God for the death of men and having to answer for their souls on Judgment Day. Women discover these wells and do everything to tempt men bodily, sometimes not being aware of it. Therefore, it is women who must fear this condition the most. Men may commit a mortal carnal sin, unduly desiring women, or indulging with another person by women’s temptation. In all these cases, the tempting women must be well aware of the judgment they will face, for they must pay for anyone who has fallen into the wells. After all, it was they who left them uncovered.49 Associated with the metaphorical themes of women imagined as open wells or drawn swords, quite recurrent in medieval literature, is the theme of the unclean and deceptive feminine gaze often voiced by the Fathers of the Church, such as the warnings of Saint John Chrysostom (c. 347– 407).50 Marbod of Rennes (c. 1035–1123) begins De meretrice (Femme Fatale) with this theme and its related variations. Resonating with what Ecclesiastes 7:27 comments on the subject, he says that the traps that the cunning enemy (i.e., the Devil) has set around the world are countless. However, the greatest of them are women.51 This metaphor of men’s enemy also appears in Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Fifteen Joys of Marriage, 14th–15th centuries).52 Marbod, continuing his misogynist condemnation, says that women are an unfortunate resource, an evil root, and corrupt arms that give birth to all sorts of outrage around the world. They cause quarrels, conflicts, terrible dissensions, and fights between old 49

Anonymous, Ancrene Riwle, part II. Bloch, Medieval misogyny, 15. 51 Marbod of Rennes, “De meretrice,” in Liber decem capitulorum, ed. Rosario Leotta (Rome: Herder, 1984). 52 La Sale, The Fifteen Joys of Marriage, trans. B. A. Pitts (New York: Peter Lang, 1985). 50

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

49

friends, and they divide affections and shatter families. More gravely, women overthrow kings and princes from their thrones, cause nations to collapse, convulse and destroy cities, multiply slaughters, and prepare poisonous potions. They cast conflagrations that rage across farms and fields. Marbod summarizes his invectives by saying that there is no manifestation of evil in the universe that women do not claim any part for themselves.53 Such pronouncements and images eventually qualified women as unfortunate resources, an endless source of quarrels and discord. All of this is in the Adversus Jovinianum of Saint Jerome, faithful heir of the ideas of Ovid in Amores54 and Juvenal (c. 55/60–c. 127) in Satire VI.55 The notion of women’s mischievous disposition, not infrequently administered by the devil, reinforced the idea of men’s monopoly on the preaching and practicing of sacred religious activities. In this sense, there were very few exceptions in favor of the religious emancipation of women,56 as the Waldenses (12th century) and the Lollards (1380–1390) proposed.57 One of women’s chief defects associated the natural predisposition to all kinds of unrestraint with their compulsive, copious and exciting speech, as happens with the wife in The Wife of Bath (c. 1390–1395) by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400).58 Perhaps one of the most intriguing paradoxes, quite in vogue in the twelfth century, was the ascetic obsession with condemning women to see and be seen. This contradiction, while boldly denying women’s mere reality, was associated with the practice of a courtly adoration of their image,59 never wholly exempt from the titillating ambivalence of eroticism.60 It is tempting to consider here whether the fear 53

Marbod of Rennes, “De meretrice,” chap. III. Ovid, “Amores,” in Ovid: The Erotic Poems, trans. P. Green. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), II.12, 232–234. 55 Juvenal, “Satire VI,” in The Satires of Juvenal, trans. R. Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), v. 242–243, 72. 56 Eleanor Mclaughlin, “Les Femmes et l’Hérésie Médiévale: Un Problème dans l’Histoire de la Spiritualité,” Concilium 111 (1976): 73–90. 57 William W. Capes, ed., Registrum Johannis Trefnant, episcopi herefordensis. A. D. mccclxxxix–mcccciv, The Register of John Trefnant, Bishop of Hereford. (Hereford: Wilson and Phillips, 1914), 55. 58 Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Wife of Bath,” in The Canterbury Tales, trans. D. Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 219–239. 59 Bloch, Medieval misogyny, 15. 60 Lee Patterson, “For the Wyves Love of Bathe: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in The Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales,” Speculum 58 (1983): 662. 54

50

Chapter Two

of women’s eroticizing power and sexual prodigality might not provoke a masculine apprehension or inferiority complex. Moreover, it might provoke a realization that this problematic man could be relieved from this disturbing condition simply by naturalizing or reducing women condemned to ion. Ideas of this kind and the assumption that the lust of love was characteristic of effeminate men appeared with incredible insistence in medieval literature. Saint Isidore of Seville in Etymologiae,61 Jehan Le Fèvre in Les Lamentations de Matheolus,62 Andreas Capellanus in De amore,63 and John Gower (1325?–1408) in Confessio amantis (A Lover’s Confession, 1386–1390)64 make particular reference to them. It is especially Saint Isidore who expresses that this idea of sexual arousal being provoked by women emphasizes their excessive natural libido. The etymologist says that woman (femina) in antiquity was called vira (i.e., the female form of vir, male) and that the word female (femina) derives from the thigh area (femorum), where her gender distinguishes her from that of man. However, some think that she is called female (femina) through Greek etymology, which indicates burning force (fos), because of the intensity of her desire. All this because females are more luxurious than males, both among people (mulieribus) and animals. Hence, the word effeminate (femineus) was used in antiquity to indicate an excess of love (amor).65 This equation of women with libido made them, among other things, lack more advanced intelligence and reason, causing them to be considered only suitable for a little advice and immediate decision-making. These denigrating aspects of females’ intellectual competence find their expression, among other places, in the Fabliaux, where medieval storytellers were often surprised that many heroines outnumbered their husbands with evidence of remarkable prescience.66 These aspects were approached in defense of women in Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre de la Cité des Dames.67

61

Saint Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, XI.II.23. Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, II.1571–1702. 63 Capellanus, Andreas Capellanus on Love, III.50, 244–245. 64 John Gower, “A Lover’s Confession,” in The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS, ES 81 (London: Oxford University Press, 1900), ii, VII, 4239, 4292, 4354–4355. 65 Saint Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, XI.II.23–24. 66 Richard Spencer, “The Treatment of Women in the Roman de la Rose, the Fabliaux and the Quinze Joies de Marriage,” Marche Romane 28 (1978): 207–214. 67 Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, I.8.8, 21–22. 62

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

51

At the beginning of this chapter, some denigrating works were mentioned that are always remembered straight away when discussing medieval misogyny. However, the literary tradition in this field is profusely entangled, characterizing themes based on what may be called an influential motif. Among the Fathers of the Church of the first centuries after Christ, influential motifs consisted of an extensive arsenal of quotations from the Bible, often endorsed by pronouncements from Roman literature. Among the writers of texts against women produced from the eleventh century onward, influential motifs for the continuation of their misogynist discourse could be pronouncements of the first wave of misogynist texts. Saint Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum, which was reliberated in the twelfth century, Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat by Walter Map and De Amore by Andreas Capellanus are examples of this situation. In addition to these succinctly listed sources, influential motifs of the misogynist discourse from that date appear to be a relatively small number of gloomy considerations about women from Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Ecclesiasticus, now considered apocryphal; the second of the twin Creation narratives dealt with in Genesis, along with the account of the Fall and the punishment of Eve; certain stories of celebrated biblical heroes who fell into the sin of sex; the epistles of Saint Paul; the maxims or aphorisms of Ovid and Juvenal; and statements and pronouncements taken over time from the writings of the Church Fathers. Although not correctly constituting a genre of its own, this corpus of misogynist literature was, nevertheless, resilient and compactly characterized by the obsessive recurrence of its repetitive examples, making this tradition an intricate network of absorbing relations between texts. Although not ideologically exempt in this, in the eagerness to make misogynist denunciations, citations were not infrequently decontextualized. A recurrent example of this was passages from Proverbs, when a damning reference to a woman, considered bad or strange, was considered by the writer without regard to the fact that an adjacent passage could well praise a good woman.68 This procedure found a relevant criticism in response to the misogyny of the time in the anonymous Dives and Pauper. At some point in the dialogue between these two characters, Pauper, in response to Dives’ censorship of women’s provocative clothing, agrees that this could be reprehensible not only to women but also to men. However, Pauper modifies the effect through recontextualization when he notes that many 68 Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 6–7.

52

Chapter Two

commentaries about women’s dressing costumes decontextualize biblical annotations. In Chapter XIII of the book, Pauper, referring to 1 Timothy 2:9–10, addresses Saint Paul’s order concerning women’s property to dress in respectable, modest, and sober clothing, not to braid their hair elaborately, and not to use gold, silver, pearls, or extravagantly expensive material. It also refers to the fact that Saint Peter says almost the same thing in 1 Peter 3:3–5, in which he commands men to respect their wives and to keep them in honor. However, when Dives says that women dressed in those days were disobeying the teachings of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Pauper protests that these apostles did not prohibit dressing extravagantly. What they forbade was women dressing ostentatiously out of vanity to induce people to lust or in a style that exceeded their position. Concerning this last aspect, it is well known that social statutes regulated dressing in the Middle Ages. However, much more disconcerting than this simple decontextualization in misogynist discourse is the manipulation of an entire quotation to extrapolate or nullify its meaning in the original context, resulting in a condemnatory stance toward women. This is the case with the verified partiality in condemnations of Bathsheba since the Bible does not imply whether she purposely seduced King David into the sin of adultery with her. Such derogatory pretexts have been a genuinely malicious trait of many misogynist commentators. Deeply rooted in a firmly prejudiced practice, many critics of the case between King David and Bathsheba, even when reexamining the issue relatively recently, have distrusted this woman’s moral integrity.69 The example of Bathsheba often became memorable in the understanding of the traditional misogynist disposition. It was sufficient to show that seduction was such a natural and historically imputable thing for women that they alone were primarily responsible for men’s sin. Walter Map, among others, defends this condition sharply in his letter of about 1180, in which the sender Valerius dissuades his addressee Rufinus from marriage. Because of the pseudonym, this letter did not receive the right authorship credits, as Valerius Maximus, the ancient Roman author of a book about remarkable deeds and sayings, was the alleged author. Eventually, however, Map claimed it as his own, inserting it in his voluminous work De nugis curialium (Of the trifles of courtiers, 12th century). In Map’s letter, David, alongside Samson and Solomon, is remembered as one of the familiar group of men demoralized by women of bad 69

Charles Conroy, 1–2 Samuel, 1–2 Kings (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1983), 115–116.

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

53

principles and character, a topic also addressed by Saint Jerome in Epistula 22, ad Eustochium (Letter 22, to Eustochium, 384).70 In the letter, Map makes it clear that, for a woman’s sake, David had inexorably fallen from adultery to murder, fulfilling the prophecy of Matthew 18:7 that says that scandals never happen by themselves. What Map meant, concerning the seduction of women, is that every iniquity is abundantly rich with evil followers, plaguing with abuse and destroying any house in which it enters. While admitting that Bathsheba remained silent, saying nothing wrong and inconvenient, she had become the spear that caused her perfect husband to fall, the arrow of death to her poor innocent man. Moreover, Map exposes a rhetorical reasoning that implies that a woman who fights so eloquently, like Samson’s Delilah, cannot be innocent, and nor can those who, like Bathsheba, triumph for the exposure of beauty, even involuntarily. Finally, he warns men that they must be closer to God than David was so as not to fall into the trap of female seduction.71 The compulsive and unconditional medieval misogynist virulence was careful, as in the case of Ancrene Riwle, to prove the intention of the seduction of Bathsheba. Meanwhile, works such as Dives and Pauper, presenting themselves in response to this misogyny, sympathized with the derogated condition of women, arguing in their favor. The episode of David and Bathsheba can be found in 2 Kings 11:1–27. Ancrene Riwle, a legacy of the misogynist Church Fathers, is an anonymous prose treatise written in the thirteenth century or earlier in Middle English. The unknown author addressed the young women who, by their free choice, used to lock themselves in convents to devote themselves to religious life. In many ways, what Ancrene Riwle advises, though sympathetically human, are warnings coming from the Fathers’ obsession to consider female beauty as a threat that should be counteracted by the good examples of women themselves. After exposing a daily prayer program in Part I, the author turns to the issue of controlling the senses of the body in Part II, beginning with the risk and danger presented in women’s wandering gaze, such as Dinah’s 70

Saint Jerome, “Letter 22, to Eustochium,” in The Principal Works of St St Jerome (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 6), ed. P. Schaff and trans. W. H. Fremantle (Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892), 100–137. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. 71 Walter Map, “The Letter of Valerius to Rufinus, against Marriage,” in De Nugis Curialium, Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. M. R. James, rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 287–313.

54

Chapter Two

and Eve’s damaging glances. Dinah had once been a negative motif in Saint Jerome. However, she had been even more negative in recent commentaries like those of Saint Bernard and Hugh of Saint-Victor, whose works were probably consulted by the author of Ancrene Riwle while writing his treatise.72 In Part II of the book, entitled “The Custody of the Senses,” the alleged incriminating intention of Bathsheba to purposely let herself be seen naked by King David exemplifies the aforementioned biblical metaphor of women as bare pits. As commented before, this same question of Bathsheba’s intention appears in Dives and Pauper. However, now it deals with women’s defense against the traditional misogynist attack in the episode. Thus, the book says that sinful lust deceived David and not Bathsheba herself.73 In addition to the judgments previously pointed out, women gained an attribution imputed to them, a kind of primate defect, the compulsory habit of always muttering that was associated with an abusive and licentious verbal incontinence74 of a mock language.75 The emphasis on this type of female incontinence, referring to her inability to maintain discretion and to move away from presumption, goes back, beyond biblical indications, to Saint John Chrysostom, who, in Homily IX about Saint Paul’s Letter to Timothy, blamed Eve for ruining everything the minute she opened her mouth in Paradise.76 Saint John Chrysostom studied law, leading a hermit’s life before being ordained. An influential commentator of the Scripture, he was remembered in the Middle Ages for advocating chastity and censoring the behavior of women. At the end of his career, he was fired from his office as Patriarch of Alexandria and was also exiled, in part because of his antagonism of severe moral rigor to Princess Eudoxia, although his voice remained one of the most powerful influences among the Church Fathers. His Homily IX defends the natural, theological, and moral superiority of men above women. This was firstly because, following the master and 72 Elizabeth Robertson, “The Rule of the Body: The Feminine Spirituality of the Ancrene Wisse,” in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings, ed. Sheila Fisher and Janet Halley (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 115–125. 73 Anonymous, Dives and Pauper, ed. P. Barnum, EETS, 280, I, pt. 2. (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), part 2, chap. XI. 74 Bloch, Medieval misogyny, 4–5. 75 Patterson, “For the Wyves Love of Bathe,” 660–661. 76 Saint John Chrysostom, “Homily IX,” in The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom on the Epistles of St Paul to Timothy, Titus and Philemon, Library of Fathers of the Catholic Church (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), 69–72.

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

55

primal reasoning of 1 Corinthians 11:9, he spread the Pauline principle that God did not create the man for the woman, but the other way around. Moreover, it happened this way in the Creation because God wanted man to have preeminence, both for the reason already indicated and because of what happened next, that is, the woman’s failure before the man’s. The woman wanted to teach the man in the beginning but ended up making him guilty of divine disobedience, ruining his paradisiacal excellence. Hence, Saint John Chrysostom concludes in a peremptory way that because the woman made no good use of her power over the man and of her equality with him, God made her submissive to him. Therefore, her desire should be solely and exclusively for man, who must rule over her.77 Although, in these examined misogynist texts, some consistent recurrences of some images and motifs may exist, this fact does not seem to constitute a systematic discursive organization with structural principles and patterns presiding over its expression. Nevertheless, some characteristics can be pointed out in this respect, giving some cohesion to this misogynist posture. One of them is that misogynist medieval treatises, such as Jehan Le Fèvre’s Les Lamentations de Matheolus, were not cohesively structured. Another is that misogynist invectives only aligned side-by-side without narrative concern in establishing a logical coherence, order, and meaning.78 Another feature that indicates some similarity among these medieval misogynist texts is the presence of a relative scarcity of models received from the ancient literary misogynist tradition. Authors often had to rely on models from other sectors of medieval writing, for example, the numerological criterion of the religious tradition. Despite this disregard for structuring, some traditional models of writing were appropriated by the discourse of medieval misogyny as the characteristically more usual and straightforward model of listing examples of women notable for their lust, often headed by Pasiphaë. This model, apparently derived from Ovid, also included the panegyric form, in which the good and virtuous biblical women served as a contrast, with a negative rhetorical effect, to denigrate the bad ones. Here, the heroine of the Book of Judith led a parade of remarkable women, renowned for the manly qualities already demanded by Saint Paul. Walter Map, in Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat, was one of the great promoters of this kind of model, managing to attract a massive amount of academic comments with educational proposals. 77

Saint John Chrysostom, “Homily IX,” 69–72. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Corbaccio, trans. Anthony K. Cassell (Urbana, IL/London: University of Illinois Press, 1975), xx. 78

56

Chapter Two

Alongside this listing model coming from Ovid, one of the roots of the ancient misogynist tradition influencing the Middle Ages, was another model that also came from an equally important root of this ancient tradition. This root was the enormous influence exerted by Juvenal’s Satire VI, which was a prototype of an antimatrimonial agenda, distinguished for presenting a comprehensive list of Roman women known and satirized for their impropriety for marriage.79 In this brief cast of models of medieval misogynist discourse, as in any analysis, Theophrastus’ supposed libel about the cunning and effective deterrence of marriage should not be missing. The success of Theophrastus’ Liber de nuptiis was undoubtedly due not only to his remarkable rhetorical property of concise conviction but also to its aura of authoritative antiquity. Incorporated into Saint Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum, the book makes wily misogynist comments for the enjoyment of women’s adversaries. This is the case, for example, with its comments on the impossibility of ensuring women’s fidelity because, if they were beautiful, they would attract a swarm of lovers, and if they were ugly, they would go looking for them. Adversus Jovininanum was, for the time being, a kind of little store of pieces of advice and warnings mainly about the disadvantages of marriage. However, it did not come up with a general catalog of these drawbacks, but rather a list of particular ones. Out of this list, the most glossed and criticized inconvenience of marriage focuses on examples of wives’ ways of speaking, leveling them all by their virulent sermons, whether rich or poor, beautiful or ugly. Whatever they were, one could only expect a flood of trouble. Also linked to this theme of the inconvenience of women’s speech was another model of misogynist discrimination that consisted of portraying them as compulsive complainants. With this vice, women portray themselves using an intolerable first-person discourse, such as the prototypical monologue of the wife in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath, of which a small exemplary exhibit can already be found in Theophrastus’ essay and Juvenal. Although much influenced by authors who belonged to the classical pagan and Christian roots of misogyny, many of Geoffrey Chaucer’s poems are narratives in defense of women. However, The Wife of Bath is an intermediate type between a properly misogynist text and a text considered as a response to misogyny. Three main parts divide its Prologue. The first deals with Saint Jerome’s discussion with Jovinian about marriage and virginity, in which some biblical ideas and texts appear 79

Juvenal, “Satire VI,” v. 242–243, 72.

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

57

manipulated to defend arguments. In this part, the wife, situated amid the pros and cons of the discussion about women, turns out to be a stereotype of the intellectually failed woman. This kind of ambivalence continues in the second part. It is a blatant account of her first three husbands, presenting a simply brilliant response to Theophrastus’ insults. However, as Jill Mann comments, the great pull of this controversy functions at the same time as a kind of demonstration of what female threats can be and what male oppression can mean, demonstrating how each of these situations depends on the other.80 The third and last part of the Prologue deals with comments made on the other spouses of the wife of Bath and seems to bring about a resurgence of the misogynist attitude presented in the book. This posture is exemplified in the ironic situation of the fifth husband, a clergyman charged for daily recitals to his wife of the content of a huge book titled Of Wkkide Wyves. Consequently, beset by a veritable parade of hostile androcentric attacks, the wife finally rebels against the husband and the book, tearing three pages from it. All of this serves, finally, to confirm the women’s customary revenge on misogynist procedures, but it is a revenge that reinforces their derogated status quo, since the retaliation takes place at the expense of women’s conformation into a caricature of a philistine grudge that characterizes her gender. In addition to Chaucer, a little information about this strategy of the first-person wife’s complaint or lamentation can be found in his precursors, as commented before, such as Juvenal, Theophrastus, Gautier Le Leu’s parts of La Veuve (13th century), Jehan Le Fèvre’s Les Lamentations de Matheolus, and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio (c. 1355). Les Lamentations de Matheolus is a translation of a subtle poem, Liber lamentationum Matheoluli (Book of the Lamentations of Little Matheolus), written in about 1295 by Mathieu de Boulogne. Mathieu states that his reservations about wives and women in general, were the result of his own experience, his unhappy marriage to a widow, which had cost him a successful career as a clergyman and lawyer. According to him, this marriage had been a breach of canon law, which prohibited non-minor clerics from marrying, describing the marriage of a priest to a widow as bigamy. Deposed and humiliated, he pejoratively adopts the diminutive of himself, Matheolulus, finally discovering that his dear widow was not worth the sacrifice. Matheolus’ bitter and maliciously wise lamentations are a result of the complicated and challenging conditions in which he was living. Despite its 80 Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 79.

58

Chapter Two

entangled plot and sensationalist tone of language, the book did not have a very wide circulation at the time. However, there is evidence that people read it along with Theophrastus in the late fourteenth century. Perhaps even Deschamps and his friends were also interested in Le Fèvre because he had already translated De vetula (On the Old Woman) by pseudo-Ovid, whose subject dealt with an old pimping prostitute, the kind intermittently satirized by Mathieu. In any case, Le Fèvre’s version of Liber lamentationum Matheoluli proved to be an effective propagation of the satirical tradition against women. Moreover, it ensured Matheolus’ name was suitable to follow Jean de Meun’s in the history of misogyny against women in the fifteenth century. It is also probably the text by Le Fèvre to which Christine de Pizan refers at the beginning of Le Livre de la Cité des Dames.81 She looks with disapproval on Le Fèvre’s work for being a book that deals with its subject in a frivolous manner, allegedly lacking a good reputation. So de Pizan purposely puts it aside to focus on more serious matters, not identifying herself, as she says, in the book. Even if this confession were true, it is likely that she found more encouragement in Le Fèvre’s next book, Le Livre de Leesce, a systematic refutation of Matheolus’ claims about women. In Book I of Les Lamentations de Matheolus, Le Fèvre presents his translation. However, he soon leaves the text and adopts the voice of the Master (Magister) Mathieu, reproaching the public disgrace caused by his marriage to Perrette. She was an extremely shrewd widow whose characteristics of demonic nature, common to women, had complicated everything. Because of this, the narrator states he wrote the poem guided by the Furies, not by the Muses. Thus, the anger moves the narrator to satirize Saint Paul when the apostle says that it is better to marry than to burn. Parodically, he states that it is better for each man to have a lover than to marry and cry. Mathieu recalls how Perrette’s beauty deceived him. However, the sight of all that beauty became ugliness and obscured his knowledge of that viperine malice. In Les Lamentations de Matheolus, the passage that talks about the feminine politics of bed management is anthological. In this respect, Perrette is the perfect teacher. To obtain her husband’s private secrets, she, in a leixa pren movement and a prostituted attitude of offering and refusing her body, finally wins the husband. Overwhelmed by a blackmailing dilemma, he eventually tells her everything, his entire and precious secrets.82 81 82

Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, I.1.1. Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, II.1107–1242.

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

59

A similar female procedure in a blackmailing first-person discourse of a married woman is found in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio (The Corbaccio). Boccaccio was an author who considered women an alwaysexciting topic, writing an entire volume on famous women entitled De claris mulieribus (Famous Women), a kind of biographical dictionary of celebrated women of pagan culture. In Boccaccio’s novels, there is often a kind of Don Juanism in his attitude, which is a combination of admiration, desire, and dissolute cynicism toward women. Il Corbaccio—perhaps meaning Bad Raven, alluding to a fable in which the bird tries to hide its ugliness under a peacock’s feathers—is not a novel, but a biting experiment cast in pure contempt for females. Greatly influenced by Juvenal’s Satire VI, however, he goes beyond that, drawing on a wide range of misogynist texts, which also appear in a personal anthology or florilegium known by the name of Zibaldone laurenziano written before 1350. Il Corbaccio’s narrator, parodying the medieval model of the dreamy vision of courtly love, feels overwhelmed by a fantasy that translates into an insatiable love for a widowed woman. However, in this vision full of mellifluous images, he dreams of a landscape of desolate purgatory, where a grave and Dantesque character, the Spirit of the widow’s husband, ridicules the fantasy of the narrator’s golden love by savagely dismantling women in general and widows in particular. Il Corbaccio, besides being a classic case of sentimental narrative—where the absent woman is the center of discussion and target of verbal abuse, being also slightly ornate of intelligence—, is also a classic development of a subcategory of misogyny directed at the old woman or widow. Boccaccio becomes particularly interesting for his strategic expedients in giving misogynist conventions a twofold aspect, that is, at the same time as he derogates women as a general category of gender, he despises them with a treatment of particular circumstances. Therefore, his satirical criticism of women affects them as a gender and, at the same time, as a species, constituting this derogation as individuals in a tactic similar to that also employed in Jean de Meun’s monologue of Le Jaloux, an attempt to update and give individual color to the conventional invective. Traits of intertextuality give the book a prose writing style antithetical to Dante’s Vita Nuova. Furthermore, the intertextual correspondences of Il Corbaccio’s narrative with influential traditional misogynist texts are quite evident, especially concerning the texts of Juvenal, Saint Jerome, Jehan Le Fèvre, and Andreas Capellanus. The following commentaries from Il Corbaccio dealing with the control and fights of spouses serve to focus on this problem, previously considered for

60

Chapter Two

Le Fèvre’s Les Lamentations de Matheolus. The narrator says that the wives, like fast and hungry foxes, occupy their husbands’ properties in a mad rush, fighting with everyone in the house. The selection of references made in this chapter about misogyny in the Middle Ages is a succinct list of authors and works. It could include other notable names such as Hildebert of Tours, Hugh of Fouilloy, Peter of Bois, and many others like Juan Ruiz, Cecco d’Ascoli, and Deschamps.83 As Christine de Pizan observed in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, there was a massive current of this writing to show that medieval literary culture seemed univocal in its denunciation of femininity.84 Some, perhaps guilty of being light on the subject, may consider that the practice of the misogynist discourse during the medieval period was merely a game representing a simple custom or taste of denunciation for the sake of denunciation itself. That misogyny was a game formed of rhetorical formulas or even a suitable stage or theater for the demonstration of skills and literary endowments. Perhaps it is in this sense that John of Salisbury, commenting on writers’ taste for speaking against the frivolity of sex at any time, went so far as to wish that misogyny might merely have been a figment of their imaginations. Contrary to this comment, however, he concluded that women were creatures who were easily infuriated and nurtured with hate.85 Perhaps no other writer than Jehan Le Fèvre came so close to the conclusion that medieval misogyny was a kind of sport. Claiming to have extended his arguments about women to a logical conclusion, he failed to exempt himself from the commonplaces and similes coined, since time immemorial, to represent the female figure.86 The following commentaries from Les Lamentations de Matheolus serve to show that medieval misogyny was a representation of reality based on reiterations or discursive recitations. This kind of representation happens when Le Fèvre, in his reflections, wonders, for a moment, if his conclusions are not objectionable and his words devoid of truth and reason. If some women are evil, perverse, and abnormal, this does not mean that all are equally like this, nor that, on the whole, they are a reason for general disapproval. After all, proceeding with this judgment would arrive illogically at a generalization with only partially valid results. 83 Gloria K. Fiero, Wendy Pfeffer, and Mathé Allain, eds. and trans., Three Medieval Views of Women: “La Contenance des Fames,”Le Bien des Fames,” “Le Blasme des Fames” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 84 Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, I.1.1. 85 John of Salisbury, Policratici sive De nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum, ed. C. C. Webb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), 360. 86 Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, II.2589–2648.

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

61

However, after reflecting on this, Le Fèvre says that his book expresses his heart’s pain. Thus, it should exclude nothing but extend his argument to its conclusion, if not logical, at least extreme, that is to say, that no good women exist. From then on, he relies on passages from the Bible to add further value and credibility to his conclusion. Le Fèvre comments that Solomon, in Proverbs 31:10, bases his opinion on asking who could find a virtuous woman. Commenting that there is no woman worth anything, he says that there is ample evidence that women have deceived all the great men of the world, for whom common sense, riches, and reason were worth nothing in the face of the unreasonableness put to them by women. In this respect, he says that the commonplaces and similes practiced by the discourse of misogyny, which are his weapons in the struggle, beautifully decorate his speech.87 However, what may also lead to the consideration that the misogynist attitudes of many medieval texts might be a game is the example of Jehan Le Fèvre’s procedure. Proving that he could play on both sides, both against and in favor of women, he dismissed the accusations against the wife of Les Lamentations de Matheolus shortly after writing them, refuting them one by one in Le Livre de Leesce. Before him, Marbod of Rennes had exemplified this duality in De meretrice and De matrona (The Good Woman), which, respectively, constituting Chapters III and IV of Liber decem capitulorum, pair attacks on and defenses of women. However, considering the exercise of misogyny discussed throughout this chapter, this practice being a game or sport still does not exempt it from the burden of discrimination and violent ideological cuts. Moreover, this happens because women were always the victim of a subjection process, objects framed by male players, who were arrogated in prerogatives of their gender and positioned in a control and dominance situation. In defense of the virtuous properties of some illustrious ancient women—similar to Abelard in Letter 6, De auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium (On the Origin of Nuns)—Marbod of Rennes comments in De matrona that zeal for virtue is more praiseworthy in the weak sex and its failures are more easily forgiven. However, his defense did not seem to challenge the prevailing views on women’s inferiority. Continuing the alleged defense of women in a rhetorical mode that ironically produced the opposite effect, Marbod invokes the example of the Virgin Mary, asking what man can match her worth, although he says that this comparison should be set aside because she is a unique example. 87

Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, II.2589–2648

62

Chapter Two

Indeed, this disqualification of Marbod is strongly attested in the misogynist discourse, such as in Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio.88 Continuing his tricky defense of women, he says that books mention a number of them who have shown the same courage as men or surpassed them in this regard. Because of their brave hearts, they deserved a just reward and well-deserved praise. In this respect, he mentions the biblical cases of Sarah, Rebekah, Esther, Judith, Naomi, Rachel, and Anna, regarded as seven stars produced by the ancient times who equaled or surpassed men in their virtues. Judith is mentioned in particular for her remarkable achievement that no man dared to try. The heroine—after returning from the assassination of King Holofernes and security had been assured to the city of Bethulia—expelled the defeated enemy from the other cities. Judith’s sensational liberation of the city of Bethulia, narrated in the Vulgate, Book of Judith 12–15, fascinated people throughout the entire Middle Ages. She murdered the enemy of her people, the tyrant Holofernes, beheading him with her sword in the tent which she allowed him to enter. Another case of remarkable eternal notoriety involved Queen Esther, who was notorious for her courage. Despite being married to a cruel tyrant, she was not afraid, at the risk of her own life, to enter the door through which no one was allowed to enter without being summoned. Esther took this risk by presenting herself to plead with her husband, King Ahasuerus, on behalf of the Jews when Aman threatened to persecute them, thereby reversing the decree. It is also necessary to remember that Marbod of Rennes describes aspects and facts involving all women cited, always seeking historicity in tradition and the Bible.89 Even considering that misogyny, as practiced in the Middle Ages, was merely a game for the exercise of rhetorical skills, this still presented the risk of underestimating and devaluing an issue of substantial social, historical, cultural, and material appeal. Although recognizing that there was a taste for debate and controversy in the treatment of misogyny in the Middle Ages and a playful warlike disposition between the opposite sexes, there has been much biased ideological and political provocation in this confrontation to consider it simply as a non-serious game and sport. In this case, it is sufficient to remember that, as a conclusion of this misogynist debate, it resulted, among other things, in the incrimination of the female responsibility in the Fall and Original Sin and, hence, the continued exclusion of women from public service and life. 88

Boccaccio, The Corbaccio, 32–33. Marbod of Rennes, “De matrona,” in Liber decem capitulorum, ed. Rosario Leotta (Rome: Herder, 1984), chap. IV.

89

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

63

In the best and most innocent case, misogyny, as manifested in the Middle Ages, can be considered as a simple exercise of dialectical and rhetorical skills, not so reprehensible for its inconsequence, frivolity, and harmlessness. If this is the case, then what about the indignation and revolt of various medieval writers about this discriminatory and derogatory practice of the female reality? However, in the widespread misogynist medieval discourse, there also existed a counterpart to this sexist culture that, though timid, was a kind of response defending the weakened sex. However, before proposing an introductory summary of this kind of literature in defense of women that existed in the Middle Ages alongside its overwhelming misogynist counterpart, the following selection may be representative. It includes the names of authors and works already discussed throughout this chapter, whose bibliographic indications are in the reference sections of this book. As contributions from Patristic literature, the following could be cited: De cultu feminarum (On the Appearance of Women) by Tertullian (c. 160–c. 225); Homily IX by Saint John Chrysostom (c. 347–407); De viduis (On widows, c. 378), De Paradiso (On Paradise, c. 375), Expositio Evangelii Secundum Lucam (Commentary on Luke, 388–389) by Saint Ambrose (c. 339–397); Adversus Jovinianum (Against Jovinian, c. 393), Epistula 22, ad Eustochium (Letter 22, to Eustochium, 384), Epistula 77, ad Oceanum (Letter 77, to Oceanus, 399) by Saint Jerome (c. 342–420); Confissiones (Confessions, 398), De Genesi ad litteram (The literal meaning of Genesis, 401–416), De civitate Dei (City of God, 412–427) by Saint Augustine (354–430); and Etymologiae (Etymologies) by Saint Isidore of Seville (c. 570–636). The medieval legacy of this Patristic literature includes Monologium by Saint Anselm (1033–1109); Decretum (12th century) by Gratian; Historia calamitatum (The History of My Calamities) by Abelard (1079– 1142); Letter 3 by Heloise (1101–1164); Summa Theologiae (1266–1272) by Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274); Tristan (c. 1210) by Gottfried von Strassburg (died c. 1210); Historia destructionis Troiae (History of the Destruction of Troy, 1287) by Guido delle Colonne (13th–14th centuries); and Ancrene Riwle (Rule for Anchoresses, 13th century) by an anonymous author. Besides these contributions, in the wake of medieval misogyny, the satirical tradition in Medieval Latin could also be taken into consideration, represented by Vita Secundi Philosophi (The Life of the Second Philosopher, end of 12th century) by an anonymous author; De meretrice (On prostitutes) in Líber decem capitulorum (Book of Ten Chapters) by Marbod of Rennes (c. 1035–1123); Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum

64

Chapter Two

philosophum nec uxorem ducat (The Letter of Valerius to Rufinus, against Marriage, c. 1180) by Walter Map (1140–c. 1209); De amore (On Love, c. 1185) by Andreas Capellanus (12th–13th centuries); and De coniuge non ducenda (Against marriage, c. 1222–1250) by an anonymous author. As examples of the so-called woman defaming stories, the following could be cited: El libro de los engaños y los asayamientos de las mugeres (The Book of the Wiles of Women, 1253) by an anonymous author and La Veuve (The Widow, 13th century) by Gautier Le Leu. And finally, there are the so-called vernacular adaptations of the late Middle Ages, exemplified by Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance de la Rose) by Jean de Meun (c. 1240–c. 1305); Il Corbaccio (The Corbaccio, c. 1355) by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375); Les Lamentations de Matheolus (The Lamentations of Matheolus, c. 1371–1372) by Jehan Le Fèvre (13th–14th centuries); and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue (c.1390–1395) by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1390–1395).

References Abelárd, Pierre. “Theologia Christiana.” In Petri Abaelardi opera theological, Corpus christianorum (continuatio mediaevalis), vol. 12. Edited by E. M. Buytaert. Brepols: Turnhout, 1969. https://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/resources/abelard/Theologia_christ iana.txt. Accessed March 17, 2021. Allen, Sr Prudence, RSM. The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC–AD 1250. Montreal: Eden Press, 1985. Ambrose, St. Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel. Translated by J. J. Savage. FOC XLII. New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1961. Andreas Capellanus. Andreas Capellanus On Love. Edited and translated by P. G. Walsh. London: Duckworth, 1982. Anonymous. Ancrene Riwle. Translated by M. B. Salu. London: Burns & Oates, 1955. Anonymous. Book of the Wiles of Women. Translated by John E. Keller. University of North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures 27. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956. Anonymous. Dives and Pauper. Edited by P. Barnum. EETS 280, I, part 2. London: Oxford University Press, 1980. Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologiae, vol. XIII. Edited by Thomas Gilby, OP, translated by Edmund Hill OP and R. J. Batten. London: Blackfriars, in conjunction with Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963.

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

65

Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologiae, vol. XXXIV. Edited by Thomas Gilby, translated by R. J. Benton. London: Blackfriars, in conjunction with Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1975. Aristotle. Generation of Animals. Translated by A. L. Peck. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943. https://archive.org/details/generationofanim00arisuoft/page/100/mode/ 2up. Accessed February 12, 2021. Aristotle. On the Generation of Animals (De Generatione Animalium). Translated by Arthur Pratt. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1908. https://onemorelibrary.com/index.php/en/books/science/book/biology204/on-the-generation-of-animals-de-generatione-animalium-745. Accessed February 12, 2021. Augustine, St. The Trinity. Translated by S. McKenna. FOC XLV. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1963. Benton, John F. “Trotula: Women’s Problems, and the Professionalism of Medicine in the Middle Ages.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 59 (1985): 30–53. Bloch, R. Howard. “Medieval Misogyny.” Representations 20 (1987): 1– 24. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Concerning Famous Women. Translated by G. A. Guarino. London: Allen & Unwin, 1964. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Corbaccio. Translated by Anthony K. Cassell. Urbana, IL and London: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Borresen, Kari. Subordination and Equivalence: The Nature and Role of Women in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Translated by C. H. Talbot. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1981. Capes, William W., ed. Registrum Johannis Trefnant, episcopi herefordensis. A. D. MCCCLXXXIX-MCCCCIV [The Register of John Trefnant, Bishop of Hereford]. Hereford: Wilson and Phillips, 1914. Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Wife of Bath.” In The Canterbury Tales, translated by David Wright, 219–239. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale: An Interlinear Translation. The Middle English Text, General Edition. Edited by Larry D. Benson. The Riverside Chaucer. Houghton Miflin Company. https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/wbt-par.htm. Accessed February 17, 2021. Conroy, Charles. 1–2 Samuel, 1–2 Kings. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1983.

66

Chapter Two

D’Avray, David L., and Martin Tausche. “Marriage Sermons in ad status Collections of the Central Middle Ages.” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 47 (1980): 71–119. Delhaye, Philippe. “Le Dossier Antimatrimonial de l’Adversus Jovinianum et son Influence sur Quelques Écrits latins du XIIe siècle.” Mediaeval Studies 13 (1951): 65–86. Fiero, Gloria K., Wendy Pfeffer, and Mathé Allain, eds. and trans. Three Medieval Views of Women: “La Contenance des Fames,” “Le Bien des Fames,” “Le Blasme des Fames.” New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Galen. Galen: On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body. Translated by Margaret Tallmadge May. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968. Gower, John. “A Lover’s Confession.” In The English Works of John Gower, vol. 1, edited by G. C. Macaulay, 354–355. EETS 81–82. London: Oxford University Press, 1900. Gratianus. Corpus Iuris Canonici, part 2: Decretum Magistri Gratiani. Edited by Aemilius Friedberg. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1879. The Holy Bible. Translated from the Vulgata Latina. Belfast, 1892. Isidore of Seville, St. Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi: Etymologiarum sive Originum libri xx. Edited by W. M. Lindsay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Isidoro de Sevilla, St. Etimologías, vol. 2. Bilingual edition translated by J. Oroz y M. A. Marcos. Madrid: B. A. C., 1982–1983. Jacquart, Danielle and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Translated by M. Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. Jerome, St. “Against Helvidius.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 758–778. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. Jerome, St. “Against Jovinian.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 779–907. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. Jerome, St. “Letter 22, to Eustochium.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 100–137. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf.

The Defamation of Women in Medieval Literature

67

John Chrysostom, St. “Homily IX.” In The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom on the Epistles of St Paul to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, 69–72. Library of Fathers of the Catholic Church. Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843. John of Salisbury. Policratici sive De nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum. Edited by C. C. Webb, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. Juvenal. “Satire VI.” In The Satires of Juvenal, translated by R. Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958. Le Fèvre, Jehan. Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce. Edited by A.-G. Van Hamel, 2 vols. Paris: Bouillon, 1892–1905. Le Leu, Gautier. “The Widow.” In Fabliaux: Ribald Tales from the Old French, edited by Robert Hellman and Richard Ó Gorman. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965. Lemay, Helen. “Some Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Lectures on Female Sexuality.” International Journal of Women’s Studies 1 (1978): 391–400. Mann, Jill. Geoffrey Chaucer. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Map, Walter. “The Letter of Valerius to Ruffinus, against Marriage.” In De Nugis Curialium, Courtiers’ Trifles, edited and translated by M. R. James, Rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors, 287–313. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Marbod of Rennes. “De matrona.” In Liber decem capitulorum, edited by Rosario Leotta. Rome: Herder, 1984. Marbod of Rennes. “De meretrice.” In Liber decem capitulorum, edited by Rosario Leotta. Rome: Herder, 1984. Mclaughlin, Eleanor. “Les Femmes et l’hérésie médiévale: un problème dans l’histoire de la spiritualité.” Concilium 111 (1976): 73–90. Ovid. “Amores.” In Ovid: The Erotic Poems, translated by P. Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Owst, Gerald R. Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933. Patterson, Lee. “For the Wyves love of Bathe: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales.” Speculum 58 (1983): 656–694. Pitts, B. A., trans. The Fifteen Joys of Marriage. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Pizan, Christine de. The Book of the City of Ladies. Translated by E. J. Richards. New York: Persea Books, 1982.

68

Chapter Two

Pliny. The History of the World Commonly Called the Natural History of C. Plinius Secundus. Edited by P. Turner, translated by P. Holland. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. Pope Innocent III. Lotario dei Segni. De miseria condicionis humane. Edited and translated by R. E. Lewis. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1978. Pratt, Robert A. “Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves: Medieval Antimatrimonial Propaganda in the Universities.” Annuele Mediaevale 3 (1962): 5–27. Richard de Bury. Philobiblon. Edited by Michael MacLagan, translated by E. C. Thomas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1960. Robertson, Elizabeth. “The Rule of the Body: The Feminine Spirituality of the Ancrene Wisse.” In Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings, edited by Sheila Fisher and Janet Halley, 109– 134. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989. Rogers, Katharine M. The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966. Rousselle, A. Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity. Translated by F. Pheasant. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Sale, Antoine de La. The Fifteen Joys of Marriage. Translated by B. A. Pitts. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Schmitt, Charles B. “Theophrastus in the Middle Ages.” Viator 2 (1971): 259–263. Spencer, Richard. “The Treatment of Women in the Roman de la Rose, the Fabliaux and the Quinze Joies de Marriage.” Marche romane 28 (1978): 207–214. Tertullian. “The Apparel of Women,” translated by E. Quain. In Tertullian: Disciplinary, Moral and Ascetical Works, translated by E. J. Daly and E. A. Quain. FOC XL. New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959. Walker, Barbara G. The Woman Dictionary of Symbols & Sacred Objects. San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988.

CHAPTER THREE THE MISOGYNIST LITERARY TRADITION OF THE CHURCH FATHERS Saint Jerome Saint Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, c. 347–c. 420), along with Tertullian, Saint Ambrose, and many others, can be considered one of the Church Fathers genuinely responsible for the theological and moral systematization of virginity and celibacy recommended by sacred teachings as an ideal and superior state for the true and profitable Christian life of salvation. However, Saint Jerome’s position and severe reproachful remarks regarding marriage, the fulfillment of which comes at the expense of the purity and moral and spiritual chastity of the true Christian, did not come ex nihilo. There are obvious reasons that, sought in the political and ideological context of his day, explain the need for such deep-rooted ascetic preaching as defended by this Patristic founder of the Church. The fame of Saint Jerome during the Middle Ages lies not only in the fact that he was an exponential figure in the propaganda campaign for virginity and against marriage: he was also a significant influence on what became the legacy of medieval Patristic literature. Moreover, his name was much revered for producing the well-known Vulgate, the standard Bible translation into Latin. However, despite all the sympathy that the saint acquired within traditional Christianity, his image became quite controversial due to an attitude of radical and bitter pronouncements regarding severe asceticism. His controversial sarcastic tone in defending strict points of view eventually provoked much resentment during his life in Rome, the scene of incipient Christianity. Moreover, Saint Jerome’s ingrained political and ideological order of material dispossession clashed with the postures of recent converts still very fond of mores of the paganism from which they became dissidents. As alluded to before, perhaps Saint Jerome’s loudest alarm to his fellow believers was the vigorous, if not obsessive, continuity that he gave to Saint Ambrose and other Church Fathers’ arguments proposing the moral and spiritual superiority of a good-willed life of virginity.

70

Chapter Three

Although Saint Jerome, surrounded by a wave of censure against the excesses of his radicalism, was forced to leave Rome for the East in 385, a friend by the name of Pamaquius contacted him about eight years later. On behalf of his ascetic sympathizers, Saint Jerome agreed to stand against a disturbance that was being caused in the city by the teachings of a certain monk named Jovinian. The following are the four points that aroused Saint Jerome’s courage against the arguments of Jovinian, whom he called the Epicurus of Christianity, in Book I.4 and I.1 of Adversus Jovinianum (Against Jovinian).1 In this treatise, the saint expounds, with remarkable excellence in his controversial rhetorical capacity, his arguments against what this heretic of the religion defended as crucial for the understanding of a new Christian doctrine. Jovinian’s first point that aroused Saint Jerome’s extreme reaction regarded what the monk defended concerning baptized Christians, saying that everyone could earn equal merit whether married, single, or widowed. The next three points expounded by the irreverent position of Jovinian, attacked with equal vehemence by Saint Jerome, concerned the considerations that the devil could not overcome sincere baptized Christians; fasting life was no more meritorious than grateful acceptance of food and drink, and a baptized believer would receive no different treatment in heaven. The balance of these real heresies expounded by Jovinian was that their author, as might be expected from such an unreasonable position against the Christian faith, was strictly excommunicated.2 While Saint Jerome was scandalized by the notion of placing sexual abstinence spiritually on the same level as marriage, he found an opportunity to destroy Jovinian’s arguments, especially the first point mentioned before, in the aforementioned Adversus Jovinianum. This treatise of Saint Jerome, composed of two books against the arguments defended by Jovinian, came to a controversial point of view that had some counterproductive effects. While Pamaquius tried to remove the copies from circulation, the respectable Saint Augustine offered to write his praising treatise on a good marriage. However, as it happened, Saint Jerome’s position on the subject gained more recognition thanks, it 1

S. Eusebii Hieronymi, Adversus Jovinium. https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/04z/z_0347-0420__Hieronymus__ Adversus_Jovinianum_Libri_Duo__MLT.pdf.html, accessed February 15, 2021. The references are from this edition, and they indicate the respective books and sections in which they are in the original. They can be checked in Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” 779–907. 2 John Norman Davidson Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies (London: Duckworth, 1975), 181–182.

The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers

71

seems, to his scholarship, insight, and intelligence in incorporating sources of the classical tradition on the same subject into his treatise. Besides these credentials, the work gained a reputation, mainly due to its inclusion in a memorable passage of great misogynist vehemence, namely, that wise men should not marry. Saint Jerome had attributed the passage to Theophrastus, a celibatarian honored as an authority on the subject. Therefore, thanks to this seemingly innocent ideological inclusion, Saint Jerome’s treatise remained immortal in posterity for many writers.3 The first six chapters of Saint Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum are essential for the treatment of the subject that he proposes. At the same time that he carefully denies that he totally discredits marriage, he places it third in the spiritual realm after virginity and widowhood. The concept of marriage is somehow relative to Saint Jerome. His method is controversial. His opponent appealed to Corinthians 1.7, among other scriptural evidence, to substantiate his view that baptized Christians could obtain equal spiritual merit, whether they were married, single, or widowed. Rhetorically discordant, Saint Jerome based his counterattack on exploring the inferences of this same biblical text.

Adversus Jovinianum In Book 1.7 of Adversus Jovinianum, Saint Jerome exposes the inferiority of marriage, the disturbances and distractions that wives bring to their husband’s lives, especially to their devoted ones. He calls the attention of men to consider the main point of evidence of Saint Paul’s preaching in 1 Corinthians 7:1—that it is not good for a man to touch a woman. Furthermore, Saint Jerome develops a reasoning on the subject by employing the rhetoric of the logic of the opposites. He says that if it is good not to touch a woman, it is therefore bad to touch one because there is no opposite to goodness but evil. In this order of ideas, he goes on to say that if it is bad to touch a woman and yet receive forgiveness, this concession is to prevent a worse evil. However, the saint concludes that sometimes it is recommendable to allow something of a slight degree of badness just to prevent something worse. Saint Jerome continues his defense of celibacy by saying that Saint Paul would never have added that each man should have his wife unless he had previously used these words to avoid fornication. In this sense, he says that once one denies fornication, Saint Paul would not say to every man to 3

Phillippe Delhaye, “Le Dossier antimatrimonial de l’ Adversus Jovinianum et son Influence sur Quelques Écrits Latins du XIIe siècle,” Mediaeval Studies 13 (1951): 65–86; Schmitt, “Theophrastus in the Middle Ages,” 259–263.

72

Chapter Three

have his wife. It is clear here that marriage would only be justified to avoid sexual licentiousness. To clarify his proposition, Saint Jerome says that this resembles the situation of someone who had to establish that it is good to eat wheat bread and, to prevent a hungry person from devouring cow dung, that person should eat barley. And, wondering if it turns out that the fault of eating wheat barley is preferred to avoid eating excrement, he concludes that what does not allow comparison with what is bad and eclipsed because something else is preferred is naturally good. Here, the similarity of reasoning of Saint Jerome with Tertullian’s De exhortatione castitatis (On Exhortation to Chastity)4 and Saint Ambrose’s De viduis (On Widows)5 is evident, except concerning the dismal image of the excrement. The analogy here with marriage is that the virginal state is always the state of excellence and that marriage would be accepted only to avoid something worse happening. Continuing to develop this theme of celibate chastity, Saint Jerome acknowledges, taking note of the Apostle’s common sense, that he does not say that it is good not to have a wife. He says that it is good not to touch a woman as if there were danger even in touching as if the one who touches a woman would not escape from her who hunts his precious life and causes the young man’s judgment to fly away, as can be read in Proverbs 6:26. Next, Saint Jerome, referring to Proverbs 6:27–28, compares the woman’s touching with the fire that someone holds dangerously tight to their chest or walks over its embers. Commenting on this, he says that just as the one who touches the fire burns instantly, the fiery nature of man and woman reveals itself by approaching it, and the gender difference is evidenced. Saint Jerome exemplifies this idea by referring to pagan fables that explain how Mithras and Erichthonius generated from the ground, from the stone or earth, through vain lust. Mithras was a Persian sun god adopted by the Romans. Ericthonius was a mythical king of Athens, supposedly conceived when Hephaestus’ semen fell to the ground as he struggled to rape Athena. Continuing in this commentary on the ludicrousness of lust, Saint Jerome cites the case of Joseph. Because of the danger of sex and the Egyptian woman who wished to touch him, he fled from her hands and, as if bitten by a rabid dog and fearing that the poison 4

Tertullian, “De exhortatione castitatis,” in Tertullian: Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage, trans. W. P. le Saint, Ancient Christian Writers XIII (Westminster, MD: Newman Press; London: Longmans, Green, 1951). 5 Saint Ambrose, “On Widows,” in The Principal Works of St Ambrose, trans. H. de Romestin, Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Oxford: Parker & Co.; New York: Christian Literature Co., 1896), X, 398–399.

The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers

73

might spread, threw away the cloak she had touched. As can be read in Genesis 39:7, Joseph repulsed Potiphar’s wife’s advances by pulling himself from her hands as she tore at his garments, accusing him later of attempted rape. Saint Jerome recommends, however conditionally, that man and woman should not refuse each other except by mutual consent and the length of time they should devote themselves to prayer, meaning that they should not refuse the debt of reciprocal sexual gratification, as can be read in 1 Corinthians 7:4 and Gratian’s Decretum. Next, he says that nothing surpasses prayer in excellence for man and woman because nothing, however good, should prevent prayer or allowing the body of Christ to be received. Moreover, on this point, he comes to the conclusion that in proposing to perform the function of husband, one fails in unrestraint. Recalling that the same apostle, in another passage, orders that one should pray always, Saint Jerome says that if one is ready to pray always, it follows that one should never be in bondage to marriage because, when surrendering to its duty, it is not possible to pray. Therefore, a life devoted to God, and at the same time dedicated to prayer, cannot be harmonious and have proper space in married life. In the context of these comments, one wonders if Saint Jerome was expecting husbands to burst with anger at this view of marriage and sex as an impediment to prayer. Despite the indisposition and commitment to this view, religious people greatly appreciated Saint Jerome in the entire Christendom. In the following, it is clear that Saint Jerome emphasizes Saint Paul’s representation of marriage as a kind of optional permission of what traditional antimatrimonial doctrine prescribed. Thus, in Book I.9 of Adversus Jovinianum, Saint Jerome addresses the singles and widowers, stating that it is good for them to continue in this way. However, within that Pauline idea of conditional permission, he says that if they cannot contain themselves, it would be better to marry than burn in the fire of adultery, as can be read in 1 Corinthians 7:8–9. Referring to Saint Paul, Saint Jerome says that after he granted married people the enjoyment of marriage and pointed out its desires or what it can allow, the Apostle then considered the case of unmarried and widowed people and set before them his own life for imitation, calling them happy if they continued like that. Returning to Saint Paul’s words, Saint Jerome comments that if men do not restrain themselves, then they should marry in order to avoid fornication, as stated earlier, and temptation by Satan because of their unrestraint. Moreover, he goes on to say that Saint Paul gives a reason when he says that if they cannot contain themselves, it is better to let them

74

Chapter Three

marry because it is better to marry than to be burned. In that case, the reason why it is better to get married, Saint Jerome says, is because it is worse to burn. Saint Jerome completes this rhetorical and moralizing reasoning around the image of fire by saying that if the burning lust disappears, then Saint Paul would not say that it is better to marry. In this argumentative sequence, composed of an arrogant syllogism, Saint Jerome says that the word ‘better’ always implies a comparison with something worse. It is not necessarily a good thing or incapable of comparison. Thus, he supposes that Saint Paul meant that it was better to have one eye than none or to stand on one foot and support the rest of the body with a stick than to crawl with broken legs. Therefore, the result proposed to understand all of Saint Jerome’s reasoning about the comparison between the state of chastity and marriage is that marriage is an evil avoided in the pursuit of excellence of the pure, devoted single life. If this is impossible, it is better to surrender to married life than to fall into adultery and fornication. Ironically, the understanding here is that marriage is a state of fornication conditionally permitted to prevent further moral and spiritual deterioration. In this reasoning, Saint Jerome elaborates his interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7:10–24 and comments on what Saint Paul says about Christ’s qualification of virginity. Thus, Book I.12 of Adversus Jovinianum says that Christ loves those who are virgins by their own will more than the others because they voluntarily give what nobody ordained them to do. This argument indicates that it is greater grace to offer what one is not obligated to give than to surrender to what is required. The Apostles, contemplating the burden of a wife, exclaimed that if such a heavy condition is that of a married man, then it is not advantageous to marry, as can be read in Matthew 19:10. Thus based, Saint Jerome says that Our Lord thought well of this view of the Apostles, saying that one is right when one says that it may not be advantageous for the men who seek the kingdom of heaven to take a wife. However, he admits that this is difficult because not all men receive the word, but only those chosen to receive it. Saint Jerome continues by referring to Christ’s words on the subject, saying that some men are eunuchs by nature, others by men’s violence. Those willing eunuchs please Christ because they are not so out of necessity but out of free choice. Christ desires to carry those who became eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, and to worship him, they renounced the condition of their birth. However, Jovinian, advocating the marriages of well-known religious men, cites examples from the Old Testament. Saint Jerome critically

The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers

75

analyzes these examples of his opponent, as in the case when, noting that some of the apostles had wives, the saint answered that they seemed to have left them to follow Christ. In the matter of redeeming the woman for childbearing, as stated in 1 Timothy 2:10, this means that they can make up for the loss of their virginity if they give birth to children who then will remain virgins. The source for this argument about the marriage of traditional religious figures is found by Saint Jerome in Solomon, author of Proverbs. Thus, in Book I.28 of Adversus Jovinianum, Solomon, with his many wives and concubines, is an authority for commenting on marriage because no one could know better than him who suffered the disorders of women. In this context, Saint Jerome says that Proverbs 9:13 reads that the foolish and daring woman comes looking for bread, which is certainly the bread that comes from heaven. He then immediately adds to this observation that those born of the earth perish in their house and run to the depths of hell, as can be read in Proverbs 9:18. Next, Saint Jerome, in his customary procedure of dealing with issues hermeneutically and employing the rhetorical method of questioning, asks who are the earth-born who perish in their house. He responds by giving his interpretation that they are those who followed the first Adam, who is of the earth, and not the second, who is of heaven. Continuing in his denial of a wife, who is no good as a man’s faithful companion, Saint Jerome resorts to Proverbs 25:20, saying that, like a worm in the wood, this is how an evil woman destroys her husband. He argues that this is about bad wives, but he also asks why a man should be forced to risk marrying a woman to prove whether she is good or evil. It is better, he says, based on Proverbs 21:19, to live in a desert land than with a controversial and irritable woman. An indefectible wife is rare, as he who is married knows well. That is why that noble and sublime speaker Varius Geminus, an epigrammatist often quoted by Seneca, said that the man who does not fight is single. Continuing this litany of curses against the women seen as a disgrace to their husbands, Saint Jerome, using Proverbs 21:9 and 25:24, says that it is better to live under the corner of a rooftop than with a faltering woman in a house shared with her. Saint Jerome continues his antimarital reasoning with regard to the husband and the wife living in the same house. He adds that if a shared house for the husband and wife makes her proud and creates contempt for her husband, he suffers more if the wife is the richer of the two, as then the husband is just a tenant in his own home. If this is the situation, she begins to be not a wife but the master of the house, and if she offends her husband, they must separate. Still in the same

76

Chapter Three

proverbial tone, using Proverbs 27:15, Saint Jerome illustrates the situation by saying that a steady drip on a winter’s day puts a man out the door, just as a quarrelsome woman will lead her husband outside his own home. That is because she floods the house with constant boredom and daily talk and drives her husband out of his own home as if it were the church itself. Hence, even Solomon had previously commanded that man should not drift out of the church, as can be read in Proverbs 3:21. In Hebrews 2:1, the Apostle adds that these things should receive absolute sense so that men do not drift. In what follows, Saint Jerome presents his taste for allegorical treatment taken from the Holy Scripture, asking who can resist explaining what has a figurative expression. From this rhetorical question, he refers to Proverbs 30:15–16 to exemplify the female evil as one of the daughters of the leech, viewed as a metaphorical image of the devil, recalling the allegory that this animal had three beloved daughters, but they could not be satisfied, and nor could a fourth, and they never found anything to be sufficient. He then names the daughters of the leech as the love of a woman, a land that is not satisfied with water, and the burning of a fire. This allegorical leech is the devil who lovingly cherishes his daughters—hell, woman’s love, parched earth, and blazing fire—who are never satisfied with the blood of their victims. This insatiable female appetite, says Saint Jerome, is not that of the prostitute or adulterer but of the love of the woman in general, accused of always being insatiable. If expressed, it breaks into flame, and if given some satisfaction, it is immediately in need again. This passionate love deprives the mind of the man of its vigor and absorbs all his thoughts except the passion that it feeds. Saint Jerome explains that what is read in the following parable has the same effect. In Proverbs 30:21–23, it says that three things on earth are inadmissible—a servant becoming a king, a fool being fed bread, and a servant supplanting her mistress—in addition to a fourth, a hateful woman having a good husband and a servant supplanting her mistress. The saint then warns about the way the Bible classifies wives among the greatest evils. If this is so, it is because they are hateful wives, Saint Jerome says, giving the same answer as before. The mere possibility of such a danger is in itself not a light affair because the one who marries is uncertain whether she will be a hateful woman or worthy of his love. If she is detestable, she is intolerable; if she is worthy of love, her love is similar to the grave, the parched earth, and the fire. Therefore, it is clear that in the composition of the fulcrum of Saint Jerome’s misogynist ideas, there is an unavoidable

The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers

77

aversion to the women, who must be kept away from a relationship with men, even one institutionalized by marriage, at all costs. Following these comments, Saint Jerome refers to Ecclesiastes, which recommends virginity and disapproves of marriage, then presents the Song of Songs as a true hymn to virginity. Next, in contrast to many of Jovinian’s heretical pronouncements, he comments on virgin-born prophets, protests against baptism that levels the virgins and prostitutes, argues that the priestly office does not match marriage and sexual intercourse, and states that control is not an abnormal restraint of sexual instinct and that it does not prove itself against procreation. In all this, the attitude of Saint Jerome is clear his ideological foundation seeking to base itself on the Holy Scripture, aims at the spiritual above the material. Finally, in defense of virginity, regarded by his opponent Jovinian as a Christian appreciation, he says that there are sufficient examples of the appreciation of virginity and monogamy that are quite well attested even before Christianity. In Book I.43 of Adversus Jovinianum, Saint Jerome praises the women who, upon becoming widows, refused to remarry, thus discussing the ideal recommendation to return to chastity for those who had suffered the loss of their husbands. Therefore, he comments on the married women who, reluctant to survive their husbands’ natural or violent death for fear that they might remarry, cultivated wonderful affection for their only husbands. In that same customary tone of moralizing preaching, he says that this decision of not marrying in a second wedding is an example that teaches how much this repudiated even the pagan women. Thus, he cites the case of Dido, the sister of Pygmalion, who gathered a large amount of gold and silver and sailing to Africa founded Carthage there. When Iarbas, king of Libya, sought her hand for marriage, she postponed the wedding for a while until they had completed the city. Not long after, having erected a funeral pyre in memory of her late husband Sichaeus, she preferred to burn herself rather than remarry. Saint Jerome takes this pre-Virgilian example from the narrative of Dido in Chapter 13 of Tertullian’s De exhortatione castitatis, the example also being a clever reversal of what is in 1 Corinthians 7:9. In Book I.44 of Adversus Jovinianum, Saint Jerome comments on the wives who remain in a kind of widowhood chastity in memory and posthumous fidelity to their husbands. To this end, he cites Niceratus’ wife, who, unable to do any wrong to her husband, inflicted death upon herself rather than subject herself to the lust of the thirty tyrants that Lysander had led to the conquered Athens. Niceratus was the son of an Athenian leader who died before the Spartan Lysander supported the government of the thirty tyrants after the defeat of Athens in 404 BC.

78

Chapter Three

Next, mentioning the example of Artemisia, wife of Mausolus, distinguished by her chastity after the death of her husband, Saint Jerome comments that she was the queen of Caria, and great poets and historians exalted her love for her husband in death as much as in life, so she built a tomb so large that all luxurious tombs are called mausoleums to this day. Here again, there is a rhetorical twist by Saint Jerome to illustrate his arguments since it was Pythius who built the celebrated tomb of King Mausolus in 353 BC, not his widowed wife Artemisia, who was also his sister. After these two examples, Saint Jerome looks at other cases of notable Roman women, such as Lucretia, who made the loss of their husbands a sufficient reason for their return to chastity through unshakable widowhood, not disturbed by any longings of the body and mind. Thus, in Book 1.46 of Adversus Jovinianum, a full list of these matrons is given with a quotation from Marcia, the second wife of Cato. When asked, after the loss of her husband, why she had not married again, she replied that she could not find a man who wanted her more than her money. Saint Jerome says that Marcia’s words teach that men, when choosing their wives, look at wealth over chastity and that many of them, when married, do not use their eyes but their fingers. Continuing to talk about the virtuous Marcia, Saint Jerome says that when the same lady was mourning the loss of her husband, matrons asked her what day they would see the end of her sadness. She replied that it would be the same day they saw her put an end to her life. Regarding this decision of the widowed Marcia, Saint Jerome thinks that she continued to desire her husband after his death, not thinking about getting married again. Then he reports the case of Portia, whom Brutus took to be his wife while she was still a virgin. She could not live without her husband, because certain women attach themselves so intimately to certain men that attaching to their husbands is like a strong link in the chain of affection. He then talks of Annia, who, urged to remarry, said that she would not do so because if she found a good man, she would have no desire to be with him, being afraid of losing him, and if she met a bad man, no reason would exist to put up with a bad husband after she had had a good one. Saint Jerome, after admitting, in Book I.47, to having extended this catalog of chaste women sufficiently and intertextualized the abovementioned Liber de nuptiis, allegedly by Theophrastus, resumes his antimatrimonial complaints in his usual bitter tone. Thus he protests about what he would do when the women of his day pressed him with apostolic authority, repeating, reminiscently, the commandment allowing a second

The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers

79

union before the first husband was buried. He concludes ironically about this, wishing that those who despise the faithfulness of Christian purity could at least learn about the chastity witnessed by the pagans. At this point, he refers to what Theophrastus’ book on marriage teaches, saying that the book is worth its weight in gold. In the book, the author asks if wise men do get married. Theophrastus establishes that a wife should be correct, of good character and honest kinship, and the husband in good health and great means. After saying that wise men sometimes enter the state of marriage under such circumstances, he immediately ponders adversely that one rarely meets all these conditions in marriage. Therefore, after this reflection, Theophrastus concludes that wise men should not take a wife. In the first place, they would hamper their study, and one cannot take care of books and wives at the same time. Next, Theophrastus, quoted by Saint Jerome, presents an accurate, unfavorable anatomy of such wives’ character, saying that married women want many things, such as expensive dresses, gold, jewelry, servants, all kinds of furniture, and ornate carriages. Resonating Juvenal’s satirical stance about complaining wives, he says that they chatter all night long, complaining that one lady has come out better dressed, another is looked after by everyone, and that she is a poor nobody, scorned at meetings and women’s gatherings. This kind of wife annoyingly asks her husband why he covets that creature next door, why he is talking to the servant, what he has brought back from the market. Theophrastus says that if the husband has a single friend or mate, she suspects this friendship to lead her husband to hate heirs. Theophrastus concludes that there may indeed be, in some neighboring city, a most wise teacher to visit, but that if men have a wife, they cannot go and leave her behind, nor can they take this burden with them. Saint Jerome comments by saying that supporting a poor wife is difficult and marrying a rich woman is torture. In a satirical way, he also says that in the case of the wife, one cannot choose and inspect but must take her in the manner and conditions she is. Continuing with these comments on the inconveniences of the marriage process, Saint Jerome says that if a wife has a bad temper, is a fool, proud, or has bad breath, all of these things unfortunately happen after the marriage. Next comes the most deplorable objectifying comparison of women with horses, asses, cattle, dogs, even the least valued slaves, clothes, kettles, wooden benches, cups, and earthenware jars. He says all this is first tested and then bought, while wives are the only things not presented or tested before getting married for fear that they

80

Chapter Three

may not satisfy the interested party. Continuing in this misogynist antimatrimonial discourse, Saint Jerome, still referring to Theophrastus, comments on hateful things about which wives complain, saying that their husbands’ attention should be exclusively theirs, always complimenting their beauty and avoiding looking anywhere else but at them. Following these grueling obligations, and rereading Juvenal’s satirically misogynist predictions in the famous Satire VI counseling never to marry, Saint Jerome, still referring to Theophrastus, says that this pleading wife wants him to call her my lady, remember her birthday, swear on her health, and wish she may survive him. In addition, he must respect her mistress, the gossip, her father’s slave, the adopted son, the prominent parasite, the effeminate slave who manages her business, and the eunuch who ministers the safe indulgence of her lust. These are all names that act as masks of adultery. Moreover, resonating Ovid’s words in Ars Amatoria (Art of Love),6 Saint Jerome says that whomever she loves, her husband must love very much, whether he likes it or not. Still carrying the voice of Theophrastus, Saint Jerome continues talking about the burden of the wife’s mischiefs in a teasing rhetoric of a petty unhappy married life. He says that if the wife has the full house management, she will reduce him to being her slave; if he reserves any control for himself, she will think that he is not being faithful to her and is ready for fight and hatred, and if the husband does not take care of her, she soon poisons him. If the husband admits old women, fortune-tellers, prophets, or jewelry and silk sellers at home, he endangers her chastity; if he closes the door to all this, she is offended and imagines that he is suspicious of her. In this detailed inventory of the ill-disposition of the wife’s character, Saint Jerome continues in Theophrastus’ voice and echoes what Ovid says in Ars amatoria7 about the futility of watching over one’s wife. Here, he ironically asks what advantage there would be in being a careful guardian when an unchaste wife is impossible to keep and a chaste one should not be. Because compulsion is the unreliable guardian of chastity, the woman deserves the chaste label only when she is free to sin and can choose. If the woman is beautiful, someone soon desires her; if she is ugly, lust soon agitates her attitudes. He concludes, on that matter, that it is difficult to keep something desired by many and it is boring to have something that no one thinks is valid to own. However, the misery of having an ugly wife is less than that 6

Ovid, “Ars amatoria,” in Ovid: The Erotic Poems, trans. P. Green (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), II.198–202. 7 Ovid, “Ars amatoria,” III.618–652.

The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers

81

of having to watch over a beautiful one. Nothing is certain about what a whole crowd sighs over and longs for. Saint Jerome ends this list of inconveniences in having a wife by metaphorically praising men who become subject to bankruptcy because of their wives, saying that they seduce with their figures, one with his mind, another with wit and gifts. Still quoting Theophrastus, Saint Jerome puts the services of a faithful servant and the company of friends above what wives can do in marriage. Thus, he says that men marry to get someone to take care of the house, to comfort them when they are down, and to drive away their loneliness. However, the faithful servant becomes a far better administrator, more obedient to their master, a closer follower of his ways than his wife. She only thinks of proving herself a mistress if she acts in opposition to her husband, that is, if she does what pleases her, not what she is told to do. He goes on to say that friends and servants subject to obligation because of favors received are better able to care in sickness than wives who make their husbands believe in their tears. They shed a flood of them in the expectation of being heirs, and their eager ostentation drives their sick husbands to despair. He says that if the wife is fragile, the husband should fall ill and never leave her bedside. Or if she is good, a pleasant wife, like a rare bird, as Juvenal says in Satire VI, the husband must share her moans in childbirth and be tortured when she is in danger.8 Theophrastus, in the voice of Saint Jerome, praises wise men for being single, saying that these men are never alone because they have good men’s company of all time and are free in the thoughts to choose what they want, and what is not accessible in person they embrace in thought. Furthermore, if men are scarce, these single men talk to God. Thus, they are never less alone than when they are alone. In what follows, Saint Jerome, quoting Theophrastus, continues what he did before by presenting a catalog that agreed on the most viable reasons for not marrying, beginning with the imbecilic reason for marrying on account of leaving a progeny. Thus, if one says that they will have children so the name of the parent does not perish, or so they can support the father in his old age or leave his property without dispute, this is the height of stupidity. He explains the reason for this stupidity by asking, with considerable skepticism, what it may mean to the men when they leave the world if another carries their name when even a child does not necessarily carry his father’s title. Countless others are called by the same name. Alternatively, what kind of support in old age can be brought by those who were raised by their fathers, who may die before them, or who 8

Juvenal, “Satire VI,” 161–166.

82

Chapter Three

may even become a rascal, when sons reach maturity and fathers seem to die very slowly. After this somewhat skeptical view justifying procreation, he says that friends and relatives are better and safer heirs. He concludes, in an advisably practical yet cleverly cynical way, that the safest way to have good heirs is to ruin one’s fortune for a good cause while in life and not let anyone use the fruit of one’s labor without merit. Saint Jerome, in Book I.48 of Adversus Jovinianum, resonating what can be read in Philippians 1:23, asks who among Christians, whose inclination is heaven and who long to be acquitted and with Christ daily, does not become disappointed when Theophrastus says such things about marriage? He goes on to ask if a lamb of Christ should desire human heirs if he should desire children and enchant with a long line of descendants who might fall into the clutches of the Antichrist. Furthermore, he ends by saying that Moses and Samuel preferred others to their children and did not count those who displeased God as their children. Saint Jerome next cites the case of the non-agreement of marriage with the practice of philosophy. To best exemplify this, he mentions the case of Cicero and Socrates speaking of their disagreement with marriage. He says that Cicero, after he divorced Terentia, was asked by Hirtius to marry his sister, but he put the matter completely aside and said that he could not devote himself to a wife and philosophy at the same time. However, as is well known, despite this witty response from Cicero to his neighbor, he remarried. Then the book comments that Socrates had two wives, Xanthippe and Myrto, granddaughter of Aristides. They often fought, and he used to make fun of them for disagreeing about a man as ugly as he, with a snub nose, rough hair, and crooked legs. Finally, they planned an attack on him, after severely punishing, hurrying, and tormenting him for a long time. Once, Xanthippe, who was abusing him from upstairs, plunged him into dirty water, but he only wiped his head and said that he knew that thunder like that was unfailingly followed by a shower. After this, also in Book I.48 of Adversus Jovinianum, Saint Jerome lists a sequence of critical comments about wives of the Roman culture, of which the following are examples. Here the commentary is about a certain Roman nobleman whom his friends considered faulty for divorcing a beautiful, chaste, and rich wife. He stretched out his feet and told them, in a proverbial and metaphorically ironic way, that the shoe he was wearing in front of them looked new and elegant. However, no one but him knew where it pressed. Continuing in that same proverbial tone about women and marriage just looking nice, he comments that Herodotus says that

The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers

83

women give up modesty when they take off their clothes. This remark is in Historias I.8, when a king suggests to his subjects that he should judge the queen’s incomparable beauty upon seeing her naked.9 Saint Jerome next refers to Terentius, who, in Hecyra (The Stepmother), states his belief that the lucky men are those who never married.10 Saint Jerome tops the list of wanton women with a celebrated misogynist stereotype of female lust, the always remembered Pasiphaë, cited alongside Clytemnestra and Eriphyle as prime examples of female wickedness. He recalls that the first was the wife of a king ruined by the lust for wanting a bull, the second killed her husband because of an adulterous lover, and the third betrayed Amphiaraus for preferring a gold necklace to her husband’s welfare. All these examples are listed by Saint Jerome following the best of the misogynist tradition of ancient references to epitomes of femalevices, very well represented by Ovid in Ars amatoria. In this topic of the classic examples of vicious women, Saint Jerome says that in all grandiloquence of tragedy, in the fall and destruction of houses, cities, and kingdoms, wives and lovers have always been the ultimate motive and driving force of these disasters. Because of bad character, women and parents take up arms against their children, serving unspeakable banquets. Because of the rape of a foolish woman, great men were involved in a long-lasting war in the case of Helen’s abduction by Paris, prompting the Trojan War. In Book I.49 of Adversus Jovinianum, Saint Jerome takes up classic misogynist pronouncements by famous authors about the inconveniences of marriage. In this sense, he says that Aristotle, Plutarch, and Seneca wrote treatises on marriage, from which he had already cited some passages and now intended to add some more. He comments that the love of beauty buries reason and is a close neighbor of madness, that this love is a foolish little spot living with a healthy mind. This theme of the insanity of sexual desire and the need for philosophers to avoid it through their seclusion is also in Book II.8–9 of Adversus Jovinianum. Continuing on the theme of the damage caused by the love of women, Saint Jerome says that this feeling confuses good advice, breaks high and generous spirits, and drags men away from great thoughts and toward small ones. It makes men grumpy, angry, reckless, cruelly arrogant, slavish flatterers, and good for nothing, not even for their love. Love burns like a blazing flame in the intensity of the passion; it also wastes lots of 9

Herodotus, The Histories, ed. Donald Lateiner, trans. G. C. Macaulay, Barnes and Noble Classics (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005). 10 Terence, The Mother in Law (Hecyra), trans. Frank O. Copley, The Library of Liberal Arts, no. 123 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), II.1.4.

84

Chapter Three

time in suspicion, tears, and complaints, finally generating a severe hatred for an other and oneself. In addition to the topics discussed above about the inconvenience of women and their marital companionship, Saint Jerome refers, among other places in his writing, in Epistula 22, ad Eustochium (Letter 22, to Eustochium)11 and Epistula 77, ad Oceanum (Letter 77, to Oceanus)12 to aspects related to these same topics dealt with in Adversus Jovinianum. In this way, he proceeds by addressing relationships between women, their inherent and innate capacity for sexual temptation made synonymous with the spiritual, religious, moral, intellectual, and physical distortion of men’s wellbeing. He recommends the ascetic holy hermit, a mystic of Christian chastity, as the solution to this danger of the female presence in the inauguration of an age of the virginity of pious women.

Saint Augustine The doctrinal postulates of Saint Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, 354–430) on the material, moral, and spiritual reality of women evidence that the reflections and pronouncements on the subject made by the Bishop of Hippo are more neutral and sophisticated, and noticeably less radical in their discriminatory sense, than those made by some of the preceding Church Fathers. Although this kind of renovation reveals a more modern and humanist sympathetic sense of the female figure, Saint Augustine does not intrinsically diverge in many points from the traditional and misogynist thinking of the medieval Patristics. Like all the others, he considers that women have the same secondary position that his predecessors delegated them in the hierarchical system of traditional androcentric superiority. Such male supremacy characterizes, among other things, an ideological mentality based on an analogical relationship existing in the conception of a natural order of the things to which the less able should submit to the most capable. Thus, just as children should obey their parents, women should obey and serve men, beginning with their fathers and husbands, simply because it becomes more right and just that the weaker mind must serve and place itself under the command of the strongest. 11

Saint Jerome, “Letter 22, to Eustochium,” 100–137. Saint Jerome, “Letter 77, to Oceanus,” in The Principal Works of St Jerome (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 6), ed. P. Schaff and trans. W. H. Fremantle (Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892), 391–402. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. 12

The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers

85

This same attitude of women’s subordination to the mandates of men became a strong legacy transmitted by the Patristic literature to the misogynist thinkers who succeeded them. This is the case with Gratian, who, in the twelfth century, wrote the Decretum, one of the central reference books in the Middle Ages due to being an important compilation of a wide variety of representative sources of the ecclesiastical canon law related to the central misogynist precepts in circulation. In this respect, passage 33.5.XII of Part II of Gratian’s Decretum13 deserves to be cited because it discusses the controversial question of continentia (continence) in the marriage, stressing its misogynist denotations. It establishes that it is proper for husbands to regulate, following often partially interpreted theologically informed religious instructions, the rights, duties, and legality of the wives’ sexual disposition. This aspect of the female marital life sums up the dictum that women should be subject to their husbands. According to the provisions of Saint Augustine’s Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, i, Quaestiones in Genesis (Questions on the Heptateuch, book seven, i, Questions on Genesis), nature orders women’s obedience to men and children’s to their parents. It is only fair that minors obey their superiors.14 What Saint Augustine calls the natural order refers to the superior hierarchical position of the men who initially thought of this order as universal.15 Saint Augustine’s teachings were of great importance to Western Christendom, exerting a remarkable influence and direction upon it for over a millennium. One of the reasons for this sympathy for the saint was that he was by no means a fanatical and uncompromising ascetic, writing constructively about marriage and defending the stance of radical pessimist Manicheism thought being inherent in the physical body. Saint Augustine indeed rescues the body, alleviating some of the burdens of the asceticism of the early Christians. Nevertheless, he also shows his absolute

13

Gratianus, “Decretum Magistri Gratiani,” in Corpus Iuris Canonici. Editio Lipisiensis Secunda, Pars Prior, edited Aemilius Friedberg (Graz: Akademische Druck, U. Verlagsanstalt, 1959), Causa XXXIII, Quaestio V, C. XI–XX, 1253– 1256. 14 Augustinus Hipponensis, “Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, i, Questiones in Genesis,” in Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, ed. JacquesPaul Migne (Paris, 1844–1864), 34.547–598 (590). 15 Ida Raming, The Exclusion of Women from the Priesthood…: A Historical Investigation of the Juridical and Doctrinal Foundations, trans. N. R. Adams (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976), 35.

86

Chapter Three

terror of the lack of control or insubordination of the sexual appeal conferred upon humanity as a poetic justice immediately after the Fall.16 One may wonder whether vivid experiences possibly tinted Augustine’s ideas about the manifestation of sex in human life. In a biography like his, a person who, though he never had a legally contracted marriage, proved, nevertheless, the experience of sexual pleasure in an illicit and guiltprovoking way.17 However, if such opinions about Saint Augustine’s sex life influenced his view of the body as an inclination to express human pleasure, relieving him of the traditional too intense shame of the Original Sin, this should not count as determinism.18 It can be read in biographical records that Saint Augustine, before his conversion, had a concubine for many years. However, his mother had her sent away when she planned, without a result, an official marriage for him. After his conversion,19 he states that the memory of sexual desire, with which he had previously come to terms without major problems, now terrified him. He further states that he had definitively decided to exclude marriage from men’s life because his masculine mind, disturbed by the pleasures of and intimate contacts with women, had been somewhat displaced from its natural wholeness and firmness.20 Among other aspects concerning Saint Augustine’s view of women considered in his writings, less preemptive and given gentler treatment, though not exempt from the traditional misogynist tone, is his position in the refined debate on whether or not God created woman in his image. On this subject, he believes that both alternatives seem appropriate, thanks to a subtle conception that one can have about women. In this respect, their physical aspect only serves to symbolize, without constituting themselves entirely, an inferior dimension of humanity accounting for a dependency on sensorial inclinations.21

16

Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 110–112, 140–141; Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 406–408, 416–419. 17 Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, 141. 18 J. Truax, “Augustine of Hippo: Defender of Women’s Equality?” Journal of Medieval History 16 (1990): 279–299. 19 Saint Augustine, The Soliloquies of St. Augustine, trans. Rose Elizabeth Cleveland (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1910), I.10.17. 20 Saint Augustine, Earlier Writings, trans. J. H. S. Burleigh, Library of Christian, vi (London: SCM Press, 1953), 33–34. 21 Kari Borresen, Subordination and Equivalence: The Nature and Role of Women in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, 21–30; Saint Augustine, The Trinity, trans. S.

The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers

87

One of the obstacles to the preservation of the moral and spiritual superiority of men preached by the medieval Patristic, mainly regarding the facilitation and induction to sin represented by the feminine presence, is to consider the participation of women in men’s lives as them having been created to be their consorts. In this sense, unlike many of his predecessors, Saint Augustine’s attitude toward Eve is not as damning as theirs. In an insidiously condescending manner, he expresses his view that Adam could not have seriously shared his credulity with the serpent’s allegations due to having, with a certain tone of irony, the superiority of men’s understanding and discernment. On the other hand, Saint Augustine says, perhaps revealing a discriminatory position toward the female figure as different and secondary, that in women’s physical resurrection, they would be merely women. Furthermore, and reinforcing some misogynist traits of Patristic thinking, Saint Augustine powerfully demonstrates his ability to object to the double standard advocated by his predecessors like Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Jerome concerning sexual rights, as discussed in Epistula 77, ad Oceanum.22 Nevertheless, it is necessary to consider whether this suspicious objection of Saint Augustine to this aspect of the male behavior, like so many others, might not suppose his intention. An intention perhaps not entirely innocent and free of androcentrism, if one remembers the stated need for men’s superior obligation to set an excellent example for the weaker sex of women. However, Saint Augustine’s restrictions on male hypocrisy, as in the previous commentary, made him a sympathetic figure and a great ally in what was a defense of women during the Middle Ages.

De Genesi ad litteram In De Genesi ad litteram (The Literal Sense of Genesis, 401–416), Saint Augustine reiterates that same maxim by Saint Paul in Confessiones about the creation of the woman for the man. He remembers the terms of the original creation, in which Eve’s origin is secondary, made to serve Adam as a helper. Thus, in De Genesi ad litteram, Saint Augustine rhetorically questions the fact of the woman being made for the man to be his helper in childbearing. If this was not the case, then what kind of help would it be? However, at this point in his reasoning, it is clear that the woman’s creation was only to assist the man in breeding, similar to an incubator, McKenna, FOC, xlv (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1963), XII. 22 Saint Jerome, “Letter 77, to Oceanus,” 391–402.

88

Chapter Three

because God did not create her to help the man plow the earth. After all, there was no instrument in Eden to make such help necessary. Moreover, even if there was such a need, Saint Augustine says that a mate would be better, and the same could be said of the comfort of the presence of a same-sex mate if Adam were perhaps bored with loneliness. Thus, it seems that Saint Augustine finds two male friends keeping each other company more enjoyable than a woman and a man. Saint Augustine—to justify the reason for women only being good to aid in procreation and, therefore, not being a more pleasurable and agreeable source of company to men than their friends—invokes the justification of this reasoning by remembering the famous principle of primacy in the order of the Creation. Thus, he says that if two comrades had to agree on one to command and the other to obey peacefully, there would be no conflict since the creation of one of them had been primary. Furthermore, it would reinforce that the second had been made from the first, as was the case with the woman. Saint Augustine concludes this reasoning by ensuring the woman’s inferiority as a creature created second, arguing that surely no one will say that God was able to make from only a woman a man’s rib and not also a man if he wanted to do so. Finally, Saint Augustine closes his biased misogynist syllogism by claiming that he does not see the reason why woman would be created for man unless she was to serve as his auxiliary in the generation of children. Saint Augustine, in De Genesi ad litteram,23 invokes the glossed tópos of the primordial responsibility for the Original Sin attributed to Eve. This motif, so dear to the misogynist tradition of religious descent, explains that this fault was enough to provide a reason for her natural servitude cast by God to every woman as a descendant of this primordial mother. It further aggravates the responsibility of Eve’s sin, condemning her daughters to render eternal servitude to man, and Saint Augustine claims that Eve’s explicit awareness of the prohibition made her transgression an even more unforgivable act. He further argues that the serpent would not have troubled her if she did not have a trace of a smug character in her in nature. 23 S. Aurelii Augustini, “Genesi ad litteram duodecim libri,” in Aurelii Augustini, Opera Ominia, liber IX.3.5, XI.37.50, XI.42.58. https://www.augustinus.it/latino/genesi_lettera/index2.htm, accessed February 16, 2021. The references are from this edition and can be checked in Saint Augustine, St Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond, Ancient Christian Writers, no. 42 (New York and Ramse, and Newman Press, 1982), vol. 2, 75, 170–171, 175–176.

The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers

89

In this order of ideas, Saint Augustine, recalling Genesis 3:16, reminds the woman, the first offender of the original divine order, that she should be subject to her husband, reinforcing the meaning of this in her proper condition. From this proposition, he explains that even before the woman had sinned, the husband receives her commanded to be submissive and subject to him. Therefore, the woman’s responsibility as an introducer of the Fall and Original Sin into the world only increased women’s original status as servants of men. Next, Saint Augustine discusses the understanding of what women’s servitude should mean, saying that one cannot rightly fail to understand that servitude, in the words of Genesis, must be understood in a similar way to the bondage resulting from a tied condition. To complete his misogynist exegesis of the understanding and defense of women’s servitude vis-à-vis servitude in general, Saint Augustine quotes Saint Paul, who in Galatians 5:13 comments that one can serve the other through love. However, while Saint Augustine recognizes that the holy apostle would not preach dominion in this relationship, agreeing that married people can serve one another through love, he nevertheless remembers the passage of 1 Timothy 2:12, from the same Saint Paul, who explicitly does not allow a woman to have command and rule over her husband. To endorse this purpose, Saint Augustine comments that the sentence that God pronounced gave man the power of the first command over woman. Moreover, it is not simply because of her nature that woman deserves to have her husband as a lord, but she must be in this condition because she was the first to sin and transgress the divine order, thereby establishing slavery among men. The saint concludes that if someone does not understand and maintain this order concerning the woman’s sin and servitude, the entirety of nature will suffer the consequence of being ever and ever more corrupt, and sin will further increase. The Augustinian understanding here is the idea that the subjection of the women symbolizes, in this theological perspective, the beginning of human domination in general and that the primordial responsibility of the woman in the Fall explains the submission commanded to her since her inception by God. This peculiar sense of understanding the subjection of women was somehow enhanced by Saint Augustine with a dose of sympathy, recognizing a specific bond of love in this submission. This particular aspect of the Patristic misogyny, much revisited, gained the attention of Saint Thomas Aquinas in his scholastic misogynist adaptation of Aristotle’s ideas about the anatomical and physiological inferiority of the woman’s body as a simple feminine amorphous Matter in constant search of the masculine principle of Form to be molded as a living being.

90

Chapter Three

In the wake of these ideas, Saint Augustine finally offers a reflection on the literal meaning of the Fall. In Chapter XI.42 of De Genesi ad litteram, he argues about the superiority of the spiritual mind of man over the inferiority and prevalence of the carnal spirit of woman who, not endowed with a higher understanding of things, was easy prey for the serpent’s wit. Thus, he rhetorically argues that if Adam was a spiritual man in mind but not in body, how could one believe what was said through the serpent that God had forbidden them to eat the fruit of that tree because he knew that if they ate, they would be gods in terms of the knowledge of good and evil? The answer comes in the following assertion of androcentric prerogative, which, in its usual rhetorical way of asking and anticipating the answer to the question, certifies that it is strange that the spiritually minded man could believe what he was told about what the serpent had said. Thus, Saint Augustine wonders if this was not the reason why, since the man could not believe what he was told, the woman was used on the assumption that she had limited understanding and, perhaps, because she lives according to the spirit of the flesh and not according to the spirit of the mind. Discussing women’s deficiency in the spirit of the mind and men as the image and likeness of God, Saint Augustine considers that Saint Paul must have had this in mind when he prescribed, in 1 Corinthians 11:7, that men shall not cover the head. Men do not cover their heads because they are the image and glory of God, while women are the glory of men. However, still with that relative sympathy and kindness of treatment for women, Saint Augustine concludes that this does not mean that women’s minds are unable to receive that same image of God. On this, Saint Paul says in Galatians 3:28 that, in this divine gift, there is no difference between man and woman. Perhaps exempting the women of his day, Saint Augustine reflects that it could be that they have not yet received the gift of the knowledge of God. However, under the direction and tutelage of their husbands, they will gradually be able to acquire it, reiterating once again the Patristic androcentrism responsible for infinite misogynist attitudes. To justify this, by naturalizing the facts of the divine origin of things, a rhetorical device used quite recurringly in the medieval Patristic discourse, Saint Augustine again invokes the misogynist tópos of the first place in Creation given to man. In this respect, he considers, according to 1 Timothy 2:13–14, that it was not without reason that Saint Paul says that Adam was made by God first, and then Eve, and that Adam was not an object of seduction but that it was the woman who was seduced by Evil

The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers

91

and fell into sin. In other words, Saint Paul comments that Adam was originally not seduced and that it was the woman who was the seductress. Therefore, he ate of the fruit, while the woman, in this situation, said that the serpent had seduced her. What, however, seems curious, if not paradoxical, are the terms of this justification for the man’s behavior in the seduction scenario directed by the woman in her secondary role in the theater of Creation. In this reasoning about women’s weakness for being seduced but dangerously being the cause of men’s seduction, Saint Augustine cites the example of Solomon. Because of his incredible wisdom, he could not believe that there was any benefit to worshipping idols, but he was unable to resist the love of the women that dragged him into this evil, as commented in 3 Kings 11:1–11. In addition to Solomon, Saint Augustine cites that men’s failure to give sympathy to their wives reinforces the case of Adam, who ate of the forbidden fruit offered by his mate to make her happy. He feared she would feel annihilated without his support, alienated from his affections, and that this quarrel would cause her death. To prove the natural virtuous wholeness of man’s nature conferred upon Adam, Saint Augustine says that he was not seduced and overcome by the lust of the flesh, but by the kind of bonding and affection that congregate men to offend God to maintain friendship among themselves. With this reasoning, women’s natural weakness in being seduced by evil is evident, just as men’s solidarity that allows them to go through the process of seduction is clear. Saint Augustine says he does not think that the tricks of the serpent to seduce the woman were effective means for the seduction of man.

Sources Augustine, St. St Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, vol. 2. Translated by John Hammond. Ancient Christian Writers 42. New York: Ramsey and Newman Press, 1982. Augustine, St. The Soliloquies of St. Augustine. Translated by Rose Elizabeth Cleveland. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1910. Jerome, St. “Against Jovinian.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 779–907. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. S. Aurelii Augustini. “Genesi ad litteram duodecim libri.” In Aurelii Augustini, Opera Ominia.

92

Chapter Three

https://www.augustinus.it/latino/genesi_lettera/index2.htm. Accessed February 16, 2021. S. Eusebii Hieronymi. Adversus Jovinium. https://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/04z/z_0347-0420__ Hieronymus__Adversus_Jovinianum_Libri_Duo__MLT.pdf.html. Accessed February 15, 2021.

References Ambrose, St. “On Widows.” In The Principal Works of St Ambrose, translated by H. de Romestin, 398–399. Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers X. Oxford: Parker & Co.; New York: Christian Literature Co., 1896. Augustine, St. Earlier Writings. Translated by J. H. S. Burleigh. Library of Christian VI. London: SCM Press, 1953. Augustine, St. The Trinity. Translated by S. McKenna. FOC XLV. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1963. Augustinus Hipponensis. “Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, i, Questiones in Genesis.” In Patrologiae cursus completus, 34.547–598. Series Latina. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris, 1844–1864. Borresen, Kari. Subordination and Equivalence: The Nature and Role of Women in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Translated by C. H. Talbot. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1981. Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Delhaye, Philippe. “Le Dossier Antimatrimonial de l’Adversus Jovinianum et son Influence sur Quelques Écrits latins du XIIe siècle.” Mediaeval Studies 13 (1951): 65–86. Gratianus. “Decretum Gratiani.” In Corpus Iuris Canonici, part 1, edited by Aemilius Friedberg. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1879. Herodotus. The Histories. Edited by Donald Lateiner, translated by G. C. Macaulay. Barnes and Noble Classics. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005. Jerome, St. “Letter 22, to Eustochium.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 100–137. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. Jerome, St. “Letter 77, to Oceanus.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 391–402. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II,

The Misogynist Literary Tradition of the Church Fathers

93

vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. Juvenal. “Satire VI.” In The Satires of Juvenal, translated by R. Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958. Kelly, John Norman Davidson. Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies. London: Duckworth, 1975. Ovid. “Ars amatoria.” In Ovid: The Erotic Poems, translated by P. Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Schmitt, Charles B. “Theophrastus in the Middle Ages.” Viator 2 (1971): 259–263. Terence. The Mother in Law (Hecyra). Translated by Frank O. Copley. The Library of Liberal Arts 123. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962. Tertullian. “De exhortatione castitatis.” In Tertullian: Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage. Translated by W. P. le Saint. Ancient Christian Writers XIII. London, 1951. Truax, J. “Augustine of Hippo: Defender of Women’s Equality?” Journal of Medieval History 16 (1990): 279–299.

CHAPTER FOUR THE MEDIEVAL LITERARY LEGACY OF THE CHURCH FATHERS Two introductory considerations are necessary before beginning the study proposed in this chapter of the countless authors and books considered as the legacy of the Patristic literature compromised with misogynist pronouncements. They are especially necessary mainly due to the large number of texts considered as heirs of this medieval tradition. The first consideration is that the corpus studied herein is obviously selective for the very reason abovementioned, and the second is the preoccupation with choosing, as accurately as possible, that Patristic literary legacy, so-called due to being written by the Church Fathers of the early centuries of Christianity. Nevertheless, another point still deserves an explanation, which is that while much of the production of this legacy was of excellent quality and theological validity for the Christian religion, the works of the Church Fathers themselves remained significantly crucial for many centuries. They were a sort of prodigious fountain that was always searched to nourish and guide one’s thoughts. It is also worth noting that the reasoning criterion for the elaboration of this sample of authors that constitute a representative legacy of the Fathers of the Church, besides being selective, as commented above, chose followers who, despite their characteristic obstructions against women, nevertheless wrote seriously and relatively constructively about them. Fallacious intentions aside, this seems to be the case with Marbod of Rennes, and, mutatis mutandis, with Peter Abelard and even some controversial postures of Gratian’s Decretum. These heirs, among many others, of Patristic misogyny did not descend to the satirical and obscene insults and treatments of an irreverent Giovanni Boccaccio, for example. Furthermore, this happened because, usually, they did not behave with demolishing intent and did not find themselves in contexts of irreparable satirical criticism. They indeed differed, as it were, from a large amount of medieval literary production that continued the truly satirical and demolishing aspects patterned after the traditional shape of misogynist satire and hostile narratives toward women from the ancient world considered as the roots of medieval misogyny.

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

95

Gratian Decretum The Decretum was one of the central reference books in the Middle Ages compiled by Master Gratian of Bologna from a variety of sources around 1140, marking its place in the list of the most important collections of canonical ecclesiastical law. Composed in three parts, the second has been chosen for the selection of passages considered here for examination and raises the issue of misogyny in religious reference. This second part consists of 36 Causae or Causes, divided into Questions and Chapters. Cause 33, from which the excerpts selected here originate, raises the question regarding marriage and divorce, and Question 5 deals with the subject of continentia, that is, abstention from sexual practice. It discusses the obligations of both spouses regarding the matrimonial practice within marriage. In this respect, the Decretum establishes some curious misogynist conditions, such as the following. It is only possible to verify abstinence in the marriage if the two parties agree. The vow of chastity must not be forced onto a wife; she must not make this vow by force. The husband may refuse to accept the wife’s chastity vows made without his consent but only in theory; he cannot cancel the wife’s vows with his consent. The husband, at first, cannot cancel the abstinence vows he has given his wife. Nevertheless, ‘cynically,’ he can cancel his consent just because he gave it. Moreover, he even holds the condition of celibacy rights if his wife’s dissoluteness, that is, her refusal to restrain herself, forces him to have sex with her. In other words, ‘sex royalties’ are to be adequate to the husband’s prerogatives. Gratian’s Decretum presents the issue of sexual practice between married people as a mandatory commitment, according to the teachings of Saint Paul on the subject. Neither of the partners can formally withdraw from this commitment to prevent them from seeking sex in other conditions, outside of their marriage. It also comments that, among other points related to the issue, in other cases of abstinentia (abstinence), other types of abnegation other than sexual can occur. In the fasting vows, the abstinence agreement between spouses may disappear, coinciding here with numerous statements by the Church Fathers confirming the husband’s authority.1 The rhetorical construction of the Decretum’s discourse on this point that prescribes about the spouses’ restraint or unrestraint at first glance 1

Raming, The Exclusion of Women from the Priesthood…, 35.

96

Chapter Four

gives the impression of a certain parity of duties and rights between them regarding this sexual behavior. Nevertheless, the greatest weight of censorship and subordination is on women. Her body and dispositions deserve to be controlled by the man’s will, especially as a husband constituted by the religious sanction of the Church. This situation is remarked upon ad nauseam in the Patristic literature, supported by many biblical passages, as in the prototypical case of Saint Paul. It also reinforces the effectiveness of institutional and misogynist pronouncements, such as those made above in Gratian’s Decretum. Here, the auctoritas of the Church Fathers established affirmations and postulates that had the power to be considered as matters of legal evidence of the same importance as those decisions of the council and the highest dignitaries of the Church. It is interesting to remember here a superb characteristic of misogyny in the marriage institution concerning the asymmetrical obligations between spouses. The vows of abstinence made by the woman with the consent of her husband, and thus released from obedience by him, place the regency of the infantilized or reified female body under the ad aeternum command and tutelage of man. In Chapter XI of the selected part of the Decretum,2 Gratian deals with the issue of responsibility and the right of competence concerning the abstinence agreement made by a couple. The passage is an abbreviated account of the legislation in Numbers 30:3–16 addressed by Saint Augustine in the book entitled Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, iv, Quaestiones in Numeros (Questions on the Heptateuch, book seven, iv, Questions on Numbers).3 This passage is entitled “Vows of abstinence that a woman makes with her husband’s consent; she does not have to fulfill those vows if he forbids it. From Augustine, ‘Questions about Numbers.’” Reasoning on the matter, the passage says that it is evident that the law wanted the woman to be under the authority of man, so she was to perform none of the vows she makes, under abstinence, unless her husband had authorized this by giving his permission. Moreover, he says that this same law does not believe that 2 Gratianus, Corpus Iuris Canonici, part. 2, Decretum Magistri Gratiani, ed. A. Friedberg (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1879). The references are from this edition, and they can be checked in Gratianus, “Decretum Magistri Gratiani,” in Corpus Iuris Canonici, Editio Lipisiensis Secunda, Pars Prior, ed. Aemilius Friedberg (Graz: Akademische Druck, U. Verlagsanstalt, 1959), Causa XXXIII, Quaestio V, C.XI–XX, 1253–1256. 3 S. Augustinus Hipponensis, “Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, iv, Questiones in Numeros,” in Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris, 1844–1864), 34.717–748 (745–746).

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

97

a woman can do what she opted for because initially she was allowed to take her vow by a man. Instead, the law says that the fault is with the man because he denied what he had previously allowed; however, the goal is not to give the woman permission to fulfill her vows. Nevertheless, the condemnation of man may occur because he first allowed and then forbade. From the above, it is clear that even when it comes to condemning the man for contravening what he had done as a vow, he still has primacy of command. In this sense, a man always alienates women in his will and legal decision-making power. To her, all that remains is the condition of being directed by him according to the authorization of Church law. Gratian then makes his comment on the subject, giving his own opinion. He begins by saying that, as written earlier, it is visible that neither the woman without the consent of her husband nor the man without the consent of the woman can make vows of abstinence before God. However, after this general rule, only seemingly equalitarian, Gratian establishes conditions of agreements that, ultimately, include considerations that favor man. Thus, Gratian continues by saying that if abstinence is promised by the one with the consent of the other, and if afterward the one who allowed it wishes to put aside the abstinence vote, this is not possible, because in the fulfillment of sexual obligation in marriage the woman has equal power to the man. Gratian adds that if either one of them exempts the other from the marriage compromises, he or she cannot then call the partner to the former servitude. As mentioned earlier, this condition of parity, finally biased in the misogynist perspective, adopts the subservience of women to men as a natural position. In this sense, Gratian says that since, in many other essential aspects, man is the head of woman and woman is the body of man, a woman can make vows of abstinence with man’s permission. Nevertheless, if he forbids her, she cannot keep her promises, and this happens due to the conditions of bondage by which man naturally subjects woman in all things. Like in the medieval misogynist pronouncements of religious descent, the naturalization of women’s subservient condition to men’s supremacy happens under the concept of auctoritas. In this sense, Gratian invokes the doctoral wisdom of Saint Augustine, contained in his book of questions on Genesis to approach, in Chapter XII of the part of the Decretum indicated entitled “Women must be subject to their husbands,” addressing the question of wives’ submission and obligation to the command of their spouses. To justify this, Saint Augustine argues, in Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, i, Quaestiones in Genesis (Questions on the

98

Chapter Four

Heptateuch, book seven, i, Questions on Genesis),4 that it is the natural order among human beings that women must obey men and children their parents because it is a matter of natural justice that minors must unconditionally obey their superiors in such things. What Saint Augustine calls, in this case, a natural order is equivalent to the misogynist hierarchy that operated at the time. It was considered one of the universal principles settled by the autocratic and dogmatic canonical worldview of the religious reality.5 Chapter XIII of this part of the Decretum, on this prescription of the dogmatic subservience and obedience of women to men, establishes that God’s image resides primordially in the man. This commandment is so because man is a first-order creature from whom originated the whole of humanity, having the power of God, as if he were his deputy because he has the image of the one God. Consequently, it was a logical deduction from this androcentric biblical principle that God did not make woman in his divine image. At this point in the discussion, Gratian refers to Saint Augustine’s Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti: Quaestiones ex utroque mixtim (Questions on the Old and New Testaments: Mixed questions on both).6 Here, the bishop of Hippo invokes the Old and New Testaments to say that God made man in his image. Considering the New Testament, Saint Augustine complements his defense of man’s divine creation, saying that the Apostle affirms that man should not cover his head because he is the image and glory of God. In contrast, the woman covers hers because she is not the glory and image of God but the glory of man. However, as far as is known, this comment of Saint Augustine about women not being the glory and image of God is questionable. It is instead a saying of pseudo-Augustine, also known as Ambrosiaster, who, in this passage, as in another comment later in this chapter, distorts what Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11:6f. Chapter XIV of the part of the Decretum indicated entitled “The man is the head of the woman. From Augustine’s Questions on the Old and New Testaments” deals with the same topic of the command of women by men. Here, Gratian refers to Saint Augustine, or rather, to the pseudo-Augustine who considers women subject to men and the law and wants wives to be 4

S. Augustinus Hipponensis, “Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, i, Questiones in Genesis,” in Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, ed. JacquesPaul Migne (Paris, 1844–1864), 34.547–598 (590). 5 Raming, The Exclusion of Women from the Priesthood…, 35. 6 S. Augustinus Hipponensis, “Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti: Quaestiones ex utroque mixtim,” in Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, ed. JacquesPaul Migne (Paris, Migne 1844–1864), 35.2301–2302 (2320).

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

99

almost servants. Moreover, a man may testify against his wife, for which she may be executed by stoning if his testimony proves to be true. On the other hand, no one may execute a man by stoning if his testimony proves to be false. The punishment he receives is to remain with her, the one he wanted to imprison, forever. However, in other cases, the law orders execution for anyone who caused harm to someone due to false testimony, albeit proved. In this case, the law requires that the person who raised false testimony be punished with the same punishment that the innocent accused would have had if the testimony had not been proven to be false. All of these regulations are in Deuteronomy 22:13–21 and in Quaestiones in Heptateuchum, v, Quaestiones in Deuteronium (Questions on the Pentateuch, v, Questions on Deuteronomy).7 Within this misogynist condemnation of women for the simple fact that they must be subject to men because of their ‘natural’ condition of inferiority based on biblical history, the judgment of Saint Augustine via Gratian reveals, once again, that commented duplicity, the so-called double standard previously discussed. In this case, a privileged consideration and judgment of man’s attitude happens when it judges the female reality with the severity of a law that is applied leniently to punish him for the moral and even physical damage caused to the woman. In Chapter XV of the part of the Decretum indicated which continues to deal with the same topic of the subservience of women to men, a commentary on Epistolam ad Titum Liber Unus (Epistle to Titus, book one) by Saint Jerome is cited to reinforce the theme.8 Saint Paul’s epistle fills this commentary with theological support to defend and assert the superiority of men. Here, the fundamental metaphor for the apologetic defense of this masculine superiority is the image of the head. Saint Paul, in 1 Corinthians 11:3, remembers that man is the head of the woman, as Christ is the head of the man. Any wife who does not submit to her husband, her head, is guilty of the same crime as a man who does not submit to his head, Christ. The chapter continues by quoting Saint Jerome’s commentary on the Pauline epistle mentioned above, saying that when a woman, who is a Christian, wishes to rule over man, she blasphemes the word of God, reducing the first commandment of God to nothing and disgracing the word of Christ.

7

S. Augustinus Hipponensis, “Quaestiones in Heptateuchum, v, Quaestiones in Deuteronium,” in Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris, 1844–1864), 34.747–776 (762). 8 S. Ieronymus, “Epistolam ad Titum Liber Unus,” in Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris, 1844–1890), 26.589–636 (617).

100

Chapter Four

Women commanding men is against the law of nature and belief because even pagan women have shown servitude to their men according to the common law of nature. Gratian compares the woman’s command over the man as blasphemy against the word and the first commandment of God, meaning that when the woman rules man, the only and true image of God, the Lord stops being loved by his beloved ones above all things. The command of woman, not only of a Christian one but of any woman, is therefore considered an inconceivable contradiction not only to religious law but also to natural law. In Chapter XVI of the part of the Decretum indicated, the question of the subservience of women to men comes to be dealt with in their conditions of general obligation, as explained by the title “It is necessary for the woman to follow man’s will in all things.” Here, there is a recurrence of the auctoritas set out in Saint Augustine’s work Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, iv, Quaestiones in Numeros.9 Concerning the promises made between man and woman, the Decretum comments that the law does not want anyone making promises to God without the Lord’s will. In the very promises of abstaining from things that are legal and mandatory, the authority of women should not have strength but only the will of men. Here is strengthened that previous idea that the express will of God, instituted by the law of the Church, states that it is up to the man, and not the woman, to abstain from promised things, and therefore he is sovereign in his decision-making power. Continuing to gloss over this theme of the subjection of women to the power and jurisdiction of men, Chapter XVII of the indicated part of the Decretum is given the title “A woman has no power but in all things may be subject to the power of the man. From Ambrose, in his book of Questions about the Old Testament.” Here, there is a reflection of the established ancient Roman law in which the woman is subject to the power and command of man and has no authority; she is neither able and authorized to teach nor to be a witness or to make a promise in a legal judgment.10 However, this comment, attributed by Gratian to Saint Ambrose, is by the controversial figure Ambrosiaster, the pseudo-Augustine referred to earlier in this chapter.

9

S. Augustinus Hipponensis, “Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, iv, Quaestiones in Numeros,” in Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris, 1844–1864), 34.717–748 (745–746). 10 S. Ambrosius, “Quaestiones ex veteri testamento,” in Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris, 1844–1890), 35.2215–52 (2247).

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

101

Next, Chapter XVIII of a part of the Decretum by Gratian entitled “From Ambrose on Hexaemeron, in the tract of the fourth day” concerns the saint’s books whose main theme is to celebrate the beauty and perfection of the divine creation of the world. However, the specific reference that Gratian uses to illustrate the theologically misogynist aspect of Decretum is that of the fourth day, when the creation of man took place. Gratian, quoting Hexaemeron libri sex (Hexameron, book six) by Saint Ambrose,11 remembers that Eve deceived Adam, not the other way around. Therefore, if it is mandatory to blame the woman first for her fault in introducing the sin in the world, she should always be under the control of man. This male dominance was to prevent her from failing again, being a presumptuous creature in sinning and spreading evil over the world and humanity. Chapter XIX of the cited part of Decretum by Gratian, on the Commentarium in Epistolam B. Pauli ad Corinthios Primam (Commentary on the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians), continues the discussion of the subordination of women to men.12 In the passage, the same reason for the justified subordination of woman to man is her prime responsibility for the Original Sin. Moreover, as a stigma to indicate this fault, she must always keep her head veiled as a sign of respect for ecclesiastical authorities and temples. Thus, the Decretum prescribes women to cover their heads since they are not the image of God. She must use this symbol to show her subordination and transgression in Paradise. In the church, she must not be bare-headed but veiled in a sign of reverence to the bishop, and she is not allowed to speak because the bishop assumes the role of Christ. Therefore, just as it will be before Judge Christ, so it must be before the bishop because he is the Lord’s deputy on earth. Thus, once and for all, the order establishes that the woman is responsible for the Original Sin. Chapter XX of the cited part of Gratian’s Decretum refers to Saint Ambrose’s book De Paradiso (On Paradise),13 wherein he justifies the tópos of the subordination of women to men on the condition that man’s creation was first. Therefore, canon law establishes ad aeternum the principle of woman’s derivation in the sense that her creation from Adam 11 S. Ambrosius, “Hexameron libri sex,” in Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris, 1844–1890), 14.13–288 (277). 12 S. Ambrosius, “Commentarium in Epistolam B. Pauli ad Corinthios Primam,” in Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris, 1844– 1890), 17.193–290 (253–254). 13 S. Ambrosius, “De Paradiso,” in Patrologiae cursus completes, series latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris, 1844–1890), 14.291–332 (315).

102

Chapter Four

had the purpose of establishing a sole bodily nature in man and woman and a single origin of the human race. So, in the beginning, man and woman did not have two origins; neither were there two created men, nor two created women, but instead the man was made first and then the woman from him. Saint Ambrose’s justification for this, mentioned in Gratian’s Decretum, is that God, wishing to establish humanity from one nature, started it with an original creature, man, thus avoiding the possibility of many different natures. Finally, after this theological reasoning, Gratian concludes, with a strong misogynist defense of the origin and position of the superiority of power and command of man over woman, on the question of the abstinence vows between the couple according to the ecclesiastical law informed by ideological and political readings based on the Holy Scripture. In this sense, Gratian’s reasoning prescribes the main points of the modus operandi of the abstinence vows. He says, in the case of these vows, that one partner can offer them with the permission of the other, but after granting permission, the promise cannot end for any reason. Gratian, in his final interpretation of this matter, says it is undeniable that the husband is the head of the wife. Consequently, she cannot offer God any vows of abstinence from her free decision or even enter religious life without the husband’s permission. What is clear in the misogynist perpetuation of the Church’s legal pronouncements about women is the constant affirmation of their secondary and inferior position, verified in a hierarchical system of asymmetrical relations of rights and powers. A system characterized by the concept of male supremacy that naturalizes the female’s imperfection and perversity.

Abelard and Heloise Peter Abelard (Petrus Abaelardus, c. 1079–1142) was one of the leading French intellectuals of the twelfth century in philosophy and theology. During the period that Heloise (Héloïse d’Argenteuil, c. 1101–1164), a girl of recognized intellectual training, became his student, both enjoyed a passionate, secret, and familiarly forbidden love affair that finally surfaced with tragic sensationalism. Fulbert, a severe monk, uncle, and guardian of Heloise, ended up having Abelard castrated soon after their wedding took place against her will. The tragedy ended with the separation of the couple, both retiring to monastic life, but Abelard, even so, eventually helped his ex-wife’s convent’s sisterhood with highly useful and educated advice.

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

103

It was during the life of religious seclusion of the two lovers that the supposed epistolary interaction between Abelard and Heloise took place, which is not only absorbing and full of subtleties but also opinions about women that each of them makes explicit or implicit. Regarding the glossed theme of medieval misogyny in the Patristic legacy, Heloise offers, in her first letter to Abelard, a great personal response to the discriminatory and derogatory calumnies made to the volatile and dominant women in the affective treatment, showing, however, a relative depth and altruism in her love devoted to Abelard. A love she did not want to corrupt with the bonds and games of interest she saw at the wedding. Nevertheless, the authenticity, exemption, integrity, and a certain liberality that Heloise had shown demonstrated that she had assimilated the ideas and rhetoric of the time, identifying, by contrast, the fragility and inferiority of the vulgar women. These are the attributes androcentrically exemplified in Abelard’s own statement, when, in Letter 6, De auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium (On the Origin of Nuns), he comments that men are naturally stronger than women in mind and body. In addition to the assimilation of male idiosyncrasies, Heloise also portrays an attitude echoing the consented deprecation of women considered by the traditional misogynist legacy as an impediment to the flourishing of the male intellect. From the position commented above, Heloise suggested the presence of a certain pride in her sex several times. Despite this, she confirmed and applied in real life the misogynist rejection of marriage derived, as previously discussed, from the antimatrimonial writings of Saint Jerome, among others. By a curious process of internalization of postulates established in misogynist tradition, Heloise inadvertently became the first woman in Western thought to ironically reinforce the devaluation of her gender.14 By acting in this way, she perpetuated a real litany of disgrace about the cult extended ad infinitum of the evils of medieval misogyny as coined in the religious field by the primitive Christianity and its followers. However, in that same twelfth century in which Heloise lived, the apology of the female figure in courtly love, paradoxically coexisting with its destructive image in the misogynist vision, did not allow her verdict on herself to be shared by those who commented on her relationship with Abelard.15 Although the criticism considered the attribution of the authorship of the letters to Abelard and Heloise separately, each writing their own missives, 14 Sr Prudence Allen, RSM, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC–AD 1250 (Montreal: Eden Press, 1985), 293. 15 Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer; Peter Dronke, Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1996).

104

Chapter Four

it also questions the authenticity and impartiality of this correspondence, among other reasons, because of the appearance of the letters only in the last quarter of the thirteenth century.16 To verify the internalization of the misogynist legacy in the expression of the affective relationship of Abelard and Heloise, the letters of the two lovers, in any case, will be considered authentic. Nevertheless, they would still justify their inclusion in this study even if they were fake, given the truly interesting and intelligent treatment designed for their production. Therefore, it should be noted, specifically on the authenticity of Heloise’s authorship in Historia calamitatum (The History of My Calamities), a letter written by Abelard to a third party reporting his misfortunes, that there is, however, a complicating factor. The fact is that Abelard reports the arguments attributed to Heloise. All of this calls into question the authenticity of the correspondence of Abelard and Heloise, even though she later gave these arguments a general endorsement. Moreover, she had done this while adding, as a significant reason for her amorous mismatch, her disrepute in the mercenary aspect that marriage can take.17 However, there is still a problem concerning this question of authorship given the fact that there is no information or knowledge, even if it was Heloise who wrote the letters, of how much Abelard transcribed and how much he polished her opinions when reproducing her writing. In Historia calamitatum, Abelard, as a spokesperson for Heloise’s opinions, reports an apparent misogynist internalized stance on Heloise’s marriage. However, even when considering the possibility of this ventriloquist enunciation not being admitted—therefore, agreeing with the authenticity of Heloise’s pronouncements, despite being riddled by the narrative focus of a male narrator—it is worth noting the mimetic arguments of a discourse characterized by heavy misogynistic aspects elaborated with apologetic marks of androcentric values. In this sense, whether or not Abelard is placing his praises and appreciations in Heloise’s voice, this indicates misogynistic prerogatives of the superiority of man over woman.

16 Christopher N. L. Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 93–102; David E. Luscombe, “The Letters of Heloise and Abelard since ‘Cluny 1972,’” in Petrus Abelardus (1079–1142): Person, Werk und Wirkung, ed. P. Thomas, J. Jolivet, D. E. Luscombe, and M. de Rijk. Trierer Theologische Studien 38 (1980): 19–39. 17 Radice, trans., “Historia calamitatum,” in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 113–114.

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

105

Historia calamitatum Abelard, in this account of the calamities of his life, his Historia calamitatum,18 comments on what Heloise supposedly thought of the marriage she contracted. He says that she questioned and protested about the honor she could gain from the matrimonial union that dishonored and humiliated both. In this sense, reiterating the antimatrimonial indignations of Saint Jerome and other Church Fathers about the material, moral, and spiritual inconveniences of marriage, it is necessary to reflect on how ingrained the traditionally misogynist arguments against marriage still were in Abelard’s days. Although ecclesiastics often had concubines and children, and Heloise had already given birth to Abelard’s son, marriage would be a humiliation for both and a real obstacle to Abelard’s career prospects. Heloise continues by saying that, with her marriage to Abelard, the world would justly demand her punishment for the deprivation of the light that Abelard represented for it. From that point on in Heloise’s argument, there is a confusion of authorship (Abelard or Heloise) in the speech segment below when it affirms that such a marriage would deprive society of the courses at Abelard’s charge. The Church and philosophers would miss him and regret their union. After that, Abelard’s voice takes over the speech, saying that nature had created him for humanity and that it would be a resentful scandal for all if he tied himself to a single woman and submitted to such vile servitude. After mentioning this, Abelard speaks for Heloise again, saying that she had rejected that marriage, which would be nothing but a disgrace and a burden for him. Following this antimatrimonial reasoning, Heloise, in addition to the loss of his reputation, presented him with the difficulties of marriage that Saint Paul urges everyone to avoid. Commenting on a broken marriage in 1 Corinthians 7:27–28, 32, he advises the man not to look for a wife anymore because those who get married will have pain and grief in this bodily life, and the goal is to spare everyone from the marital disaster that only brings anxiety and worries for married life. Abelard continues his reasoning by referring to the opinions of Heloise, saying that she had told him that if he accepted neither the Apostle’s advice nor the exhortations of the Fathers about the heavy yoke of marriage, at least, she argued, he could hear what the philosophers said 18

Abelard, Historia calamitatum, ed. Alexander Renée from Troyes, Médiathèque du Grand Troyes, MS 802 (Toronto: Toronto Medieval Latin Texts, 2015). The references are from this edition, and they can be checked in Radice, “Historia calamitatum,” 70–130.

106

Chapter Four

on the subject. At this point, the antimatrimonial figure of Saint Jerome, examined earlier in Book I of the treatise Adversus Jovinianum, rises up again, in which Theophrastus’ exposition of the unbearable annoyances of marriage and its endless anxieties prove, with the clearest possible arguments, that a man should not take a woman in marriage. In what follows, Abelard considers what he says to be Heloise’s comments where it is possible to note him faithfully following Saint Jerome regarding Liber nuptiis by Theophrastus, such as regarding the disharmonious conditions that married life and raising children can bring to men. Heloise rhetorically asks what harmony and accommodation of peaceful situations would exist between students and babysitters, desks and cribs, books and tablets, or pens and spindles. Concerning the scholar of the Scripture or philosophy, Heloise asks, who would be able to concentrate on these important disciplines of revelation and knowledge and still be able to withstand crying children, nannies entertaining them with songs, and all the noise from men and women coming and going at home. Asking whether the scholar of these subjects would tolerate the constant confusion and fights that young children bring home, Heloise explains that the great philosophers of the past despised the world, not renouncing it as much as escaping from it. They refused every pleasure to find peace only in the arms of philosophy, and it is worth noting here the recurrence to this theme developed in Adversus Jovinianum19 by Saint Jerome and imitated by Abelard in Theologia Christiana. Next, Heloise, through the enunciation of her speech by Abelard, recalls the greatest philosopher Seneca, who advised Lucilius to treat philosophy as an inappropriate subject for worthless moments, evidently here alluding to married life. Referring to the philosopher’s words, she remembers that it is necessary to concentrate on philosophy to neglect everything because no time is long enough. It requires constant and exclusive dedication, as can be read in Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, Epistula 72.3 (Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 72.3) by Seneca.20 Heloise continues in Abelard’s narration to advise him on the virtue of celibacy. She refers to the fact that even pagans and laypeople could live in this way without being connected to any profession of faith. If this is so, it would be a greater obligation for him, who lives as a scribe and jurist, not to put vile pleasures ahead of sacred duties and to guard against falling directly 19

Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” II.9. Seneca, “Letter 72.3,” in Moral Letters to Lucilius, trans. R. M. Gummere, A Loeb Classical Library edition, vol. 2, 1920, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_72, accessed February 28, 2021.

20

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

107

into Charybdis, thereby losing all sense of shame and being thrown into a whirlpool of impurity forever. Heloise’s final admonition evokes to Abelard the dignity of a guardian of letters and philosopher in not failing to care for what is appropriate if the reverence due to God means nothing to him. At this point, she recalls the story of Socrates and Xanthippe. The famous story of this matron, an inconvenient and fearless wife of Socrates, remembered by Saint Jerome and previously mentioned in this book, takes place at this point in Heloise’s speech after she argues that the name concubine, rather than wife, would be more valuable and appropriate. Thus, the traditional misogynist posture of the ascetic male distrust of women internalized in Heloise expresses itself the most in her Letter 3. Here, there is a possible sense of guilt for the injury to Abelard she admits to having done. Nevertheless, she confesses that both were guilty, the motif for a suffering and anxious outburst in which Heloise reproduces the internalized tópos of female guiltiness that is always attributed to the woman for belonging directly to Eve’s lineage. As Abelard comments in Historia calamitatum, the weaker sex needs the stronger one, so much so that the Apostle establishes, in 1 Corinthians 11:5, a fact also considered by Gratian, as previously commented, that the man must be above the woman, functioning as her head and as a sign of that superiority. He has the right to order her to always have her head covered. Because of this reasoning, Abelard says that the custom in convents of placing abbesses as the head of women, established a long time ago, is surprising to him because many things in the law should not be the responsibility of women, whether in command or subordination. Abelard, continuing in his comments on his indignation at women being allowed to lead men, says that, in several places, the natural order for men to lead women is reversed to the point where abbesses and nuns are seen directing clerics who have authority over people. Based on this comment, it is worth considering a possible contextual reference to the controversy caused by the situation in Fontevrault because the abbess of that locality exercised authority over the clergymen assigned to the nuns. Abelard says that this authority to direct the religiously secluded was an opportunity to lead the clergy to bad desires. Perhaps seeking justification in Juvenal, the staunchest detractor of the ancient misogynist roots concerning women having a higher position than men, Abelard says that this Roman satirical poet had this in mind when he said that nothing is more intolerable than a wealthy woman. In this way, discriminatorily misogynist, Abelard was of the strong opinion that abbesses should not come from powerful families or behave

108

Chapter Four

in the manner of masters21 since he was of the firm opinion that men should be women’s advisers. Here he justifies, once again, his superior position as adviser and consultant to the community of nuns to which Heloise had withdrawn as a solution to her tragic romance.

Gottfried von Strassburg Gottfried von Strassburg (c. 1180–1210) was one of the most important medieval German poets. He is the author of Tristan (c. 1210), one of the masterpieces of narrative art in the style of courtly love from the German High Middle Ages. The work consists of a renowned and inspiring adaptation of the well-known legend of Tristan and Isolde, cultivated among the French and Germans in the twelfth century. Strassburg’s Tristan can be uniquely considered due to a mixture of lyricism with a certain cynical attitude insofar as it shows a character only interested in himself and who is not sincere, a mark of misogynist discourse centered in male prerogatives. The enamored duo maintains a mutual passion so tight that it is capable of enduring the torment of the suspicion and vigilance in the court of Isolde’s husband. However, in this loving treatment of Tristan and Isolde, there is a curious ambivalence in the composition of Isolde’s character, as she becomes a real hero insofar as she gives away her femininity. A curious ambiguity that is, nevertheless, perfectly explainable in terms of its misogynist perspective. Moreover, this true sequestration of Isolde’s identity as a woman resonates, in the author’s mimetic and ideological intention, a kind of enthusiasm for the appreciation of woman in the highest degree of consideration when she overcomes the imperfections of her sex and approaches the superior male paradigm. In this ideological sense, Gottfried von Strassburg can be considered a legitimate heir to the legacy of traditional misogyny mainly for composing, despite its ambivalence, a desirable moral and religious profile for Isolde rooted in the Patristic conceptions of medieval tradition. The enthusiasm for Isolde as a woman is compromised by the Church Fathers’ commonplace that says that women only acquire their elevation if they approach men’s status. Thereby, they can transcend the viciousness and self-destruction they inherited as successors of their primordial mater genetrix, Eve, promoter of the Original Fall.

21

Radice, “Historia calamitatum,” 113–114.

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

109

Tristan Following these considerations, Gottfried von Strassburg, in passage 17971 of the book, says that because women have become heirs of the condition of an original failure and because even nature promotes this defect in them, all honor and praise must be recognized and dedicated to those women who, despite this natural imperfection, successfully manage to abstain from it.22 Strassburg explains that the means to overcome this natural imperfection is the effort recommended to her for an ever-sought growth in terms of virtue exemplified as man’s natural endowment. In doing so, a woman who, despite her objectionable and despicable innate instincts, keeps her honor, reputation, and person morally intact with contentment is considered a woman in name only by people since in spirit she is a true man. It is worth identifying here a quite clear dialogue that Strassburg maintains with Saint Ambrose’s comments, in Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam (Commentary on Luke),23 regarding the comparison, unfavorable to Mary Magdalene, made between this female disciple of Jesus and Saint Stephen about the privilege and merit of the first-hand vision of the risen Christ. Saint Ambrose explains in the passage that the fact that Jesus called Mary Magdalene a woman was because she was a woman in the sense that she did not believe. A woman who believes hurries toward the perfect masculinity, toward the measure of the age of Christ’s completeness, considered by Saint Paul as an overcoming of bodily weaknesses.24 Strassburg continues, in his biased misogynist reasoning, to masculinize the desirable feminine character by means of the androcentric morality. He says that a woman should receive a good judgment for all her deeds, honor, and esteem when she puts aside her nature as a woman and takes on the heart of a man. Moreover, when this happens, all her wickedness is removed, thus being purged, in the manner of sap that drips from the pine tree, the hemlock that becomes balm, or what takes root as a nettle but blooms as roses on the ground. In that same metaphorical enthusiasm of 22 Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isold, ed. Friedrich Ranke (München: Buckmann, 1925). The references are from this edition, and they can be checked in Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, trans. Arthur Thomas Hatto (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 120–122. 23 Saint Ambrose, Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL vol. xiv, part IV (Turnhout: Brepols, 1957), X.161. 24 Raming, The Exclusion of Women from the Priesthood…, 162; Vern Leroy Bullough, “Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women,” Viator 4 (1973): 485–501.

110

Chapter Four

the woman as a man, Strassburg continues asking, but rhetorically stating, what is perfected the most in a woman when in the company of honor she battles with her body not only for its rights but also for its decency. He recommends in response that she should direct the combat to give justice to both body and honor, and thus to serve each equally, so that neither is neglected. Next, Strassburg predicts that a woman is not a woman of value if she despises honor for the sake of body or body for the sake of honor when circumstances favor the possibility of claiming the value of both together. Then, he recommends that she is not allowed to deny either her body or honor but keep them in joy and suffering according to circumstances. After all this doctrinal preaching and following the most radical precepts established by the Church Fathers on the subject, Strassburg finally spiritualizes the winning woman. She had become a man in moral and spiritual terms, a virtuous dominator of the interaction between body and honor, or rather, of the recommendation that there is no body without honor. Regarding this desirable interaction, he says that heaven knows and recommends that a woman should grow in merit at the expense of great effort. The religious misogynist doctrine is clearly expressed here, internalizing the idea of woman’s creation as a defective one in the woman’s view. This situation is found, as previously mentioned, in the considerations of Heloise in Letter 3 addressed to Abelard. She claims that her misery is a cause of her crime of love, questioning women as a fatality and total ruin for men. Heloise biblically moralizes the issue based on the warning in Proverbs 7:24–27 that recommends that men should not let a woman’s ways seduce their hearts because wounded women bring down many men, and even the strongest ones are their victims. Continuing on Tertullian’s metaphorical misogyny, Heloise comments that the woman’s house is the road to hell, leading to the cellars of death. Complementing this defamatory and demonizing litany of women, Heloise quotes Ecclesiastes 7:27. This passage reads that all women are more bitter than death, a deception, a net, and their arms are chains, and the one who pleases God should avoid them, for he who displeases God and is a sinner becomes their captive.25 Finally, Gottfried von Strassburg concludes by recommending that the woman should proceed by choosing her means with moderation, in complete avoidance of casual sexual reward. What is particularly ironic in this position of Strassburg regarding women is his attitude and disposition, although he may seem distant from a radical misogynist commitment. Not 25 Abelard and Heloise, “Letter 3,” in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. B. Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 130–131.

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

111

exempt from cynicism, he legitimizes the presence of corporeal femininity in women if subjected to an imposed moral ideologically controlled by the misogynist policing of an androcentrism rooted in the traditional religious foundations of the time regarding the feminine reality.

Anonymous Ancrene Riwle In the misogynist footsteps of the negative example of misguided women, Dinah is one of the biblical prototypes of the indiscreet woman who carries a dangerous and evil eye, whom Saint Jerome selected to censor in Epistula 107, ad Laeta (Letter to Laeta).26 Following this exemplum tradition, Ancrene Riwle (Rule for Anchoresses, c. 1230), of anonymous authorship, considers, as one of the basic doctrinal rules for religious women to lead a virtuous life, the policing of their way of looking at things and the mundane reality outside of the convent life. This theme of the dangerous feminine gaze is a rather recurring tópos in the debated question of misogyny in the Middle Ages. It appears, to cite only two of the most notable examples here, in the comments of Saint Bernard of Claraval (1090–1153) and Hugh of Saint Victor (1096–1141), the latterr of whom seems to have consulted and modified the anonymous ruling manual.27 This theme of the pernicious effect of the female gaze is but one of many warnings that form the doctrinal prose of Ancrene Riwle. The book is a manual-style treatise written in thirteenth-century Middle English intended for the training of reclusive young women who voluntarily cloistered themselves in individual cells or anchorages for the purpose of devoting themselves to religious life. This praiseworthy attitude and choice was actively encouraged and recommended by Saint Ambrose and Saint Jerome, outstanding Patristic preceptors of the praise, worship of virginity, and chastity of Christian women. One might even consider that, in many ways, the bits of advice offered by Ancrene Riwle are quite human and even sympathetic. However, what 26 Saint Jerome, “Letter 107, to Laeta,” in The Principal Works of St St Jerome (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 6), ed. P. Schaff and trans. W. H. Fremantle (Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892), 469–480. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. 27 Elizabeth Robertson, “The Rule of the Body: The Feminine Spirituality of the Ancrene Wisse,” in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings, ed. Sheila Fisher, and Janet Halley (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 115–125.

112

Chapter Four

is of interest to medieval misogyny, to its Patristic literature and legacy, in the book is that these pieces of advice reflect that obsession of the Church Fathers with feminine beauty. A beauty regarded in many biblical passages as a real threat to the physical, moral, and spiritual integrity of men. In this regard, it is necessary to consider that, among the masculine reactions and attitudes aroused by the misogynist view of women, the fear of women, or femmephobia, and anger have female seduction and beauty as their exact provocations, which despite being avoided, paradoxically, became desired. However, according to the admittedly derogatory posture of the treatise, it is women’s responsibility to neutralize their beauty to avoid the problem that this ambiguity brings to men. It is as if this contention happens simply because women exist.

Ancrene Riwle After establishing a daily prayer program in Part I, Ancrene Riwle turns to the question of controlling the body’s senses in Part II, beginning to address the issue by arguing about the risk of wandering eyes. In this sense, as commented before, inmates should not be so unwary as to allow themselves to peer out of their cells, for this would be to repeat the dangerous gaze of Dinah or even Eve, the origin of all known history of Western misogyny. Therefore, in Part II,28 the anonymous author addresses the need for women to control the course of their body that, since creation, had had to satisfy the ruinous seduction of an exacerbated libido. In this sense, the biblical story of Dinah illustrates the dangers that women run not only from looking but also from being looked at inadvertently. Moreover, they are not aware of the necessary vigilance against the possible evil that surrounds them when they are in public. Part II, which deals with the custody of the senses, contains this story, based on Genesis 34:1, explaining that Jacob’s daughter Dinah had gone to see the women who had come from abroad. During this visit, it is clear that, despite Dinah’s curiosity, she had not looked at any man. Nevertheless, the result of that visit was the loss of Dinah’s virginity, and she thus became a prostitute. That was of dire consequence because later, as a result of Dinah going to see the women outside, the promises of great patriarchs were broken, a great city burned to the ground, the king, his 28 The Ancrene Riwle, http://www.bsswebsite.me.uk/History/AncreneRiwle/AncreneRiwle.html, accessed March 1, 2021. The references are to this edition, and they can be checked in Anonymous, Ancrene Riwle, trans. M. B. Salu (London, Burns & Oates, 1955), 23–25 and 120–122.

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

113

sons, and men of the city were killed, and women were taken. Dinah’s father and her brothers, noble brothers, suffered expatriation. This calamity is what happened from Dinah’s trip to see the women outside. The Holy Spirit determined that all these things, Ancrene Riwle says, should be written down to warn women of the dangers that result from their foolish eyes not being wary of things that can result in quarrels and mishaps. However, the deadly dangers that surround the female gaze do not only lie in the agent’s gaze. Ancrene Riwle clarifies this, imbued with the femmephobia complex that characterizes the masculine disposition to denigrate the nature and character of the feminine. In this sense, the book says that it is not enough to attribute the responsibility of the disaster solely to the fact that the woman looks, but also to the fact that she lets herself be looked at, becoming guilty of this dangerous levity and carelessness. This judgment of the danger of women looking and being looked at is quite evident when Ancrene Riwle comments that Dinah’s evil was not the result of her look, which was not given to Sichem, the son of Hamor, with whom she sinned. It was an uncontrolled tragic consequence of her levity because what he did to her was, at first, much against her will. Next, the anonymous narrator of this moralizing recollection of the dangers of looking cites the memorable and recurring example of the temptation of David by Bathsheba. In the account of this biblical story recorded in 2 Kings 11, Ancrene Riwle does not explicitly condemn the unhealthy properties that the traditional misogynist posture saw in the woman’s gaze and in the fact that she carelessly allowed herself to be the target of glances. Nevertheless, the admonishments of the harmful female gaze indicate the woman’s pernicious attractiveness as the sole culprit. Moreover, she is condemned and guilty of villainy simply for being within sight of a man and making him capable of expressing his desire for her. In this sense, men’s weakness in being corrupted does not come into judgment. This conclusion is because misogyny, thus conceived in its religious roots, advances in the property of naturalizing women as a reality in itself consisting of negative and harmful aspects to the physical, moral, mental, and spiritual integrity of men. Ancrene Riwle, following the story of Dinah, addresses the case of Bathsheba’s relationship with King David, exemplary for its misogynist density in condemning women as a sinful presence for good men. Thus, it comments that Bathsheba, by stripping before David’s eyes, caused him to sin with her, even though he was a holy king and a prophet of God. Following this comment, Ancrene Riwle moralizes, now about the convent context, on the contact of ecclesiastics with the inmates, saying

114

Chapter Four

that even after this biblical example, a weak man still approaches the cells. He feels formidable in his broad aspect and closed cloak, and he wants to see some inmates and must necessarily look as if he were made of stone. He sees how much the beauty of a woman whose face is not sunburned pleases him, saying that she can look fearless to holy men, just as he is indeed one of them, dressed in his broad gloves. However, the indignant narrator of Ancrene Riwle calls this presumably holy man presumptuous. He asks this man if he had not yet heard what happened to David, the beloved of God who, as can be read in Acts 13:17, said that he had found a man after his own heart. However, this man, whom God called his chosen king and prophet, by watching a woman while she was bathing, let go of his heart and betrayed himself to the point of committing three of the most severe and deadly sins. He prostituted with Bathsheba, the lady he had looked at, betrayed, and murdered a real soldier, Uriah, her husband. The narrator concludes this example by addressing himself again to the ecclesiastical sinner visiting the inmates, blaming him for his boldness in casting his eyes upon a devout young woman. Next, Ancrene Riwle’s narrator takes on an advisory role, warning the dear inmate sisters not to believe or trust anyone who insists on seeing them in their convent setting. He says that he does not want anyone to see them without the special consent of their superior. He continues explaining that all those three sins of which he had rightly spoken and all the evil that came through Dinah, on which he had also commented, had happened not because women had looked at men with lust but because they had stripped before men’s eyes, thus providing them with the right occasion to sin. However, what in this passage from Ancrene Riwle seems to exempt women from the guilt of seduction by the sight of her countenance, ultimately fails to blame them, as does Tertullian, previously commented on in this book, for their unwary lack of vigilance and policing of the dangers that their image causes, which by nature leads men to sin and death. Next, in these moralizing counsels about the dangers of women’s gaze or the danger of men looking at women, Ancrene Riwle’s narrator exemplifies this situation by employing the traditionally dear tópos of the metaphorized female figure as an uncovered well. The uncovered well is the woman who, with her sinful and adulterous bodily charms, causes a man to separate from God and, like someone who uses no reason, like the ignorant animal, falls into the well, mortally in sin. The well is also the woman who, unaware of the danger posed by her countenance, shows

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

115

herself to man and tempts him, causing him to sin even in thought or with someone other than herself. Upon that woman, Ancrene Riwle invokes all sorts of divine punishments, causing her to pay harshly and apocalyptically on the Day of Judgment for the soul of he who was mortally lost in sin. The man remains without guilt but instead with sympathy as a victim of female helplessness and levity. This real allegory of a profoundly misogynist burden has the ideological force of internalizing guilt in a woman’s conscience. It does so by blaming her for the fate of having been raised without any rescue and forgiveness. Although the passage of this allegory of the woman as the uncovered well appears extensively in Ancrene Riwle, it deserves mention here in its entirety as one the most characteristic examples of medieval misogynist rhetoric in its richness of details, comparisons, and allusions. Ancrene Riwle begins by reasoning about the metaphor of woman as a well, commenting that the comparison is made because of the potential dangers of this female-well. If an animal happens to fall into this uncovered well, the man who left it open will pay a costly fine. Next, and in a morally condemning way, Ancrene Riwle says that these are very terrible words for the women who show themselves to the eyes of men. These are the women who uncover the well. The well is their faces, bright necks, eyes, and hands if they raise them before men’s eyes. What is more, these women’s speeches, if unchecked, are a well, just as all other things are that belong to them through which sinful love awakes. All this, says the narrator of Ancrene Riwle, our Lord calls the well. He commands that this well always be covered with a lid so that no animal may fall into it and perish in sin, and animal here means the animal man who does not think of God and who does not use his reason as a man should but moves on to fall into the well if he finds it uncovered. However, the judgment of the women who uncover the well is harsh because they must pay for the animal that fell into it. In the order of these figurative ideas, it is said that women are guilty before God for the death of the animal, must answer for his soul on Judgment Day, and make restitution for the loss of the animal when they have no coin, but only themselves. He says this is a harsh penalty, but it is God who judges and commands women to pay for their fault without failure because they uncovered the well in which the animal perished. In an apostrophic manner, the narrator of Ancrene Riwle then condemns women damningly and blames them for always uncovering this well, for doing everything to make men tempted by them, even if men are usually unaware of them. The book terrifies women by holding them tragically responsible for the nature of their gender, invoking the fear that they must

116

Chapter Four

have on Judgment Day. The extension of blame is so severe since it includes men who commit mortal sins, even if not with women but with a simple desire for them, or men who try to give in to someone else because of the temptation aroused in them by women. Ancrene Riwle says that women must be certain of the judgment. Unless they are acquitted, they must, as the saying goes, suffer the rope, that is, feel pain for their horrible sin. Finally, with the tone of an ironic and perverse proverb, contextualized for the subject matter, Ancrene Riwle comments that, according to the saying, the dog goes happily anywhere that he finds an entrance. Following the example of the allegory of women as uncovered wells discussed above, Part IV of Ancrene Riwle treats the increasing weakness of reason vis-à-vis the work of temptations. It does so in a visibly parabolic tone that metaphoricizes women devoid of a competent and robust reason as found in men to take care of essential things, including spiritual ones. Thus, to illustrate this misogynist theme of the weak power of female reason, Ancrene Riwle refers to the episode of 2 Kings 4:5–6 that reports the death of Ishbosheth. Here, the main metaphor for figuring out the weakness of women’s rational faculty is the image of a sleeping reason that in this state does not serve to distinguish evil and, consequently, without this capacity, favors the entry and mastery of it. The following is the account of this episode of the death of the sleeping king, who, going to rest, appointed a woman who was picking wheat to watch the door of his room. Rechab and Baana, the sons of Remmon, came and found the woman sleeping, as she had stopped picking wheat, and they went in and murdered poor Ishbosheth, who had guarded himself so poorly and precariously. From this point in the story, Ancrene Riwle decodes the episode’s allegorical meaning, giving reason a symbolism that eventually qualifies as anagogic. In this sense, he says it is indispensable to understand the purpose of what he is reporting. He points out that in Hebrew, Ishbosheth means confused man, for he was doubtless confused and out of his mind to lie down to sleep among his enemies. Thus, the guard of the door is the person whose task it is to choose wheat, to separate straw and chaff from the clean grain. This constant separation is to distinguish good from evil and always blow away the devil’s chaff, which is worth nothing other than to increase the smoke of hell. However, troubled Ishbosheth, acting extremely confusedly and without reason, appointed a woman to be his guard, who was nothing more than an inferior kind of guardian. Moreover, Ancrene Riwle continues by saying that it is a much more unfortunate thing for all those who do the same. Women are reason made weak when they should be manly, robust, courageous, and of good faith. The traces of Saint Paul’s footsteps are

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

117

visible in his glossed pronouncements about the need for the woman to masculinize her character to act well and, consequently, acknowledge her natural weakness. Furthermore, Ancrene Riwle goes on in its parabolic tone, saying that the guard goes to sleep as soon as one begins to allow sin in, the entrance of desire and fun. When the sons of Remmon, the sons of hell, found such a negligent guard and lacked watchfulness, they entered and murdered Ishbosheth, the extremely confused spirit that is off-guard, asleep, inattentive. Like many other passages in the book, Ancrene Riwle invokes the auctoritas of Saint Gregory for the theological reinforcement of the moralization of the theme. The saint comments that Ishbosheth would not have died from this sudden death if he had not appointed a woman, that is, a relaxed watchman, to guard the entrance of his soul.29 Finally, Ancrene Riwle concludes its last misogynist verdict on women by saying that this disgrace happened because of the sleeping guard, who was not awake or on guard. She had not acted like a man but as a woman, a creature that, by its nature, acts without reason and without suggesting competence, easily liable to fail and be thrown away.

Sources Abelard. Historia calamitatum. Edited by Alexander Renée. Médiathèque du Grand Troyes, MS 802. Toronto: Toronto Medieval Latin Texts, 2015. Abelard and Heloise. “The History of his Misfortunes.” In The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, translated by B. Radice. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Anonymous. Ancrene Riwle. Translated by M. B. Salu. London: Burns & Oates, 1955. Gratianus. Corpus Iuris Canonici, part 2: Decretum Magistri Gratiani. Edited by Aemilius Friedberg. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1879. Gratianus. “Decretum Magistri Gratiani.” In Corpus Iuris Canonici. Editio Lipisiensis Secunda, Pars Prior. Edited by Aemilius Friedberg. Graz: Akademische Druck, U. Verlagsanstalt, 1959. Radice, Betty, trans. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Strassburg, Gottfried von. Tristan. Translated by Arthur Thomas Hatto. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. 29

Saint Gregory The Pope, The Books of the Morals, Book 1. 35. 49. http://www.lectionarycentral.com/gregorymoralia/Book01.html, accessed March 2, 2021.

118

Chapter Four

Strassburg, Gottfried von. Tristan und Isold. Edited by Friedrich Ranke. München: Buckmann, 1925. The Ancrene Riwle. http://www.bsswebsite.me.uk/History/AncreneRiwle/AncreneRiwle.html.

References Abelard and Heloise. “Letter 3.” In The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, translated by B. Radice, 130–131. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Allen, Sr Prudence, RSM. The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC–AD 1250. Montreal: Eden Press, 1985. Ambrose, St. “De Paradiso.” In Patrologiae cursus completus, 14.291– 332. Series Latina. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris, 1844–1890. Ambrose, St. “Commentarium in Epistolam B. Pauli ad Corinthios Primam.” In Patrologiae cursus completes, 17.193–290. Series Latina. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris, 1844–1890. Ambrose, St. “Hexaemeron libri sex.” In Patrologiae cursus completus, 14.133–288. Series Latina. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris, 1844–1890. Augustinus Hipponensis. “Quaestiones in Heptateuchum, v, Quaestiones in Deuteronium.” In Patrologiae cursus completus, 34.747–776. Series Latina. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris, 1844–1864. Augustinus Hipponensis. “Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, i, Questiones in Genesis.” In Patrologiae cursus completus, 34.547–598. Series Latina. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris, 1844–1864. Augustinus Hipponensis. “Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, iv, Questiones in Numeros.” In Patrologiae cursus completes, 34.717– 748. Series Latina. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne, Paris, 1844–1864. Augustinus Hipponensis. “Quaestionum in veteris et novi testamenti: Quaestiones ex utroque mixtim” In Patrologiae cursus completes, 35.2301–2392. Series Latina. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris, 1844–1864. Brooke, Christopher N. L. The Medieval Idea of Marriage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Bullough, Vern Leroy. “Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women.” Viator 4 (1973): 485–501. Dronke, Peter. Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies. Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1976. Gregory The Pope, St. The Books of the Morals. http://www.lectionarycentral.com/gregorymoralia/Book01.html. Accessed March 22, 2021.

The Misogynist Literary Legacy of the Church Fathers

119

The Holy Bible. Translated from the Vulgata Latina. Belfast, 1892. Jerome, St. “Commentarium in Epistolam ad Titum Liber Unus.” In Patrologiae cursus completus, edited by Jacques-Paul Migne, 26.589– 636. Series Latina. Paris, 1844–1890. Jerome, St. “Letter 107, to Laeta.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 469–480. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. Luscombe, David E. “The Letters of Heloise and Abelard since ‘Cluny 1972.’” In “Petrus Abelardus (1079–1142): Person, Werk und Wirkung,” edited by P. Thomas, J. Jolivet, D. E. Luscombe and M. de Rijk. Special issue, Trierer Theologische Studien 38 (1980): 19–39. Mann, Jill. Geoffrey Chaucer. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Raming, Ida. The Exclusion of Women from the Priesthood…: A Historical Investigation of the Juridical and Doctrinal Foundations. Translated by N. R. Adams. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976. Robertson, Elizabeth. “The Rule of the Body: The Feminine Spirituality of the Ancrene Wisse.” In Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings, edited by Sheila Fisher and Janet Halley, 109– 134. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989. Seneca. “Letter 72.3.” In Moral Letters to Lucilius. Translated by R. M. Gummere, A Loeb Classical Library edition, vol. 2. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_72, 1920.

CHAPTER FIVE THE MISOGYNIST SATIRICAL TRADITION IN MEDIEVAL LATIN Andreas Capellanus One of the most sui generis expressions of the reverence and idealization of the feeling of love ever devoted to women in Western European medieval literature, the source of the invention of Western romantic love in the twelfth century, was the so-called courtly love. Ironically, but explicable in ideological, sociohistorical, and cultural terms, this special kind of literary genre expresses a complex apology of women in coexistence with a radicalized derogation of the female postulated by an everlasting Patristic literature tradition and its medieval legacy. Writers of this time satirically express the nuances of this misogynist derogation. Marbod of Rennes, Walter Map, and Andreas Capellanus were among those who cultivated a grim and defaming satirical tradition against women composed in Medieval Latin. In the wake of this kind of misogynist satirical literature written in Medieval Latin, De amore (On Love), a very controversial treatise because of its ambiguous intentions, was written around 1185 by Andrew the Chaplain or Andrew Chaplain (Andreas Capellanus, 1150–1220). Nobody knows anything about the author for sure. However, it is reasonable to associate him with the French royal court of his day since he knew the Countess Marie of Champagne around 1180. In a broad initial comment, Capellanus’ De amore is a work done in a parodic and satirical manner, full of criticism and mockery about the refinements of twelfth-century courtly love or loving courtesy. Filled with curious questions, answers, and models of debates on love-related themes, the general book structure vaguely resembles Ovid’s Ars amatoria.

De amore Seeming to emulate the literature of Ovid, the master of classical satirical misogyny, Andreas Capellanus structured De amore in three books. Book

The Misogynist Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin

121

I consists of an imitative elaboration of the courtly love literary art, while in Book II, the author deals, within this same theme, with the art of retaining and preserving this modality of feeling. In Book III, Capellanus, on a paroxysmal degree, carries the content of a radically critical and satirical attitude, professedly misogynist, which, in a certain way, runs through the author’s entire work. In it, modeled in a speech of extreme denial and slanderous accusation of the defects and vices attributed to women, the author gives his just reasons why one should not love a woman. In the preface to the book, the author promises to present, following the style of Ovid’s Remedia amoris (The Cures for Love), a lenitive or salutary guide to remove the torments from those who are victims of disaffections. Nevertheless, this does not happen because the book is more a form of immediate repudiation of love than a consolation and cure for unloving. Imbued with this purpose, Capellanus’ book discusses misogynist arguments to prove why it is not worthwhile to love a woman. Moreover, the author does this through the construction of a discourse composed of a mixture of religious, moral, and prudential arguments, such as the statement that sexual love offends God, damages friendships, and promotes violence, the worst perjuries, and so many more crimes of similar damnation. This same love enslaves and causes men to lose their public reputation, bringing them into the influence of evil, further weakening them in body and soul. After this misogynist reasoning, Capellanus seems to imply that fornication with women disfigures the dignity of men, but he refrains from carrying out an analysis of the nature and condition of the woman to prove this. He says he will not do this analysis because it would be too broad to discuss a topic that, besides being dull and boring, could be interpreted negatively as a condemnation of Nature.1 Saint Jerome, in Adversus Jovinianum, shared this same opinion, paraphrasing Saint Paul when the Apostle speaks of acquiescence to marriage only as an attitude to prevent the condemnation of Nature made perfect by God.2 However, Capellanus, after declaring that he cannot go against the designs of nature, does not keep his promise and throws indictments, perhaps the most wickedly misogynist ones, against the bad character he claims to be inherent to women’s nature. Such presumably deliberate 1

Andreas Capellanus, De amore libri tres, III.52–53. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/capellanus.html, accessed February 12, 2021. The references are to this edition, and they indicate only the books, chapters and sections where they are. They can be checked in Andreas Capellanus, Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh. London: Duckworth, 1982. 2 Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” 779–907.

122

Chapter Five

invectives against women, running the entire length of the book, virtually qualify them as the most exasperating in terms of a staunchly misogynist ideological stance. Moreover, this totalizing treatment of women results in a final reductionism that condemns all of them to material, moral, and spiritual essentialisms, as unappeasable creatures only worthy of figuring in a manual of misogyny in the style of those hunting medieval witches. Although rhetorical exaggerations permeate the whole treatise, this modus operandi for the denial of women, characteristically formed by a totalitarian language, reaches a high point in Book III. Indeed, the book seems to imply that it takes time and care to sediment ad aeternum, at some points of the discussion, the principles that constitute the negativity of the formation of the feminine reality. It is finally apt to consider, faced with the treatment of this strident and sad misogyny, whether this antiwomen stance would not be the correlate of an anti-love or rather a courtly anti-love posture. In this case, one may wonder if everything the author says of women was not exactly what he thought women were in reality. This problematic weighs heavily here because in Books I and II, he had only flirted with female psychology and sexuality. Finally, in the face of this ambivalent scriptural reality, something certainly exists in Andreas Capellanus’ De amore, as the book’s satirical intention sought to portray female reality as the object of a love-centered desire and its inherent misogynist derogations. De amore offers innumerable passages to exemplify this misogynist situation stemming from androcentric prerogatives, as in Book II.6.15. In these passages, the author recalls the so often glossed theme in misogynist medieval literature known as tópos of the double standard, that is, the consideration of two weights and two measures to deal with the rights and duties that jointly concern men and women. Thus, in the passage mentioned above, Capellanus deals with alleged infidelity problems, beginning with the inquiry as to what should happen if a woman discovers that her partner also loves a second woman. Unless it is just a casual sex adventure with someone’s maiden, the author’s opinion is that the first woman should reject him, but he mitigates this prescription by saying that, despite the offense, it is possible to consider certain stratagems to regain his complete allegiance. However—and here that alluded tópos of the double standard is evidenced—the same is not true of the woman who betrays her lover for loving another man because stricter criteria are applied in her judgment. Next, in the discussion of the subject in Book II.6.15, Capellaanus says that through the investigation of the primeval sin, one can consider what should be done to a woman who breaks her allegiance to her lover. He states that the enduring opinion of some authorities claims that the same

The Misogynist Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin

123

conventions established for the case of a traitorous man should be fully preserved for a traitorous woman, as can also be read in Epistula 77, ad Oceanum (Letter 77, to Oceanus)3 by Saint Jerome. Despite this equal consideration, in a real tour de force characteristic of the usual discretionary judgments of misogyny, Capellanus considers that although this opinion is ancient, no one should revere it because it casts the most significant error upon all. Furthermore, the author does not waste any more time commenting on this subject. In Section 16 of that same Chapter 6 of Book II, in consideration of the subject of a woman loving doubly, Capellanus says that God forbids the proclamation of forgiveness to a woman who is not ashamed to fulfill the desires of two men. Returning to his previously mentioned discretionary tone, Capellanus, naturalizing this dubious attitude toward men, says that society tolerates such behavior in them. It is thus permitted because of prevailing conventions about privilege in sex behavior where the performance of all shameful acts in this world is naturally more freely allowed to men. However, he adds that, in the case of women, the modesty of their chaste sex considers it so bad that, once a woman indulges in the pleasure of several men, she is considered a lewd prostitute unworthy to associate with other groups of ladies. In Chapter 19 of that same Book II, Capellanus even refuses a remedy for those who love such women, repeating, in Section 28 of Book III, that sexual freedoms are for men because of their audacity, but if conferred on women, they eventually slip to the status of prostitutes. Finally, in Section 17 of Chapter 6 of Book III, Capellanus arrogantly ponders if the adulterous woman’s return to her former lover’s hugs is not more shameful because he can surely conclude that her love for him will not be the same at all. Capellanus concludes by rhetorically asking for the reason why the lover should give his affection back to this unrecoverable woman. As commented before, Book III of De amore radicalizes the females’ conditions as worthless realities for the loving dedication of men, joining in the rhetoric of its discourse of aversion and anger toward women, elements considered as two basic ingredients to identify misogyny. Thus, Sections 62–64 of the book discuss the evils that love does to the intelligence and reason of wise men. In this sense, Capellanus, quite similarly to what Saint Jerome comments on the subject in Adversus Jovinianum,4 says that another reason why he warns men not to love is that loving passion dislodges their wisdom from its functions. 3 4

Saint Jerome, “Letter 77, to Oceanus,” 391–402. Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” 779–907, I.49.

124

Chapter Five

Continuing this commentary, Capellanus says that no matter how full of healthy sense this man may be, once seduced into sexual intercourse, he cannot observe moderation. He discards his wisdom to control tendencies toward sexual indulgence or even to refrain from its harmful activities. Capellanus goes on to say that intelligent men are said to grow more insane with love and more eager to quench the desires of the flesh than those with less knowledge to guide them. To illustrate the situation, he cites the case of Solomon, saying that no man had more complete or greater wisdom than he. However, he sinned by limitless sexual indulgence and, through the love of women, did not fear to worship foreign gods. Capellanus also recalls the well-cited case of King David in the famous list of men destroyed by women, saying that despite being a prophet of greater wisdom, he had numerous concubines. The abominable wife of Uriah mocked him in adultery and, like a treacherous murderer, killed her husband. Concluding this reasoning about pernicious feminine love, Capellanus recalls Walter Map’s comments on Solomon and King David in Dissuasion Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat (The Letter of Valerius to Rufinus, against Marriage) and Saint Jerome in the previously mentioned Epistula 22, ad Eustochium. In this sense, he asks which man could control his lust, since men who were so famous for their great instruction and wisdom failed in the love for women that caused their wisdom to forget its function, making them unskilled to control their sexual indulgence. In Sections 65–69 of Book III, Capellanus comments on the naturally impossible reciprocity of women’s love, the vice of their material greed in dealing with affections, the disloyal affective inconstancy, and the vile moral vulnerability of their feelings affected only by material interests. Regarding the mismatch of female love, he comments that there is yet another argument to explain why those who love can be disappointed. Man can never find the reciprocal love he seeks in a woman because no woman has ever loved her husband or can ever connect with a lover with the mutual bond of love. Because, as can be read in Ars amatoria5 and Amores6 by Ovid, it is the women’s way to look for wealth in love and not to give partners the solace they want. Furthermore, no one should be surprised by this because it is in women’s nature. Addressing the topic of female greed, Capellanus says that all women, because of the general shape of their sex, disfigured by this vice, carefully 5

Ovid, “Ars amatoria,” in Ovid: The Erotic Poems, trans. P. Green (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), II.279. 6 Ovid, “Amores,” in Ovid: The Erotic Poems, trans. P. Green (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), I.8.

The Misogynist Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin

125

focus with their ears pierced on profits and financial gain. He confesses that when he traveled the world, though he had searched carefully, he never found a man to declare familiarity with any woman who did not forcibly demand gifts if they were not offered spontaneously and did not delay in a love already started if there was no complete record of gifts to acknowledge, either spontaneously offered or requested. Still on this unhealthy female interest, Capellanus says that even if the lover had bestowed riches upon a woman, she finds him missing when he offers her customary gifts and she finds that he is now without a penny. She will regard him as an unknown stranger, and he will be an annoying person to her in all that he does. Capellanus, commenting on the disloyal female affective inconstancy, says that there is no woman attached to her lover with such affection and firm constancy that she will remain loyal to her love if any man approaches her with the slightest offer of gifts. He explains that this inconstancy of female love is because of the vile moral vulnerability of women whose feelings are affected by the greed of material things. Capellanus continues by saying that there is some permanent flame of greed in women whereby generous gifts finally break the barriers of chastity. He adds that if a man seeks to approach them with open hands, there is no woman who will let him go without getting what he seeks. However, if he does not make generous promises of gifts, he should not approach a woman with any request. Even with the distinction of a king to adorn him, he will get absolutely nothing from her if he comes to her empty-handed and must be turned away red with shame because all women are greedy for material things and are only interested in what they can pocket. Finally, Capellanus concludes his discussion on this topic on the shameful vulnerability of women motivated only by pecuniary interests. He says that there is no living woman of distinction of blood or blessed with position and abundance of wealth that an offer of money does not break, her virtue being corrupted by the material extension of wealth, even that of a corrupt or ordinary man. The reason, Capellanus concludes, is that no woman ever considers herself rich, just as a drunkard never thinks he has had enough to drink. Even if earth and water turned entirely to gold, he concluded that women’s greed would not diminish. Next, in Section 70 of Book III, Capellanus continues to defame female vices, nearly all of them coinciding with the types of the capital sins sanctioned by the Church. Thus, he says that every woman is by nature not only greedy but also an envious slanderer of other women, a usurper, a slave to her belly, fickle, crooked in speech, disobedient,

126

Chapter Five

rebellious against prohibitions, married to the vice of vanity, avid for boasting, a liar, a drunk, and a loose-tongued person who cannot keep a secret. She indulges in sexual excess, is inclined to all evil, and loves no man at heart. In this nominal order of women’s vices, Capellanus gives a dissertation exposition on each one of them, addressing the aspects that he considers more severe to comment on the malignity of each addiction to which he alluded. In this sense, in Sections 71–72 of the book, he says that a woman is greedy because there is no conceivable evil in the world that she does not boldly welcome in anticipation of a gift, and yet she does not feel that she can help a person in need, despite possessing a great patrimony. Following this explanation, Capellanus adopts his usual proverbial and figurative rhetorical tone, saying that it is easier to scrape off a piece of the unbreakable magnet stone with the fingernail than obtain something of women’s hidden savings by their own free will through human wisdom. Citing Epicurus, who believed that the highest good is in the belly’s service, Capellanus says that a woman believes that nothing gets applause in this world except wealth and parsimony. No woman is so naive and foolish that she cannot keep her property with great greed and gain possession of others with the most polite skill. She does so because she sells a chicken more seriously than the smartest lawyer who transfers the ownership of a good-sized castle. Then he concludes that no woman ever binds herself in such ardent love to a man that she does not devote her whole brain to sucking out her partner’s wealth. This fundamental principle never has deviations because there are no exceptions to it. The next vice included in the list, commented on by Capellanus in Sections 73–74, is envy. He says that, in general, every woman is envious, always consumed by jealousy of another’s beauty and unhappy with her material share. Even if she hears of the beauty of her own praised daughter, she can hardly stop the fire of personal envy eating at her. She regards the poverty and extreme indigence of neighboring women as abundant wealth and full possessions. So, Capellanus says, the old proverb that productions are more luxurious in the neighbor’s field and that the neighbor’s cattle produce heavier udders intended to designate women, without exception. Moreover, to conclude on this explanation of inveterate female envy, he says that it is almost inconceivable that one woman should praise the moral character and beauty of another, and that if she happens to praise her in something, she will immediately add a critique of something else to cancel the compliment previously made. Following the vices alluded to in the list by Capellanus, the next to be commented on in Sections 75–77 of Book III is slander. He says that, with much consequence, one can reason that women are indeed great slanderers

The Misogynist Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin

127

because slander is the result of the exercise of envy and hatred. He argues, in defense of his view, that women have never sought to waive their prescriptive rights but try to keep them entirely undiminished. It would even be challenging to find a woman whose tongue could be merciful or leave slander aside. Capellanus continues his damning dissertation by saying that every woman believes that she increases her glory and her good name if she seeks to diminish the praise of other women. Moreover, he completes this idea by saying that this is a clear indication to all that there is little wisdom within women because everyone in the world is aware of the general and constant rule that slander only damages the good name and hurts the slanderer’s reputation. However, Capellanus continues, this does not stop women from slandering or assaulting the praise of good men. Therefore, he thinks that men should firmly hold the view that there is no woman with even a hint of sound instruction. As for men, Capellanus says that everything they keep in terms of intelligence is quite alien to women. They get notions randomly, live happily in their compliments, and behave contrary to wisdom in ways that would be tedious for him to mention individually. Commenting on the vice of greed, Capellanus, in Sections 78–79 of Book III, says that this vice also deforms women. They strain every tendon to steal all possessions, not only from other men but also their husbands, to whom they are happily married. Once they have grasped these possessions, women struggle to keep them in a way that does not help anyone. Such is the greed that prevails in women, Capellanus says, that they do not believe they are going against divine and human laws and seek to get rich at the expense of others. Capellanus ponders on this topic by commenting that women think that refusing gifts to everyone and jealously keeping things won by fair or wrongful means is the greatest virtue and a quality that everyone should praise. He concludes on this indecent female procedure by saying that no woman is an exception to this rule, not even a queen. The next female addiction satirized by Capellanus in Sections 80–82 of Book III is gluttony. On this vice, he says that women are usually a slave to their belly, for there is nothing that will cause them to blush in tasting, if they are sure, an excellent food. Even more, if they are tormented with hunger, no food could be enough for them to anticipate being satisfied or to be invited to the table. Instead, they always look for the most private places to eat in secret, and their habit is to enjoy eating outside of mealtimes. Capellanus, on the subject of female gluttony, theologizes this sin by saying that the female sex is greedy and addicted to grasping possessions and exhausting all that she has most eagerly through food gluttony. He

128

Chapter Five

says this is in Eve, the first woman. Though fashioned by God’s hand and not by the work of man, she was not afraid of taking the forbidden fruit, and she deserved her expulsion from her Paradise home because of her voracious belly. Capellanus concludes his reflections by asking if the first woman, created without sin by God’s hand, could not refrain from her belly vices, how the rest of her descendants would since they are sinfully in the womb of their mother and never live without sin. After these considerations, Capellanus, in his usual totalitarian proverbial tone about the satirized and denigrated female reality, concludes that women never give out of goodwill. Fine meals are good lures to make them offer something. Next, in Sections 83–88 of Book III, Capellanus comments on women’s inconstancy generally, saying that not one of them is firmly determined in anything that a slight persuasion of someone does not soon dispel. That is because women, Capellanus continues, are all like melted wax, always ready to take on a new shape by someone’s seal mark. This idea that women have a natural softness of constitution, as seen before, was definitively established in the misogynist Middle Ages through the etymological considerations of Saint Isidore of Seville. Marbod of Rennes later associated the formation of women with easily molded wax, which is considered a suggestion that women may be marked by the phallocentric order of the patriarchal system.7 Continuing in his comments on women’s inconstancy and changeability, Capellanus says that no woman could make a man confident in her promise because her intent and purpose are extremely changeable. No woman’s mind, he continues, remains unchanged for an hour, so much so that Martianus reasonably says that when dealing with women, one should not delay because they are always fickle in their manner. Here, in this speech of Capellanus, is a reminiscence of the famous words of the Aeneid in the passage where Mercury urges Aeneas to leave Dido because women are fickle. However, Capellanus, surprisingly, attributes this speech to Martianus Capella.8 Capellanus recommends that men should not expect to be satisfied with the fulfillment of any promise of a woman unless he has first securely obtained the promised thing. He adds that it is even pointless to consider a woman’s commitment to civil laws. He satirically recommends that men 7 Danielli Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. M. Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 38. 8 Martianus Capella, “Marriage of Philosophy and Mercury,” in Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, vol. 2, trans. William Harris Stahl, R. Johnson, and E. L. Burge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

The Misogynist Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin

129

should always keep their purses ready when confronting a woman’s promises. He adds that the old proverb seems to tolerate no exception in the case of women when it says that once one is ready, one should avoid delays because procrastination never pays off.9 For Capellanus, linked to the inconstancy and changing character of women is their capacity for deception. Everybody knows that everything they speak is misleading since they always have different ideas from the words they say. In this sense, Capellanus goes on to say that no man could then delight in the intimacy or affection of a woman, nor would they be able to know the secrets of her heart or the degree of sincerity with which she addresses him. This is because women do not believe in men as friends, believing that all men are ultimately deceptive. So they always go on with misleading purposes, and everything they say is said with a false heart and an ambivalent mind. After reasoning about the capacity of female deception, Capellanuss advises men that they should never feel confident in women’s promises or vows because there is no lasting loyalty in them. He adds that this is why men must make sure to keep their private purposes hidden from women and not reveal their hidden thoughts so that they can cheat malice with malice and repel their deception. As a prime example of this situation, he cites the case of Samson. All men knew his honest character, but he could not hide his inner thoughts from a woman without being betrayed by her deceitful heart. He was defeated by an army of enemies, captured and deprived of the strength of his body and vision, as can be read in Judges 16:15 and Epistula 22, ad Eustochium10 by Saint Jerome. Capellanus says that Samson’s deception by a woman is not a unique example. It is found in countless cases of other women who also, in a vile way, betrayed their husbands and lovers through false words because these men could not hide their secrets from them. In Sections 89–91 of Book III, Capellanus comments on another addiction of women, disobedience, no less objectionable than the previous defects attributed to them. On this addiction, he says that it pollutes every woman. No woman is living in the world who is so intelligent and circumspect that if she is forbidden from the improper use of something, she does not fight the prohibition with the full force of her body and seeks to break it. Concerning this reasoning, Capellanus, observing what is said

9

Hans Walther, Proverbia sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi, 9 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1963–1969), 31438. 10 Saint Jerome, “Letter 22, to Eustochium,” 100–137.

130

Chapter Five

in Ovid11 and Walther,12 comments that women strive greatly to obtain the forbidden fruit and the denied and desirous prize. Capellanus discusses women’s eagerness to break the ban, recalling the fable of a man of great wisdom who had a disgusting wife. He did not want to kill her with his own hands because he did not want to commit a crime, but he knew she was happy to look for forbidden things. Then the crafty man took a costly bottle and poured into it a fine-smelling wine mixed with poison, telling his wife to make sure not to touch it or venture to drink a drop of it because it was poisonous and lethal for humans to drink. As the story continues, Capellanus says that the wife disregarded her husband’s ban. Before he left, she drank the forbidden drink, and the poison ended her life altogether. However, Capellanus underplays the morality of this fable, saying that there are better cases of females’ disobedience. He remembers the case of Eve, asking rhetorically if it was not her, the first woman made by the hands of God, who died and lost her immortality and glory for the sin of disobedience. She was guilty of dragging herself and all posterity to mortal destruction. After that, he ironically and pragmatically recommends that if someone wants a woman to do something, he will undoubtedly succeed if he asks her to do the opposite. Next, in Sections 92–93 of Book III, Capellanus discusses the vice of female pride, another instance in which the vices condemned by the author coincide, in most cases, with the capital sins of the Christian doctrine. On pride, he comments that it harms women because, when some incentive arouses her to pride, she cannot control her tongue and hands with abusive deeds, words, and anger, doing all kinds of evil recklessly. Here, pride is associated with anger, another capital sin. Pride goes wild and enrages women, Capellanus continues, and anyone who tries to curb their anger wears himself out with wasted effort. Even if he kept women’s hands and feet bound and applied all manner of torture, he could not make them give up their evil intent or diminish the arrogance of their mind. Moreover, women’s anger is aroused by any small observation, sometimes even without provocation. Then their arrogance swells without limit. Regarding this lack of control of female arrogance, Capellanus confesses that he could not think of anyone who had been successful in finding a woman who could curb their arrogance since no woman is an exception to this rule. 11 12

Ovid, “Amores,” 1982, III.4–l7. Walther, Proverbia sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi, 29695.

The Misogynist Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin

131

The discussion of women’s arrogance continues in Sections 94–96 of Book III. In this respect, Capellanus says that every woman seems to despise others, a trait that is derived from pure arrogance because no man could despise another except out of great pride. He says that women, both old witches and young girls, stretch each nerve to praise their beauty. Moreover, the words of the wise man, who comments that gross contempt and pride exist in beauty’s train, clearly prove that this habit also results from pure arrogance, as can be read in Ovid’s Fasti (About the Roman Calendar)13 and in Walther.14 Capellanus concludes on this topic of female arrogance by saying that it is almost evident that women cannot be in full possession of a noble character because, as the saying goes, when arrogance is present, it ruins all just ways.15 Alongside arrogance, Capellanus places the female vice of boasting, saying that no one can find a single woman who, above all and delighted by the praise of people, does not believe that all the words spoken about her are to praise her. He traces this feminine vice, like so many previously seen, from the first woman, Eve, when she took the forbidden food to know good and evil. Still discussing boasting as an inherent addiction of the feminine nature, he says that a woman does not exist, even of low status, who does not claim to have remarkable relatives, saying that she is a descendant of a family of high-ranking men, and who does not use all kinds of ways to exalt herself. Capellanus concludes, in his usual sentencing manner, that ostentation is something that vainglory seeks for itself. Addressing the addiction for lying in Sections 97–98 of Book III, Capellanus issues his totalitarian judgment that all women are liars. There is no living woman who does not claim what is not true and invents lies with untiring naivety. All women will lie under oath a thousand times for some small advantage and make up endless lies for the slightest gain. Capellanus continues commenting on the vice of lying by saying that they are enslaved to keeping all their lies without mistake and are vain to invent untrue things against other ladies with elaborate falsehoods. Meanwhile, he concludes by saying that no man could have strong suspicions about a woman to make her confess her mistake unless caught in the same sinning act. 13 Ovid, Heroides, Amores; Art of Love, Cosmetics, Remedies for Love, Ibis, Walnut-tree, Sea Fishing, Consolation; Metamorphoses; Fasti; Tristia, Ex Ponto, vols. I–VI, ed. G. P. Goold et al., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1977–1989), I.419. 14 Walther, Proverbia sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi, 8874. 15 Walther, Proverbia sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi, 12465.

132

Chapter Five

Next, in Section 99 of Book III, Capellanus discusses women’s addiction to drunkenness. He says that all of them are fond of drinking wine and that none of them is ashamed to drink the best Falernian in daylight in the company of a hundred matronly colleagues. Juvenal’s Satire VI16 refers to this wine brand in an episode of a woman vomiting the precious drink. Continuing to satirize the drunken character of women, Capellanus says that they never refrain from drinking wine so often as to refuse another glass if brought to them. If they say that the wine is spoiled, they consider it the most significant enemy and that, for them, drinking water is the most harmful practice. However, if they find wine in good condition, not mixed with water, they would rather tolerate a significant loss to their estate than fail to fill themselves with wine. This is because, Capellanus concludes, no woman escapes the sin of drunkenness on numerous occasions. The next vice criticized by Andreas Capellanus is the unfortunate incontinence of the female speech. Thus, in Sections 100–101 of Book III, he says that all women are also loose-spoken. None of them can restrain themselves in their speech when insulting people or shouting loudly all day long like a barking dog, mourning the loss of a single egg, or disturbing the entire neighborhood over a trifle. He goes on to say that a woman gossiping with another woman would never give, of her own accord, the other woman the slightest chance to speak. She always tries to dominate the conversation with her own opinions and to go on talking the longest. On this note, Capellanus says that a woman’s tongue and breath could never be exhausted from so much talk. He says that many women, on many occasions, are so keen to talk that when they are alone, they talk and speak out loud to themselves. Therefore, Capellanus concludes that a woman recklessly contradicts everyone and could never agree with anyone’s opinion but always strives to put her point of view first on every subject. Next, suggesting that this addiction is associated with female verbal incontinence, Capellanus presents the sin of indiscretion. Thus, in Sections 102–103 of Book III, he comments that no woman can keep a secret because the more one tells a woman to keep something secret, the more she eagerly tries to tell everyone. Continuing in this denigration of women as creatures of indiscreet nature, Capellanus says that no woman exists who is able to keep an undisclosed secret, no matter how important or even likely to cause someone’s death that secret may be. Capellanus analyzes this feminine compulsion for indiscretion by generalizing that a secret entrusted to a woman seems to burn her from within if she does not 16

Juvenal, “Satire VI,” 430.

The Misogynist Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin

133

first expose the disastrously confidential secrets deposited on her. He concludes that someone could not prevent women from acting like this by bidding them do the opposite, the pocket rule said before, because they are all happy to gossip about something new. Therefore, the most advisable thing is to keep every secret away from every woman. In Section 104 of Book III, Capellanus addresses the sin of lust, perhaps the most derogatory of the vices conferred upon women. It is fraught with censure, with moral and religious condemnation. In this sense, he says that every woman in the world is also lewd, because a woman may be eminent in social distinction and a man the lowest and most despicable, but if she finds out that he is sexually virile, she does not refuse to sleep with him. Resonating with what Juvenal says on the subject in Satire VI,17 Capellanus, concluding his view on the terrible female libidinous incontinence, says that no man, however manly, could completely satisfy in any way women’s sexual desire. Continuing to talk about the unbridled female lust, Capellanus, in Sections 105–106 of Book III, says that no woman attaches herself to a lover with such chaste loyalty or unites with her husband without welcoming another man as a lover. Especially if he is wealthy. Lust is in the company of women with the most flagrant desire. Still, in his opinion on women’s lust, Capellanus, as in so many other considerations made about the female reality, postulates about women’s lack of control. On this subject, he says that no woman in this world is so faithful or committed to an engagement that, if a lustful lover comes along and teases her with the skills and persistence to enjoy love, she is not concerned at all with rejecting his request or defending herself against his approaches once he has used heavy pressure. In his usual totalizing manner of acquiring the weight of a true postulate, Capellanus says that this shameful female willingness for adultery or sexual licentiousness is a rule in the case of any woman. This is so because even the reputed ones with distinguished and excellent husbands look for lewd intercourse with other men. Capellanus concludes, in his misogynist condemnatory tone, that a woman behaves like this because an obsessive sexual desire curses her. Crowning all this reasoned cursing of the most heinous vices attributed to women’s ways of being, Capellanus radicalizes the feminine reality, following the most clinging misogynist tradition of the ancient and medieval world, as inherently malevolent and causing malignancy to men. Thus, in Sections 107–109 of Book III, he postulates that women are wholly disposed to all evil and that they all fearlessly commit every major 17

Juvenal, “Satire VI,” 115–132.

134

Chapter Five

sin in the world under a small pretext. Their minds readily bend to all evil under the slightest pressure. Capellanus goes on, taking his reasoning in the perspective of conferring on women an innate tendency of placing themselves as objects of propitiation of occult forces, of wicked and evil superstitions. Regarding this, he says that there is no living woman in the world, even an empress or a queen, who does not devote her whole life to portents and different ways of guessing the future, as pagans do. Their simple mind, he continues, is obsessed with paganism, and they diligently practice the infinite wickedness of astrology. Indeed, Capellanus says, still commenting on the subject, there is no task a woman does without waiting for the day and time to come without inaugurating it with baleful art. She does not even marry, conduct a death ritual, seed a field, enter into a new home, or start anything else without first beginning it in the woman’s way and without having it approved by women’s prognostic magicians. Crowning this reasoning about the power of women’s wicked and evil inclination to superstitious paganism forces, Andreas Capellanus recalls the case of Solomon. The king, in his great wisdom, knowing all women’s wickedness and crimes, made the general pronouncement about their vices and depravity that it is a real truth that there is no such thing as a good woman, as can be read in Ecclesiastes 7:29.

Sources Andreas Capellanus. Andreas Capellanus On Love. Edited and translated by P. G. Walsh. London: Duckworth, 1982. Andreas Capellanus. De amore libri tres. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/capellanus.html. Accessed February 12, 2021.

References Capella, Martianus. “Marriage of Philosophy and Mercury.” In Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, vol. 2, translated by William Harris Stahl, R. Johnson, and E. L. Burge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. The Holy Bible. Translated from the Vulgata Latina. Belfast, 1892. Jacquart, Danielle and Claude Thomasset. Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages. Translated by M. Adamson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.

The Misogynist Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin

135

Jerome, St. “Against Jovinian.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 779–907. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. Jerome, St. “Letter 22, to Eustochium.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 100–137. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. Jerome, St. “Letter 77, to Oceanus.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 391–402. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. Juvenal. “Satire VI.” In The Satires of Juvenal, translated by R. Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958. Ovid. “Amores.” In Ovid: The Erotic Poems, translated by P. Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Ovid. “Ars amatoria.” In Ovid: The Erotic Poems, translated by P. Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Ovid. Heroides, Amores, Art of Love, Cosmetics, Remedies for Love, Ibis, Walnut-tree, Sea Fishing, Consolation, Metamorphoses, Fasti, Tristia, Ex Ponto. Edited by G. P. Goold et al. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1977–1989. Walther, Hans. Proverbia sententiaeque Latinitatis Medii Aevi, 9 vols. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1963–1969.

CHAPTER SIX THE MISOGYNIST CONTRIBUTION OF VERNACULAR ADAPTATION In a passage from one of the most misogynist books of the Middle Ages entitled Philobiblon (The Love of Books), written in the early fourteenth century by Richard de Bury, an important figure of the Church and State at the time, the author gives impersonated voices to books to complain about their place being usurped by women. These females frivolously alienated them from men’s lives. However, after this resentment, the books ironically give their rival some reason. For they admit that they would have it if they saw what is inside them, discovered their private deliberations, had read only the book of Theophrastus or Valerius, inveterate defenders of the misogynist tradition, or if they had only listened with sympathetic ears to Chapter 25 of Ecclesiasticus.1 In reference to this passage, along with so many others responsible for the situation of women in relation to the formal culture of medieval times, it is of significant importance to consider a fact in the establishment and perpetuation of medieval misogyny. Such is the case of traditional literature in Medieval Latin and vernacular languages being equally faithful transmitters of medieval thought and culture concerning women. The reason for this is that the learning of Latin was socio-culturally understood as empowerment given mainly to the formation of men. Thus, it is to be considered that, through the learning of Latin as a curricular obligation, came the first steps toward misogynist indoctrination, both from exemplary material of a Christian religious background and from renowned misogynist writers of classical antiquity. Since women were not often educated in Latin, it is possible to think that this language remained a linguistic bastion perpetuating misogyny, thus remaining unpunished by the possible indignation of women about this state of things. Alongside this Latin education, considered as a male prerogative, was the case of the Latin-trained clerics, who wrote in vernacular or translated into this linguistic modality. This is the main reason why thirteenth- and 1

Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. Michael MacLagan, trans. E. C. Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), 40–42.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

137

fourteenth-century vernacular writings, despite their widespread dissemination, are notable for being neither more or less abrasive than nor as consistently misogynist as their Latin predecessors. However, as discussed before, the medieval courtly literature of the time may be considered a broad field of relatively positive vernacular literature in dealing with the female figure. In this sense, the work of Jean de Meun, along with those of other vernacular writers of the period, is a repository of a diversity of misogynist conventions of the ancient and medieval tradition that underwent a renewed treatment through the introduction of peculiarities that characterized the variegated shape of the culture of the late Middle Ages.

Jean de Meun Jean de Meun (Jean de Meung, c. 1240–c. 1305) was a renowned intellectual translator of a variety of Latin and philosophical works into French. However, he became most celebrated for having continued an allegorical work by a French poet named Guillaume de Lorris (c. 1200–c. 1240) entitled Le Roman de la Rose, written in about 1230. Left unfinished by its author with about 4000 verses, de Meun added 17724 verses of his own to the poem in around 1275, thus finishing the original text. Le Roman de la Rose is a long poem that allegorizes the pursuit of a lover for a rose, a metaphor for his beloved wife. From the thematic perspective of the satirical misogyny of the time, there seems to be a consensus among critics of this long hybrid poem that de Lorris’ section contains a broad wave of more emotionally felt and implicit misogyny. Nevertheless, in the continuing section of the poem, written by de Meun, his misogynist and satirical address to women is oriented toward a more open and explicitly critical attitude, less emotionally felt than that of de Lorris. Concerning the allegorical misogyny dealt with by de Lorris in the section of his own poem, the unpleasant personifications (Hatred, Greed, Old Age, and so many other unwanted ones) that he portrays outside the walls of his garden of love, where the rose is emotionally discovered and cultivated, are female. However, it is to be noted that this pursuit of a desired love proves to take on the meaning of a male-centered pursuit of a sexual object that, if not properly conscious, seems to take the form of a courtly game woven for the playful satisfaction of the male alone.2 2

Joan M. Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature from the Twelfth Century to Dante (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 111.

138

Chapter Six

Although Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris are both, except for the differences noted above, legitimate heirs of traditional misogyny, the former demonstrates a discourse more explicitly owed to this tradition. Proof of this are the instances in which he stereotypically denigrates the image of women, as in the case of La Vieille, often portrayed in traditional misogynist literature as a pimp. And it is this old female pimp who recognizes in herself, in a kind of ridiculous presentation for the entertainment of licentious men, a trace of the misogynist predicate attributed to women considered as their poor ability to judge, especially when it comes to discarding a bad-tempered boyfriend or lover who was, however, a tenacious bed-rider. Analyses and interpretations of Le Roman de la Rose have noted the allegorical characters brought onto the scene by de Meun, notable for their speeches containing misogynist ingredients, who were actually created to function as dramatis personae considered as projections that falsely reflect the author’s intentions. This is what happens, for example, with the extremely misogynist representation of Le Jaloux. This caricature in Le Roman de la Rose does not belong to the primary cast of the text. De Meun devised it through the character named simply as Friend, who advises another character, the Boyfriend or Lover, in the procedures necessary to maintain the feeling of his beloved. It is fully apparent, on first reading, that Le Jaloux is a negative example of an imbecile and a domineering husband who excels in bowling and making the life of his supposed wife practically infernal. Yet at another level of inquiry about a possible mimetic fallacy, it may well be considered that de Meun, in scrutinizing the character of the jealous husband, in this way exposes the most current and traditional misogynist views, attitudes, and postures of an anti-woman discourse filtered by phallocentric culture.

Le Roman de la Rose This chapter covers more than one and a half thousand lines of Le Roman de la Rose to illustrate key points to continue the thematic focus on traditional medieval misogyny. Jean de Meun presents, from line 8455 on, highly condemning comments by Le Jaloux, better known as the allegory of The Jealous Husband.3 The personification of the Friend, who advises 3 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Roman of the Rose by Guillaume of Lorris and Jean de Meun, 5 vols, Ernest Langlois edition (Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot, 1914–1924). The references are from this edition, and they indicate only the lines where they are. They can be checked in The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 156–281.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

139

the Boyfriend or Lover on how to keep his love object, says that it is at weddings that one can see the macho figure of the husband being domineering over his wife, beating her and making her life a struggle. Such a husband tells his wife that she is stupid and foolish to be out dancing and often keeping the company of beautiful young people. Thus, women undergo so much suffering when their husbands want to have control and possession of them that even good love cannot withstand. After his comment, in a seeming objection to Le Jaloux’s vilified posture, Jean de Meun gives him the voice of a dramatis persona. At this point, the narration embodies a strategy of misogynist discourse. Even in an apparently unwilling caricaturization of one of its characters, the narration still deliciously sadistically exposes the defects and cripples of women eternalized in the hegemonic centuries of male culture. Thus, in line 8467 and following, Le Jeloux says that women are very vertiginous and their behavior is very stupid. He comments that as soon as he goes to work, his wife does not hesitate to go dancing and live a turbulent life like that of an irreverent singing mermaid. Continuing his speech, Le Jeloux says that when he leaves Rome or Friesland with his merchandise, then his wife immediately becomes coquettish because comments about her conduct circulate everywhere, and he learns this from someone who tells him that. Le Jaloux adds that when someone asks why she behaves so modestly everywhere she goes, she responds keenly that it is because of her love for her husband. About this, Le Jaloux tells her that everyone knows very well that she is lying. Moreover, feeling sadly disgraced, he says that he had formed evil gauntlets with his own hands and that he had been mistaken, even cruelly, when he accepted her loyalty on the day of their marriage. Ironically, he continues to apostrophize his wife by asking her if it is for him that she leads this life of turmoil and lust and whom she thinks she is deceiving. He says that he has never had a chance to see her quaint little games, while those rogues who go around spying on whores, eager for pleasure and hot with desire, look her up and down as they follow her on the streets. In line 8553 and following, Jean de Meun continues to reproduce the alleged speech of Le Jaloux in direct discourse. He gives full responsibility for these misogynist judgments to this dramatis persona, though this certainly does not exonerate the author-narrator of the pitfalls of an intentional fallacy that would exempt him from ideological ideas similar or at least sympathetic to those of the speaking character. In this way, Le Jaloux tells his wife that he would not have taken her if it were not to serve him, possibly recalling here the words spoken in the very act of marriage. Moreover, in line with this idea of subservience superimposed on wives,

140

Chapter Six

he keeps asking if she thinks she really deserves his love by associating with dirty rascal men simply because they have a merry heart and find her very merry as well. From this point on, at the peak of his misogynist offensive, Le Jaloux qualifies his wife as an evil whore, saying that he has no confidence in her and that demons had induced him into marriage. He regrets that he did not believe Theophrastus, for then he would never have married a wife, because this great anti-marital counselor did not consider the man who takes a wife in marriage to be wise, whether she be beautiful or ugly, poor or rich. He states this as true in his noble book, Aureolus (Golden Book), also cited on the subject by Walter Map in the conclusion of Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat (The Letter of Valerius to Rufinus, against Marriage) and Saint Jerome in Adversus Jovinianum (Against Jovinian).4 In the wake of this reasoning against marriage, what follows in Le Jaloux’s speech gives the impression of paraphrasing what Theophrastus says, either directly reported by Saint Jerome in the quoted passage from Adversus Jovinianum or through his intermediary John of Salisbury. In this sense, it is said that Theophrastus’ Aureolus, a good book to study at school, proves to be true in saying that married life is very unpleasant. It is full of toil and troubles, strife and quarrels that result from the pride of foolish women and the opposition and reproaches they make and utter with their mouths; it is a life full of demands and complaints that they make on many occasions. That is why men always have great difficulty and trouble in keeping their wives in order and restrained from their foolish desires. By means of a paraphrase of Theophrastus’ considerations on the subject, Le Jaloux exposes in line 8579 the unbearable inconveniences of marriage, saying that anyone who wants to take a poor wife must have to feed her, dress her, and put shoes on her feet. Le Jaloux goes on to talk about the case of this man who wants to get married. If he thinks he can make his life better by taking a wealthy wife, he will find her so vain and proud, so smug and arrogant that he too will have great torment in tolerating her. Moreover, even if it is the case that she is pretty, everyone will run after her, stalking and honoring her. Thus, Le Jaloux explains that suitors will come to the mountains, toil, battle, and put themselves at the service of this beautiful wife, and they will surround her, beg her, and try to obtain her favors, covet her, and continue until they take her, because a tower attacked on all sides hardly ever avoids being taken. 4

Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.47, 779–907.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

141

In line 8597 and following, Le Jaloux continues his derogatory speech regarding the woman taken in marriage, saying that if she is ugly, she will want to please everyone. Moreover, he asks how to keep something against which everyone makes war. Such a troubled man, if he makes war with the whole world, cannot live in peace on earth because he knows that no man can keep their wife free from capture as long as she is wellcoveted. Le Jaloux proverbially concludes the matter by saying that one who knows how to win a prize would even capture Penelope, and there was no woman of greater discretion and moral integrity in ancient Greece. Continuing to comment on the expert conqueror who knows how to win a female prize, in line 8608, Le Jaloux says that, in fact, such a man would do the same to the unpolluted Lucretia, although she killed herself because she had been raped by her husband’s son. According to Le Jaloux, citing Titus Livius, her husband and father did not prevent her from killing herself in front of them, despite all the precautions they had taken. They strongly urged her to let go her grief, gave her compelling reasons, and in particular comforted her with compassion and forgave her with a generous heart for all that had happened. Her husband talked to her and focused on finding vivid arguments to prove that her body had not sinned because her heart had not wanted to sin, since the body cannot be a sinner when the heart does not consent. Nevertheless, she, disregarding all these arguments, regretfully put a knife to her chest so that no one could see when she went to hurt herself. Moreover, she answered them shamelessly that no matter who might forgive her for the dirty sin that weighed upon her so heavily, she could not forgive herself for the penance of that sin. Then, Le Jaloux continues in his narration, Lucretia, full of great anguish, struck and tore her heart and fell dead to the ground in front of everyone. First, she begged them to avenge her death. She wanted to set this example to assure women that any man who took them by force would have to die. As a result, the king of Rome and his son were sent into exile, and they died there. After this disturbance, the Romans never wanted anyone as king again. It indeed seems surprising, in this professedly misogynist narrative context of Le Jaloux, to recall examples of the moral integrity and impeccable character of virtuous women by the zeal of their honor and their marital fidelity, best represented by the case of Lucretia. However, even in dealing with the positive aspects of this female figure, it is clear in the discourse that praises her that there is a subtle derogation of traits and attitudes that reproach her for showing what is inherent to the nature of every woman, namely, the arrogance, pride, and irreverence that identify

142

Chapter Six

woman from her biblical origin. This can be particularly noted in this case, as it seems that it was Jean de Meun who composed Le Jaloux’s speech. Although based on historical facts recorded by Titus Livius in Ab Urbe Condita Libri (History of Rome),5 Le Jaloux nonetheless grafted a misogynist suggestion onto Lucretia’s narration, possibly derived from De Civitate Dei (City of God)6 by Saint Augustine. A suggestion that maliciously discredits Lucretia for pointing out her willful female refusal to accept the advice of her relatives. The expression “shameless,” in which state she appears before all, insinuates a certain lack of modesty and shameful withdrawal for the defiled honor that every woman who excels in her decency should not boldly expose to the public. Thereby, Lucretia’s fault was the disrespect of the androcentric auctoritas of the traditional reality of the pater familias. In line 8651 and following, what seems surprising, in a misogynist satirical discourse such as Le Jaloux’s, is to find a possible complement to the woman of virtuous competence in terms of marital and loving fidelity. Nevertheless, this tone soon disappears, totally demystified, when he says that, depending on how well a man knows how to beg a woman, there is no Lucretia or Penelope among women of value on earth who can resist his attacks. This is because if a man knows how to take her, no woman will ever defend herself, as is commented on by Walter Map in Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat and Andreas Capellanus in De amore (On Love)7 regarding women’s lack of resistance to the loving and sexual harassment of skilled men. Concluding this thought about the inveterate and always frankly loving licentiousness of women, Le Jaloux, based on stories of the pagans, says that no one has ever encountered any exception of a woman who deviates from the rule. Continuing his derogatory speech about man’s search for a woman to marry, Le Jaloux, in line 8661 and following, discusses the dangerous and astonishing habit of men not inspecting the women they will marry beforehand. He says that he does not know where this foolishness comes 5 Titus Livius, The History of Rome, vol. 1, trans. George Baker, A. M. (New York: Peter A. Mesier et al., 1823), I.57–58, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/livythe-history-of-rome-vol-1. 6 Saint Augustine, De civitate Dei, Documenta Catholica Omnia, XVIII, V, 1993– 1996, I.19. http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/0354-430, _Augustinus, _De_Civitate_ Dei_Contra _Paganos, _ EN.pdf. 7 Andreas Capellanus, De amore libri tres, III.104. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/capellanus.html, accessed February 12, 2021. The references are to this edition, and they can be checked in Andreas Capellanus. Andreas Capellanus on Love, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (London: Duckworth, 1982), 243–321.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

143

from except madness, and he notes that a man who buys a horse does not pay any money if he does not first see the horse without a harness, no matter how suitable the horse appears when covered. This comparison with the horse, charged with sexual symbolism, comes from Theophrastus, from his link to things that, unlike women, a buyer experiences before they pay, as can be read in Adversus Jovinianum by Saint Jerome.8 In this comparison, Le Jaloux says that this buyer looks all over the horse and tries it, but that he takes a wife without experimenting with her, never being without clothes, not because of gain or loss, comfort or discomfort, but for no other reason than she cannot be displeased before she gets married. So, when she sees the thing achieved, she shows her malice for the first time; each of the vices she has appears, and then, when it will no longer help a man to repent, she makes the fool aware of her ways. Moreover, Le Jaloux concludes this reasoning by saying that he knows with great certainty that, no matter how prudently a wife acts, there is no man, unless he is a fool, who does not repent when he finds himself married. Next, in line 8687 and following, Le Jaloux discusses the rarity of finding a woman who is really worth a consortium. In this respect, he recalls Valerius of Walter Map’s Dissuasion Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat, who says that worthy women are rarer to find than phoenix birds. Le Jaloux says that no man can love a woman without her hurting his heart with great fears, carelessness, and other bitter misfortunes. Returning to the comparison of the woman of value with the phoenix, Le Jaloux corrects his opinion by saying that, for him, a more honest comparison would be that one finds women of value less often than white crows, despite the beauty of their bodies. However, so as not to say that he is attacking every woman with such great impunity, he ends up confessing that a woman of value, if one really wants to search for her, must be aware that she is a rare bird on earth, as easily recognizable as a black swan. In addition to using Walter Map to illustrate the rarity of a really worthy woman, Le Jaloux also mentions Juvenal, who, in Satire VI,9 advises that if anyone encounters a chaste woman, they should kneel in the temple, bow before Jupiter, and arrange for a golden cow to be sacrificed to Juno, the honorable lady, because nothing more wonderful ever happened to any creature. After warning men of the difficulty of finding a woman worthy of love, Le Jaloux asks, in line 8717 and following, if any man still wants to love a wicked woman of whom, according to Valerius, who is not 8 9

Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.47, 779–907. Juvenal, “Satire VI,” v. 45–54.

144

Chapter Six

ashamed to tell the truth, there are swarms here (and larger ones overseas) than those of bees that cluster in their hives. Next, Le Jaloux disserts about what is expected to happen to him. Resonating here the same terms of Map’s inquiry in Dissuasion Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat, Le Jaloux says that such a man does nothing but harm himself by imprisoning himself in such a way as to lose both his soul and his body. Still referring to Valerius’ example in line 8727 and following, Le Jaloux says that Map’s letter-writing counselor, when he sensed the reason why his companion Rufinus wanted to marry, made a serious speech to him. He asked God Almighty to keep him, as always, away from a woman of great power, a crusher of all things through malice. Le Jaloux, in line 8735 and following, recalling Juvenal in his famous satire,10 comments that the Latin poet advised his friend Postumus, taken by the Fury of torment and the pain of marriage, that instead of marrying, he should sell ropes, cables or halters, leap from a tall window, or even fall from a bridge. Next, in line 8745 and following, Le Jaloux cites the exemplary case of antimatrimonial opinion given by the wise king Phoroneus who, known for giving laws to the Greek people, spoke on his deathbed to his brother Leonce that he would have died happy if he had never married. Asked for the reason for this statement, Phoroneus, echoing Map’s words in Dissuasion Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat, replied that all husbands are witnesses of this and experience it when married, no matter how wise the wives may be. In line 8759 and following, Le Jaloux, in his defense against marriage, cites the ambiguous case of the ventriloquist statement of Heloise who, in the voice of Abelard, even as a woman, had strongly opposed the union with her lover. Thus, Le Jaloux says that Peter Abelard, in turn, had admitted that Sister Heloise, Abbess of Paraclete and his sweet ex-lover, absolutely did not want to agree to his proposition to take her as his wife. On the contrary, the well-understood, educated, loving, and well-loved young lady put forward arguments to convince him not to marry. Moreover, she proved to him with texts and reasons that the conditions of married life were very harsh, no matter how wise the wife might be, because she had seen them, studied them, and known them from books, and knew the feminine ways very well, because she had them all inside her. In the passage between lines 8777 and 8824, the narrator, while presenting Le Jaloux’s speech and using Abelard’s Historia calamitatum 10

Juvenal, “Satire VI,” v. 28–32.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

145

(The History of My Calamities),11 mentions some arguments of Heloise and her famous statement that she preferred to be Abelard’s prostitute than an empress. Le Jaloux takes advantage of this ambiguous misogyny placed in a woman’s own mouth and argues reasonably about this unique virtue of Heloise, perhaps suggesting it as an example to other women. Because of this, he says he does not believe that there has ever been another woman like Heloise and that he thinks that her learning has placed her in a situation of knowledge that better favors how to overcome and dominate her nature of feminine ways. He concludes by saying that if Abelard had believed her, he would never have married her. It is, however, sure that this idea of Le Jaloux, that Heloise had learned to master her feminine ways because of her wise readings, is one of the most obvious instances of the formal system of indoctrination of misogyny, since that bookish authority was essentially restricted to having read works of male authorship. In line 8883 and following, Le Jaloux, declaring that marriage is indeed a malevolent institution, asks for help in his married life from Saint Julian, who housed pilgrims, and Saint Leonard, who frees prisoners who truly repent when he sees them wailing. Moreover, he reveals that it would have been better for him to hang himself the day he took a wife, when he became familiar with such a strange woman. With such a coquettish wife, he asks to die and cries for the son of Saint Mary, asking what such a singular wife is worth to him. That expensive dress that makes her nose so long and trails behind her, annoying and vexing him, that act of hers that is so arrogant that makes him mad with anger and that does not give him any profit. Between lines 8851 and 8889, Le Jaloux criticizes his wife’s elaborate dresses, saying that they hinder him during the day and hang around uselessly at night. Continuing to explain his arguments about the worthlessness and inconvenience of a wife, in line 8889 and following, Le Jaloux says that when a man wants to oppose him, he says that the bounty of good things goes well with different types of people and that beautiful clothing creates beauty in ladies and girls. Le Jaloux answers that no matter who actually says that, he would answer that that person lies. This is because, he says, the beauty of beautiful things, violets or roses, silk clothes or fleurs-de-lis, as he finds it written in books, is in those things themselves, not in the ladies. Resonating in Le Jaloux’s commentary, once again, is the voice of the author himself and his literary preparation, probably influenced here by Boethius’ thought which, in De Consolatione 11 Abelard and Heloise, “The History of his Misfortunes,” in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. B. Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).

146

Chapter Six

Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy),12 argues that the brilliance of jewels belongs to the stones themselves, not to their wearers, and that whatever lies beneath the glittering ornaments remains in filth. Continuing in his tendentious defense of the woman’s natural beauty, which is nothing more than cynical reasoning to spare costs on her clothing, Le Jaloux says that all women should know that none of them will ever have anything in life except natural beauty, saying that, to him, the same applies to kindness. Therefore, he says, beginning his speech, if one wanted to cover manure with silk clothes or small flowers, neat and beautifully colored, it would still certainly be manure with its same bad smell as before. In fact, this comment by Le Jaloux echoes the frequent comparisons that medieval moralists make of the hypocritical woman dressed in snow-covered dung, as can be read in Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio (The Corbaccio), in the passage that satirically discusses what lurks beneath the woman’s façade,13 and in Jehan Le Fèvre Les Lamentations de Matheolus (The Lamentations of Matheolus) and Le Livre de Leesce (The Book of Leesce). 14 Le Jaloux goes on to say that one might argue that if the manure is ugly inside, it looks more lovely on the outside, and that ladies likewise dress for the purpose of looking pretty or hiding their ugliness. Then, if anyone says that, Le Jaloux explains, he would not really know how to respond, except to say that such a mistake comes from a maddening sight of the eyes that see such ladies throughout their fine dresses. As a result, their hearts go astray because of the pleasant impression of their imagination. Moreover, they do not know how to recognize a lie or the truth, or how, for lack of clear vision, to explain sophistry, as can be confirmed in Les Lamentations de Matheolus15 when it comments on the sophist habit of women wanting to win. However, Le Jaloux replies at this point that if husbands had the eyes of a lynx, they would never be considered to be beautiful because of their fur cloaks, clothes, head ornaments, scarves, underclothes, jewelry or other meaningful objects, smiling faces, bright contrivances that make them look artificial, or garlands of fresh flowers. No matter how well Nature formed Alcibiades, whose body was always beautiful in color and shape, anyone who could see him from within would consider him very ugly. He 12

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Victor Watts (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1999), II. pr. 5. 13 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Corbaccio, trans. Anthony K. Cassell (Urbana, IL and London: University of Illinois Press, 1975. 14 Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, II.3095–3098. 15 Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, I.824–902.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

147

says this, as can be read in De Consolatione Philosophiae,16 in a discussion on the inability of the eye to see anything beyond exteriority. Noteworthy here, however, is the use of an example of male beauty. In the following passage, composed of lines 8957 to 9012, Le Jaloux ponders about the incessant unilateral conflict between Beauty and Chastity and, in line 9013 and following, he goes on to comment on the incompatibility between attractive beauty and virtuous chastity. On this subject, he says that he swears by God, by the heavenly king, that a woman, when she wants to be beautiful or intends to look beautiful, examines herself and takes great care to project herself and to look attractive because she wants to make war against Chastity, which certainly has many enemies. In convents and abbeys, all women swear against it. They would never be locked like this, between walls, unless they did not hate Chastity so strongly that they all aspired to embarrass it. All women pay tribute to Venus without any consideration of value or prejudice. They adorn and paint themselves to make fools look at them, and they hunt down the streets to see and be seen, echoing here what Ovid comments in Ars amatoria17 when he observes that women gather to look and be looked at in the amphitheater. They also adorn themselves, says Le Jaloux, to arouse desire in people so that they will want to lie with them. In this way, they wear their best clothes for the caroles, a kind of dance, and for the churches, as Ovid comments in Ars amatoria18 when discussing the wiles by which women deceive their guardians. Moreover, on this obsession with women seeing and being seen, Le Jaloux adds that none of them would ever do that unless she thought she would be seen and then give pleasure to those she could fool. In his deprecation of wives, Le Jaloux adds that, surely, if truth were told, women bring great shame upon God. Fooled fools, they do not consider themselves rewarded with the beauty that God has given them. Each one has on her head a crown of gold or silk. She dresses and goes around the city showing herself, and then the unfortunate wretch humiliates herself in a very damned way when, to increase or perfect her beauty, she wants to put an object of lesser value and greater inferiority than herself on her head. Thus, she goes around undoing God because she finds him unsuitable and, in her foolish heart, she thinks to herself that God did her a great mischief when he brought beauty to her. He recognized himself as very 16

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 1999, II. pr. 8. Ovid, “Ars amatoria,” in Ovid: The Erotic Poems, trans. P. Green (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), I.99. 18 Ovid, “Ars amatoria,” III.618–652. 17

148

Chapter Six

negligent. In this way, she looks for beauty in the creations that God made with a much worse appearance. At this point in Le Jaloux’s speech, one can note a paraphrase of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae19 and a clear reminiscence of Tertullian in De cultu femininarum (The Apparel of Women)20 when he comments on women tampering with their original God-created image by dressing and adorning themselves capriciously. In the passage between lines 9063 and 9122, continuing on this theme of ornamentation, Le Jaloux says that if men adorn themselves, they offend God in the same way. He says that he prefers simple clothes and resents buying elaborate dresses for his wife to show her boyfriends who, presumably, find her more sexually pawned than he and laugh at him in the meanwhile. In line 9123 and following, Le Jaloux, addressing his wife in an indecorous manner, claiming that it is because of her wild means that he finds himself in vexation, calls the woman a turbulent, dirty, vile, fetid bitch. He continues in this tone, cursing her, saying that he hopes her body will never see the end of the year because she gives it to such dogs. He says that it is through her and her lust that he placed himself in the confraternity of Saint Ernoul, the patron of the horns, from where there is no saved man, no matter how much he walks to keep an eye on her and spy on her, even if he had a thousand eyes. Le Jaloux completes this thought by commenting on the lasciviousness of women who get attacked and on the fact there is no guard worth anything. However, if they omit the latter fact, they are never without desire. He says that Juvenal gives him great comfort in this situation when he speaks of the urgency with which a woman’s carnal desire has to be satisfied. It is of the sins that stain women’s hearts because their nature commands them to focus on doing worse, aspects that Juvenal discusses in Satire VI.21 At this point, Le Jaloux recalls the diabolical behavior of women in referring to stepmothers who cook poisons for their stepchildren, and he mentions that women do charms and spells and many diabolical things; despite the strength of men’s thinking, none of them are able to ascertain the harm that women can do. In line 9155 and following, Le Jaloux addresses women by saying that they all are, will be, or have been prostitutes, in fact or desire, because whoever can change the fact cannot curb desire. All women have the 19

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 1999, II, pr. 5. Tertullian, “The Apparel of Women,” trans. E. Quain, in Tertullian: Disciplinary, Moral and Ascetical Works, trans. R. Arbesmann et al., FOX, xl (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959). 21 Juvenal, “Satire VI,” v. 133–155. 20

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

149

advantage of being their own desires because no amount of beating or rebuke can change their hearts, but the man who could change them would have lordship over their bodies. Between lines 9165 and 9312, Le Jaloux presents a series of curses directed at his wife’s boyfriends, who, under the influence of this Deianeira or Delilah, imagine themselves as resilient as Hercules or Samson, ready to cripple him. Yet they probably treat her like a prostitute and are really after her expensive accessories, which are useless to him and lead her to fornication. In line 9313 and following, Le Jaloux addresses his wife indignantly, asking her, without her inventing any lies, where, in the name of love, she got that other rich new dress she wore the other day when she went to the choirs because he says that he knows perfectly well that he never gave it to her. He goes on to say that she swore by Saint Denis, Saint Filisbert, and Saint Peter that the dress had come to her through her mother, who sent the fabric to him, because, as she had implied, her love for him was so great that she wanted to spend her money to spare him from his. With his curses reaching the level of a foul vocabulary, Le Jaloux wants his wife’s mother to be roasted alive, calling her a dirty old whore, a priest’s concubine, a mare, and a pimping whore, wishing his wife, on her merits, to fry along with her mother if the case were not exactly as his wife told it. He says that he would certainly ask her mother but that that would be an effort made in vain because the whole thing would not be worth a bubble to him, since the mother is just like her daughter. He says that he knows that his wife has spoken to her mother, and it is obvious that both have had their hearts touched by the same wand. Moreover, he says that he knows which foot the wife jumps on and that her mother, that dirty old painted whore, agrees with his wife’s attitude because she was used to acting the same way, she who has been following so many roads and been bitten by so many dogs. Now, Le Jaloux, addressing his wife, says that he knows her mother’s appearance is so bad that she can do nothing for herself, and that is why she now sells her daughter. Three or four times a week, she comes by and takes her daughter, his wife, out on the pretext of new pilgrimages, according to her old custom. So she does not stop showing her off, as one does with a horse to sell, while she grasps and teaches her daughter to grasp, as can be similarly read in Ovid’s Amores,22 which comment on the sale of sex, and in Juvenal’s Satire VI.23 22 23

Ovid, “Amores,” I.8. Juvenal, “Satire VI,” v. 231–241.

150

Chapter Six

In the passage between lines 9357 and 9402, the Friend, concluding Le Jaloux’s speech, imagines him assaulting his wife in a rage, provoking her smoldering resentment. In line 9403 and following, finishing quoting Le Jaloux’s direct speech, the Friend says that if he still sleeps in the company of his wife after that, he puts his life in very great danger. He says that in fact, sleeping or walking, he must fear more strongly that, in order to avenge herself, she may poison or break him or wither him into a life of desperate wiles. Alternatively, he must also fear that if she cannot do otherwise, she may put it into his head that she must flee, because a woman is neither worthy of glory nor ashamed when something arises in her head, echoing here what can be read in Juvenal’s Satire VI24 when he commented on the woman’s plastered face. The Friend ends, as misogynistically as in the quotations from Le Jaloux’s direct speech, by saying that a woman is wrong in everything, probably here recalling Proverbs 9:13, which says she is full of seduction, knowing absolutely nothing, a woman who is foolish and clamorous. He recalls at this point that Valerius, in Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat, still claims that, whatever woman hates or loves, she is always sassy, smart, and calculating in bringing harm to others. In the passage between lines 9421 and 9902, the Friend weaves reflections on the incompatibility between love and the authoritarianism that can affect marriage. Based on this view, he addresses a miscellany of advice to the Boyfriend or Lover, with several misogynist insinuations, the first of which is the assumption that the male inconstancy is apt to see the dissimulation of women. Thus, in line 9903 and following, the Friend says that no woman will ever be very knowledgeable or so firm in heart and so loyal or serious that anyone could be more sure of keeping her, no matter how careful she was, than of holding an eel by the tail. That is because he does not have the power to keep her from getting away, so she will immediately escape, no matter how tightly he may hold her. As no animal is so well trained that it is not always ready to escape, so she has so many different ways to change that no man should have confidence in her. In line 9917 and following, the Friend confesses that he does not say these things about good women, who set restraints through their virtues. However, he comments that he has not found any virtuous woman, despite having tested many. He says that even Solomon could not find them, no matter how well he knew how to test them, because he himself claims that he could never find a stable woman, as can be read in Ecclesiastes 7:29. 24

Juvenal, “Satire VI,” v. 457–473.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

151

He advises the Friend that if he is patient in looking for a woman and finding her, he should take her, because then he will have the best of girlfriends, someone who will be his entirely. Moreover, if she does not have the opportunity to find another place, or if she does not find someone to request her, such a woman will surrender to chastity. In line 9993 and following, after saying that he wants to make a brief comment before leaving this subject of women’s lack of virtue to be men’s mates, the Friend says that if a man wants the love of some woman, whoever she is, ugly or beautiful, he must obey this commandment of hers. And he should always remember it and consider it to be very precious, that is, to say to the intended woman that he cannot protect himself against her, so astonished and amazed is he at her beauty and worth. This is because, the Friend goes on reasoning, there is no woman, no matter how good, old, young, worldly, or religious she may be, no matter whether she is chaste in body or soul, who does not delight in hearing someone praising her beauty. Therefore, no matter how ugly she may be, he must swear she is prettier than a fairy. He must do so firmly, since she will easily believe him, because every woman, says the Friend that he knows very well, thinks herself quite beautiful, though she may be demonstrably ugly, and undoubtedly worthy of being loved, as can be read in Ovid’s Ars amatoria.25 The Friend continues, in line 9959 and following, his reasoning about how a man should strategically, though not without a heavy dose of cynicism, proceed to conquer and retain a woman. To do that, he says that every nice and brave young man must be diligent in keeping his girlfriend, without criticizing them for their follies, because women do not mind correcting themselves. Instead, they have such a formed mind that there seems to be no need to teach them in their business. Moreover, no man who does not want to displease them should dissuade them from anything they want to do. This is because, just as the cat knows the science of grasping by nature and cannot be diverted from it because it was born with such an ability and had never been placed in a school to learn it, so does the woman, no matter how foolish she is. She knows from her natural judgment that despite her excesses, good or bad, wrong or right, she does nothing that she thinks she should not do. She hates those who correct her, remembering here what Ovid comments in Ars amatoria26 about not criticizing a woman’s faults and in Remedia amoris (The Cures for Love)27 about the fact that few women admit the truth. 25

Ovid, “Ars amatoria,” I.611–614. Ovid, “Ars amatoria,” II.641. 27 Ovid, The Cures for Love, trans. A. S. Kline, 2001, 26

152

Chapter Six

In the allegorical composition of Jean de Meun’s work, the Boyfriend or Lover pleads with the Girlfriend, whose Capacity of Responsiveness (her Bel Accueil) is personified but held uselessly somewhere far away from his appeals by La Vieille. This dramatis persona represents the archetypal medieval literary configuration of the Old Woman, the survivor of the harsh struggles of a lifetime spent dealing with sexual and loving matters. Like Ovid’s Dipsas, La Vieille is a role model for young girls that she hopes to learn, under her advice, in order to use men just as she feels they used her before. There is something ambivalent in the way that de Meun designs this character. If, on the one hand, it seems that La Vieille acts against men in retaliation for their cynicism and lies, on the other hand she represents an illustration of the strongest misogynist diatribes that exhibits all the ways women can deceive and tyrannize men,28 her figure being somewhat guilty in the opinion of men like the Friend. However, the question may be posed from another perspective, namely that de Meun, in illustrating this character in his own person, may be following Ovid’s teachings in Ars amatoria,29 which advises men to deceive women who deceive while revealing to women that, ultimately, men are the greatest cheaters. In any case, La Vieille particularly wants her advisee to be alert to the supposed generosity and loyalty she receives. In the wake of these ideas, in line 13037 and following, La Vieille tells her advisee that she should never be generous and should keep her heart in several places, never in only one. She should not give or lend the heart but sell it very carefully and always to the highest bidder, as can be read, particularly regarding the sale of affection, in Ovid’s Amores.30 La Vieille continues this preaching of feelings by telling her advisee to make sure that whoever wants to buy her heart never makes a bargain, because no matter how much he wants to give, he should never have anything back, it being better that he will get burned, hang himself, or maim himself. In any case, she continues in her counseling, this point should be noted: have your hands closed to give and open to receive, because surely giving is crazy, except when giving a little to attract men when the plan is to catch them as prey or when a return is expected for a gift that could not be sold for a higher price.

http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/CuresforLove.php, accessed March 3, 2021. 28 Joan M. Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature from the Twelfth Century to Dante (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 116. 29 Ovid, “Ars amatoria,” I.645, III.31, 456. 30 Ovid, “Amores,” I.8.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

153

In the passage between lines 13055 and 13144, La Vieille assists in a quest to reassure her advisee’s wealthy admirers, each of whom she must swear a false promise to because the gods have given preference to perjury in love and security does not come from young people. In line 13145 and following, La Vieille continues her advice by saying that she must also know another truth, namely, that one who is the lord of a beauty must collect his toll everywhere, and if one does not realize their work in one mill, another must come to make the entire turn. Continuing in these allusions that resemble popular proverbial sayings, La Vieille, figuratively, to characterize the advisable behavior of her advisee, offers another tirade, saying that a rat that has nothing but a hole to escape has a very poor refuge and makes a very dangerous provision for itself. The same thing happens to women since they are the mistresses of all markets, since everyone works to have them. She must take possession everywhere, La Vieille continues, adding that if after good reflection the woman wants only a boyfriend or lover, she must have got a crazy idea because the one who delivers her love in one place has no heart, neither free nor uncommitted but vilely enslaved. This woman, says La Vieille, who is careful to love only one man must surely deserve to have a full dose of pain and distress because if she has no comfort from him, she will have no one else to comfort her. Moreover, those who give their hearts to one place are the ones who most lack comfort because when men are bored and angry, they all run away from their women. La Vieille continues in her reasoning about men’s perverse lack of commitment to their wives, saying in line 13173 and following that no woman can come to a good end. At this point, she recalls the famous story of Dido, Queen of Carthage, who could not hold Aeneas, no matter how much she cared for him; she received him poor, an unfortunate fugitive from the beautiful land of Troy, his homeland, and clothed and fed him. Because of her great love for him, she honored his companions and had his ships rebuilt to serve and to please him. To obtain his love, she gave him her city, body, and possessions. Then he reaffirmed to her that what he had promised and sworn was that he was and would be her lover forever and that he would never leave her. She, however, had no joy with him because the traitor, without permission, fled by sea on his ship. As a result, the beautiful Dido lost her life. Before the second day had passed, she killed herself in her room with the sword he had given her with her own hands. Recalling her lover and realizing that she had lost him, she took the sword, almost naked, lifted it upside down and thrust it under her breasts, then dropped it. It was a great pity to see her do that act. He had been a hard

154

Chapter Six

man, untouched by pity. Her feelings for him, who betrayed her, were so great that she plunged the blade into her body. Then, in line 13211, La Vieille recalls Phyllis, another classic example of a betrayed woman who, alongside Dido, constitutes another mocking defense of women in a situation of being betrayed, an aspect that can be seen in Ovid’s Ars amatoria.31 Phyllis waited so long for Demophöon that she hanged herself because her lover had exceeded the deadline he had to return and thus broke his oath and loyalty. In the passage between lines 13215 and 13264, La Vieille’s comment about men’s lack of loving commitment subverts the classic misogynist example of Helen’s traditionally imputed guilt, taking Paris, who had abandoned Oenone for Helen, as a reference. She cites, on the subject of male disloyalty, the case of Jason, who left Medea as ungratefully as possible, despite all she had done for him. La Vieille continues her speech against male disloyalty in line 13265 and following that would reveal an anti-misogynist stance if it did not cynically advise women to do the same as men do to them, making them equally distorted. She says that every man betrays and deceives women, a statement about the lying character of men that reappears in the passage between lines 13781 and 13794. La Vieille adds to this comment that they are all fond of sensuality, taking their pleasure anywhere. Concluding this reasoning about men, La Vieille gives that instruction that ironically disparages women by equating them with their partners. In this respect, she says that all women should, in response to men’s mischiefs, deceive them equally and not fix their hearts on any of them because any woman who does this is foolish. She should, instead of having only one man, have several of them and, if possible, act to please them to the point where they are ready for deceit. Following the purpose of this argument, in lines 13273 and 13516, La Vieille gives detailed advice about how a woman should cultivate her body and her ways to take the most advantage of the men she treacherously seduces. In line 13517 and following, continuing this advice on how a woman should conduct herself in this deceptive treatment of men, La Vieille says that she must be careful not to be closed away for long because, while she is at home, she is less frequently seen by all, her beauty is less known and less demanded. She should go to church often and be seen at visits, weddings, travels, games, parties, and folk dances because, in these places, the God or Goddess of Love maintains their school and says Mass to their disciples, as can be read in Ovid’s Ars amatoria.32 31 32

Ovid, “Ars amatoria,” III.9–43. Ovid, “Ars amatoria,” III.417.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

155

La Vieille, addressing the already denied theme of the need for women to dress at excessive expense by Le Jaloux in line 13529 and following, opposes the jealous husband’s views by saying that it is evident that if women get admiration from others, they must be well dressed. To complete the protocol, she offers a series of recommendations on how well-dressed women should behave. If their dress drags or falls near the floor, they should lift it at the sides or front, as if to get some ventilation or as if they had a habit of rolling up their dresses to step more freely. They should be careful to let all passersby see the fine form of what they expose. Moreover, if they wear a cape, they should wear it so that it does not hide much from the sight of the lovely body that it covers. Thus, women should want to show their body and the clothes in which they are dressed, which should neither be too heavy nor too light, with silk threads and small pearls, and in particular they should show their purse, which should be exactly where everyone can see it. Next, they should take the cloak in both hands and stretch and extend their arms on both clean and muddy streets. Remembering the peacock’s twirls with his tail, the welldressed woman should do the same with the cape to show off the body and the fur linings of squirrel or other expensive skin that the cloak uses to everyone who might be looking at her. In the passage between lines 13575 and 13696, La Vieille recommends to her advisee that a woman’s love net should be spread indiscriminately; ties should be carefully handled and kept hanging as long as possible. Still prescribing the ways of a woman who wants to impose herself and take advantage of men, in line 13697 and following, La Vieille says that a woman who does not exploit her boyfriend or lover until the last sentence is foolish. The more she can extract from him, the more she will have, being more highly valued when she sells herself most dearly. This is because men despise what they can get for nothing; they do not value it as a mere twig. If they lose it, they care little, certainly not as much as what they bought for a high price. Here, says La Vieille, are the proper ways for a woman to plague enamored men or lovers, that is, she should call her servants, butlers, the nurse, her sister, even her mother, if she is not so private, to help with the task and do everything possible to make her boyfriend or lover give up his coats, jackets, gloves, or mittens. That way, like little kittens, they will loot whatever they can catch, so that in no way can the boyfriend or lover escape their hands before they have spent their last dime. Let him give them money and jewels, as if he had been playing with buttons instead of money, because the prey is captured much faster

156

Chapter Six

when it is attacked by several hands, as Ovid notes in Amores33 when dealing with paid sexual favors of women. In line 13725 and following, continuing on the same subject of the looting of her boyfriend or lover, La Vieille tells the profiteers to remind him that his wife needs, for example, a dress, because her man should not allow her to leave without it. That is because, if she chose to be in his company, she should be dressed like a queen and ride in fine harness. Le Vieille, turning now to the wife, asks her why she takes so long to ask this from her husband. She says that she is very shy around him when he leaves her so destitute. Therefore, La Vieille continues saying cynically that the woman, no matter how pleased she is, should order her husband’s profiteers to be silent, she who perhaps relieved him about how much she had seriously damaged him. What if she realizes that he recognizes that he may be giving her more than he should offer? That he may think himself seriously harmed due to the numerous gifts with which he has a habit of feeding her? And if she feels she does not dare to urge him to give her something, she should ask him to lend it to her instead, swearing that she is quite ready to pay him back the day he indicates. But La Vieille’s final advice is that it is certainly forbidden for a woman to repay anything she borrowed, as can be read in Ovid’s Amores.34 In what remains of La Vieille’s speech, it especially emphasizes the existence of a compulsive human libido that drives women toward sexual freedom that defies social constraints. Since it is clear that the imperative is powerful in both men and women, what La Vieille says on the subject contributes to reinforcing misogyny only insofar as it may represent a libertarian view that a woman puts forward. La Vieille also catalogs certain Ovidian stratagems for the wife to evade her husband’s vigilance, such as making him drunk, drugged, or feign a fever that makes her need to go to the baths, pretending to put her intentions into action. In its form of allegorical construction, Le Roman de la Rose presents another dramatis persona that deserves notice for its heavy dose of misogyny. This is the Genius figure, who becomes particularly significant for his condemnation of revealing secrets to women. The context in which this occurs in the book is the passage where the goddess Nature declares that she wishes to confess a grieving secret of her bitter feeling for having foolishly assisted humanity. However, Genius, a kind of Nature priest, begging her to calm her emotion, promises to keep everything she confesses to him a secret. Then, acting contrary to his promise, he makes 33 34

Ovid, “Amores,” I.8. Ovid, “Amores,” I.8.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

157

one of the most acutely misogynist outbursts, not very pertinent to the true disposition of Nature and considered particularly offensive. In line 16322 and following, Genius, in his aggressive misogynist speech about Nature’s secret concerning women, also claims that it is true that they are infallibly inflamed with anger. To support his opinion, he refers to Virgil, saying that the Roman poet himself, quite well aware of women’s needs, had said that not one of them had ever been so stable that they should not be variable and changeable.35 That is why women demonstrate themselves as irritable animals. Genius completes this trope of woman’s animalization with Solomon’s no less innocent pronouncement, which says that there has never been a head as cruel as a serpent’s, that nothing is more damaging than a woman, and that nothing is as malicious as she is, as can be read in Ecclesiasticus 25:22–23 and 26, wherein the wicked woman is discussed. In short, Genius says, there is so much addiction in women that no one can count their wicked means in rhyme or verse. He then mentions, to give his speech auctoritas, the historian Titus Livius, who was well aware of women’s habits and manners and who said that women are so easily deceived, so foolish, and so malleable in nature that with their manners of supplication they deserve no more than hollow flattery. Genius, in defense of his misogynist point of view, says that the Scripture refers somewhere to the female vice of covetousness, probably referring here to the female case noted in Timothy 6:10. It is known that Titus Livius comments, in Ab Urbe Condita Libri,36 that the abducted Sabines were placated by the romantic lines of their abductors who claimed to have been driven by love, the most touching appeal to a woman’s heart. Continuing to discuss the risk of revealing secrets to a woman, Genius says, in line 16347 and following, that he who tells his wife his secrets makes her his mistress, as can be read in De amore by Andreas Capellanus.37 Genius continues his unfortunate discourse on the unreliability of women by saying that no man born of a woman, unless he is drunk or demented, should disclose anything that should be secret if he does not wish to hear the revealed thing said by someone else. No matter how loyal or good in nature the woman is, it would be better to flee the country than tell her something that he should keep in silence. A man, Genius continues, should never do anything secretly if he sees a woman approaching because, even

35 Virgílio, Eneida, trans. José Victorino Barreto Feio and José Maria da Costa e Silva (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2004), IV.569–570. 36 Titus Livius, The History of Rome, vol. 1, I.57–58. 37 Capellanus, Andreas Capellanus on Love, III.87.

158

Chapter Six

if there is physical danger, he can be certain that she will tell the secret, no matter how long she may wait. Even if no one asks her about anything done in secret, she will surely reveal it without any special adulation. For she will be silent for nothing, as can be seen in Juvenal’s Satire VI38 when he talks about the loquaciousness or ease with which women articulate what they have learned because a woman would be dead if the secret did not leap out of her mouth, even if she was in danger or censored. Rhetorically asking what the bastard who trusts her is doing to himself, Genius replies that he binds his hands and cuts his throat because if he dares mumble or scold her or get angry even once, he puts his life in such peril that if he deserved death for such a secret deed, she would have him hung by the neck or secretly murdered by friends. This is the unfortunate port that he reached, concludes Genius. In lines 16389 and 16577, Genius reports that a man’s difficulty in hiding a secret will be most obvious to his wife in bed. This is because she will persuade, complain, and resort to sexual tactics until he reveals the secret. Then she will wait until she can use it against him. Genius, in line 16577 and following, addresses the lords he calls the righteous, admonishing them to protect themselves against women if they love their own bodies and souls, telling them not to reveal the secrets that they keep inside their heart to them. He urges them to flee from such animals by calling them children and asking them to note certain verses from Virgil’s Eclogues.39 Above all, they should know them in their hearts in order not to go astray when collecting flowers and fresh strawberries, because the cold snake is lying in the grass. Continuing in this reference to the Roman poet, calling the righteous lords children who must flee from women who act like the insidious serpent, Genius says that she poisons anyone who comes near her. Thus, just men, like the virgin child, searching the fields for fresh flowers and strawberries, find themselves at the mercy of the evil and cold serpent, which hides there; the malicious viper that covers itself and hides its poison under the delicate grass until it is able to hurt the searcher. Genius, in this metaphorical speech, tells the child to avoid the viper’s venom, to flee if he wants to escape death. That viper is such a poisonous animal in body, tail, and head that if anyone gets close, they will die from being poisoned because its venom corrodes and shatters what it reaches without remedy, and no molasses can cure the burn of this poison, no herb or root is worth anything against it; the only valid recourse is to escape. 38 39

Juvenal, “Satire VI,” v. 434–456. Virgílio, Eneida, III.92–93.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

159

In line 16617 and thereafter, Genius, continuing his discourse on the evil that women represent for men, surprisingly says that it was never his intention to say that women should not be cherished or that men should run away from them and not lie with them. This startling twist of opinion by Genius, who had previously described women as corrosive and poisonous, is really just another rhetorical strategy to recharge his old misogynist tone in an extremely cynical way. Thus, Genius recommends that women should be highly valued and rightly improve their dowry, they should be provided with good clothes and well-groomed, and they should be well-served and honored so that men may continue their kind, lest death destroy them. Genius’ misogynist concern that men consider and honor women only to serve as the right instrument for the procreation of his patriarchally managed progeny is quite evident here. Excluding this purpose, Genius recommends that no man should ever trust a woman to the point of telling them something that should be secret. Continuing his manipulated recommendations on what women can do for the benefit of men, Genius says that they are certainly allowed to move around and keep things in the house if they know how to take care of them. If they happen to have permission to do things like buying or selling, or if they know of any trade, they should have the license to do so if they need to. Yet they could know things that are open to knowledge and do not need concealment. However, Genius warns that if men go too far and that women receive too much power, they will later regret feeling their malice. This is because Ecclesiasticus 25:30 says that if a woman has lordship, she will oppose her husband when he wants to say or do anything. Thus, men must hold their tongues because nothing can end well when they share secrets with those who have such corrosive, poisonous, and harmful tongues. However, when fools go into their arms and hug and kiss them in games that please them so much, then nothing can be hidden from them. It is then that the unwary husbands reveal themselves and repent so greatly. With this enormous sample of a true litany of the disparaging nature and self-interest and deceitfulness of women, Genius makes reference, in line 16677 and following, as previously done by Jean de Meun, to the malicious Delilah. In the midst of her venomous adulation, she cuts Samson’s hair with her scissors as she held him so softly, sleeping in her lap. As a result, that man who was so brave, valuable, strong, and fierce in battle lost all his strength after she clipped his curls. She revealed all his secrets, which the fool, not knowing how to hide anything, had told her, as is also reported by Andreas Capellanus in De amore.40 Finally, Genius 40

Capellanus, Andreas Capellanus on Love, III.87.

160

Chapter Six

adds that even Solomon addresses this issue of women’s unhealthy and intriguing tongue when he advises husbands to escape danger and reproach and guard the gates of their mouths against their sleeping wives, while also saying that whoever considers men dear should preach this sermon, that they guard themselves against women and never trust them.

Geoffrey Chaucer The position and ideas of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) about women seem to be considered in a perspective that, if not relieved of certain radicalisms, at least demonstrates a certain openness to an attempt at critical relativism. However, he recalls traditional misogynist judgments rooted in the mentality and culture of the later medieval period in which the poet lived. Considered favorable to the appreciation of new views and horizons of the principles of modern times, Chaucer was a kind of alchemist of the later medieval misogyny. He experimented with old favorite traditional compositions distrusting women in new contexts of misogynist resignification, thus reinvigorating the litany of the endless androcentric derogation of the feminine. A classic example of this process of contextual reframing can be seen at the end of the fabliau The Merchant’s Tale, where the reference to Ecclesiasticus 7:29 becomes a point of contention in the episode chaired by Pluto and Proserpina. Concerning Chaucer’s reference to critical relativism regarding misogyny, many of his poems can be evaluated by his open positions addressed in women’s defense. This is the case, for example, with the Legend of Good Women. Nevertheless, this classification is not an easy one to make because the laudatory tone in defense of women is controversial. In this sense, critical considerations indicate the book to be a parody of low mimetic intention, fulfilling only the idea of taking stories of classical origin and distorting them to give them contemporary moral meanings. There is even a satirical treatment in the work if one considers the stories about these good women to be all somewhat similar and standardized, with little characterization, leading to the idea that the work was deliberately poorly written and shallow when discussing women. This incipient defense could be the case of the Wife’s speech in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue if it were not for the fact that she only partially fulfills the purpose of defending the feminine cause since she is ambivalently plunged into an overwhelming amount of quotations and misogynist references. At best, considering Chaucer’s critical identification in the Prologue, this kind of speech hybridism could function, in the course of the defamation and defense of women in the medieval period, as an interface between

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

161

these two types of positions. If there is a dose of sympathy for the Wife of Bath, it has a price. It results from the weight of the misogynist burden that she receives, which does not allow positive qualities to emerge. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue appears in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (c.1390–1395) without any announcement or reference. However, it is to be recalled that she is one of only a few women participants in the pilgrimage and the storytelling competition that pilgrims used to do. It is common to recognize three main thematic treatments in the Prologue. The first treatment addresses Saint Jerome’s argument about marriage and virginity, combating Jovinian’s ideas on the subject. When discussing this subject, the Wife of Bath’s speech manipulates some pertinent ideas and excerpts from the Scriptures. It seems that, in this reuse, she is nothing more than a puppet victim of rhetorical effects, the prototype of the intellectually shallow woman. Hence, it is in this stereotyped representation that the perspective of misogynist treatment resides. The second thematic treatment continues, in a way, this ambivalence of positions, mainly in the narrative of her first three husbands and, broadly, in the brilliant response that she gives to Theophrastus’ slanders. She retaliates against Theophrastus’ insults in the same way as she did against the lies her husbands threw at her while drunk. The fact that the Wife presents herself with an ostentatious and inquiring tone in defense of her condemned cause, unheard as a medieval female voice, results in what was considered as a combat with no apparent victory between a kind of demonstration of female provocation and a testimony of male oppression.41 However, and for the misogynist context that regulates this impasse, what remains in a negative sense is a situation of compulsive exaggeration in her marital saga. The third thematic treatment consists of a commentary on the Wife of Bath’s other husbands. In this segment, with great parodic force, tonic points of inveterate misogyny stand out when, in his stereotyped doctrinal procedure, the fifth husband, a compulsive cleric, recites daily excerpts to the Wife from a book entitled Of Wikked Wyves (On Bad Wives). The suffocating preceptorism, laden with sharp and hostile, if not inquisitorial, androcentric pronouncements, causes the angry Wife to finally tear three pages out of the book, solely to signal again that her attempt at being of a fearless nature is punitively redirected to the order of the paterfamilias.

41

Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, 79.

162

Chapter Six

The Wife of Bath’s Prologue The Wife begins the Prologue with a particular reflexive scope to question the value of the experience instead of the books’ authority, a prerogative of traditional customs of her time. She says that experience is good authority for talking on marriage problems, probably wanting to refer to her tribulations of the flesh, as remembered by Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:28. It is marriage or remarriage that she will discuss, making a defense of it in a naive and argumentative wit typical of practical reasoning. The thesis against which she must argue is the canonical Patristic position defending the excellence of celibacy and virginity as a condition for the cultivation of spiritual gifts necessary to control the natural carnal intemperance of women. In this scenario of ideal virtues, of great misogynist prescription, the Wife of Bath, an average woman, defends marriage. Thus, verses 1 to 13 focus on this theme of marriage versus celibacy and virginity in defense of experience being sufficient to talk about marriage.42 The Wife comments that since the age of twelve, the minimum legal age for a girl to marry, she has had no less than five husbands at the church door, that is, legally married. In this regard, she is rebuked for being told that, since Christ went to a wedding no more than once, in Cana, Galilee, he thereby taught that a person should not marry more than once. The Wife, in verses 14–34, stands in justification of her case of matrimonial incidence. She says that she had had to carry those bitter words of Jesus in her mind when speaking about the disapproval of the Samaritan beside the well. She had five husbands, and the actual one was not her husband, as can be read in John 4:18, quoted by Saint Jerome in Adversus Jovinianum.43 The Wife says that she does not understand Jesus’ words, why the fifth man was not a faithful husband to the Samaritan, or how many faithful husbands she could have. She adds that she had not yet heard of any number or limit in all her life. However, people assume or interpret. She says that all she knows for sure is that God commanded people to grow and multiply. 42

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, The Middle English text, general edition by Larry D. Benson (The Riverside Chaucer. Houghton Miflin Company), https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/wbt-par.htm, accessed February 24, 2021. The references are from this edition, and can be checked in Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” in The Canterbury Tales, trans. David Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 219–239. 43 Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.14.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

163

She comments that God said that the husband must leave father and mother and separate himself so as to join his wife. However, as for the number of spouses, it does not refer to any, neither two nor eight. In Saint Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum44 and Juvenal’s Satire VI,45 both authors name eight marriages, the multiplication understood by the Wife of Genesis 1:28 as an impressive number. She asks, then, the reason why this subject is considered a real disgrace. From verse 35 to 58, she continues to justify her many marriages by appealing to the memory of cases appreciated in the subject and biblical references. Therefore, she asks what can be said about that wise king Solomon, gifted by God with so many wives. In that sense, she, who did not have so many husbands, should not be condemned. At this point in her speech, the Wife gives the impression that God enjoyed Solomon’s happy life with so many women, not considering that the king, under the influence of seven hundred wives, fell into paganism, as mentioned in 3 Kings 11:1–11. Among other passages, Saint Jerome, in Adversus Jovinianum46 and Epistula 22, ad Eustochium,47 has a regrettable view of marriage as corrupting the integrity of the man. However, the Wife thanks God for having married only five times and for being willing to marry for the sixth time if it happens because she would not be chaste forever and would not take a vow of celibate widowhood. She affirms that when a husband leaves this mortal life, some Christian must marry her soon. Saint Paul says that she is free to marry, wherever she pleases, in the name of God. He says that being married is not a sin; it is better to be married than to burn. After this corrupted reading of what Saint Paul says about marriage and celibacy, the Wife continues to apologize for the right to marry at will. She says, then, that she does not care if people abhor the villain Lamech’s bigamy because she knows that Abraham was a holy man, and so was Jacob, as far as she can tell, and they had more than two wives, each one of them, as did many other holy men as well. Here, the Wife takes on one of her many irreverences in the Prologue, disregarding Lamech’s setbacks mentioned in Genesis 4:24 and, in referencing Abraham and Jacob, the fact that she is supporting Jovinian against the venerable Saint Jerome in Adversus Jovinianum.48

44

Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.15. Juvenal, “Satire VI,” 206–230. 46 Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.28. 47 Saint Jerome, “Letter 22, to Eustochium,” 100–137. 48 Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.19. 45

164

Chapter Six

From verse 59 to 76, the question of recommending celibacy and virginity is addressed by the Wife with a certain knowledge. She asks if anyone can tell her where, at her age, Almighty God explicitly forbade someone to get married and to be given in marriage and where God ordered virginity. She also says that when the Apostle speaks of female virginity, he says that he does not have a firm precept for this, recalling here Corinthians 7:25 and Adversus Jovinianum.49 The Wife also comments that the advice for a woman not to marry does not mean it is an order. The Apostle left the matter to people’s judgment. Furthermore, if virginity were an order of the Lord, marriage would be condemned simultaneously and, indeed, there would be nothing from which virginity would grow if no seed were planted. In any case, Saint Paul did not dare to order a thing for which the Lord had given no edict. This commentary concludes in a sporty, joking way that, if a prize had been established for virginity, it remains to be seen who will enter the race and win it. In verses 77–94, the Wife says on this teaching of celibacy and virginity that it is not for all men to receive, but only those who please God with the strength to follow him. She says that all she knows is that the Apostle himself was a virgin but, although he wished everyone to be like him, this was just advice with regard to virginity. She says that she has his permission, as a concession, to be a wife. Therefore, it is not shameful, her husband having died, that she remarry. A second marriage cannot incur guilt, although it is good for a man not to touch a woman, that is, to sit on his bed or sofa because fire and plaster would be very close to each other. Furthermore, she concludes this segment by saying that she thinks that people understand the metaphor and that, in any case, Saint Paul thought that virginity was better than a fragile marriage. Moreover, she calls it fragile unless the married couple tries to live their lives in chastity. From verse 95 to 104, continuing to address marriage and virginity, the Wife says that she has no reservations with placing virginity above remarriage. She recognizes that purity in body and heart can please some, but she does not boast about it because no homeowner’s utensils are all made of gold. Some are of wood, and yet they are of use. The Lord calls people to him in various ways, and each has a special gift from God because God always thinks of good. Continuing her speech, the Wife, in verses 105–114, says that virginity is a great quality, as well as dedicated self-control, but that Christ did not force anyone to sell everything, give it to the poor, and then follow in his 49

Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.12.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

165

footsteps. With the same wit of manipulating the words that characterize her, the Wife says that Christ certainly spoke to those who intended to live perfectly, remembering here Matthew 19:21, where it can be read that marriage, widowhood, and virginity are the three increasing degrees of perfection. However, she adds that this is not for her, as she wants to give the best days of her life to being a wife and to being satisfied. It is in recognition of absolute gynecological satisfaction, defying masculine puritanism, that the Wife, in verses 115–134, argues, with a rhetorical knowledge of experience that was premature for the times, about the usefulness of genitalia in a context where celibacy and virginity were religious and moral commands. In a well-founded and playful mood, if not irreverent, the Wife continues to ask what the intention of creating the organs of generation was when man was made so perfectly, a question which, on another occasion, Jerome sought to escape in Adversus Jovinianum.50 The Wife continues in her reasoning about the usefulness of the genital organs by saying that they were not made for nothing, free of charge. Twist the subject as one may like, continues the Wife, they were not only made for emitting urine. If one argues these small differences of ours are to distinguish between the sexes, and for no other reason, she says that experience teaches that this is not so. The genital organs were modeled for both purposes, that is, for both necessary function as well as pleasure in procreation. She continues by asking why it is still written in the books that men are obliged to pay their wives with what is due to them, sagaciously remembering the reciprocal sexual debt in marriage commented on by Gratian in Decretum,51 based on 1 Corinthians 7:3–13. Then, she ironically worries about how her husband would finally give her the payment if not with his small instrument. There then follows the Wife’s thesis that genitalia were given to men and women both to pass urine and for procreation. It is to be considered, in the context of pronouncements on such irreverent and licentious matters for a duly married wife at the time, if Chaucer’s proposal, despite his sympathy for women, did not pour out the old wine of misogyny from which he had traditionally drunk. One may come to this conclusion because what ultimately results is an inconvenient image, not very decent even in the eyes of those of a misogynist predisposition, of a woman who is excessively hungry for satisfactions, even within marriage.

50

Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.36. Gratianus, “Decretum Gratiani,” in Corpus Iuris Canonici, pt. 1, ed. Aemilius Friedberg (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1879), X. 51

166

Chapter Six

In verses 135–162, continuing her arguments about the use of genitalia and defending procreation, the Wife says that she does not want to imply that everyone who has this type of equipment is obliged to use it, because then who would care about chastity? Christ was a virgin, though formed as a man, like many other saints since the beginning of time, and yet they lived in perfect chastity. She says that she does not object to virginity, let them be the bread of the purest selected wheat, and let wives like her be called mere barley bread. And yet, as Saint Mark says, when the Savior fed the crowd, it was with barley bread, as can be read in Adversus Jovinianum.52 Continuing, she says that she is not one in particular, but that she is in the condition that God has called them all. In married life, she says she wants to use her instrument as generously as her Maker gave it to her, that her husband will have it night and day, anytime he likes, to do his duty, that it will not be difficult because she will not refuse. She asserts that she must have a husband, who must be her creditor and, at the same time, her slave, and that he must have, while she is his wife, his problem in the flesh. Because during her life, she says that she had the power of his body and not him. This is exactly what the Apostle said, that husbands must love their wives too. Shortly before, in the Wife’s speech, what seemed to be a bold speech about the usefulness of genitalia, mainly in a married woman, changes in its intention now, since she sensibly cedes to virginity. Moreover, what could seem voluptuous in the female sex, evidently a point of misogynist censorship, receives a new direction for dealing with the issue of parity of sexual rights in marriage. From verses 163 to 168, the Pardoner (Licensee) rises to challenge the Wife, beginning with a brief dialogue. It is clear that the Wife has presented a long unpretentious speech, which precedes her story to be told in the pilgrims’ competition. The Pardoner says that he now swears in God’s name that the Wife is a splendid preacher for Saint John. He was about to marry a woman, but then he wondered why his body would pay such a high price. He would not marry in that or any other year. In this Pardoner’s attitude, the old masculinist ethics revealed that the woman was for the man, with no reciprocity conditions. In verses 169–183, the Wife tells the Pardoner that her story did not start in figurative language. Her story is from a different barrel, from which he will drink a more bitter mixture than beer. When she finishes telling her story of tribulations, he will decide whether he wants to taste the barrel she mentions. First, she tells the Pardoner that he should be 52

Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.7.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

167

careful about getting too close because she has a dozen or so lessons she wants to tell. She says that the man who does not want to be alerted by others will himself alert all other men. These are the very words that Ptolemy writes in Almagest. In verses 184–187, the Pardoner begs the Wife to continue telling her story, sparing no man and teaching them all the techniques that she has learned to deal with so many husbands. In response, the Wife, in verses 188–192, replies that she will do so with great pleasure, but she very diplomatically asks that no one in the group, if she says what comes to her mind, misinterpret anything that may be wrong because all she is trying to do is entertain. From verse 193 to 223, the Wife says that she will tell her story, vowing never to drink a drop of wine or beer again if what she says is not true. She says that of the husbands she had, three were good husbands, and two were terrible. The good three were rich and old but little able, all of them, to comply with the terms of the agreement and the marriage contract. She says that she even wants to laugh, remembering how cruelly she made them sweat at night, none of that meaning anything to her. In any case, she says that they gave her land and property, and she no longer needed to be present to earn their love or treat them with respect. She confesses that they all loved her so much and that there was no barrier to their love. She also confesses that a willing woman always wins a lover, that is, if she does not have one. Since she had her husbands under control and would transfer all of their lands to her, there was no reason to sacrifice to please them, except for her advantage. The Wife says that she put her husbands to work so hard that at night she made them sing, not having pork shank, as some earn in Dunmow in Essex, referring here to the custom that a piece of bacon could be won by a couple who did not fight for a year. Addressing the wives, she says that they have the power to understand how she handled things so well, how to talk and stay in control, because no man is half as clean as women, especially when things are going very badly. Any smart wife, who knows what that is, can make her husband think black is white, with her maid as a witness. In verses 235–256, imitating the complaints model considered by misogyny as an unhappy resource for unfortunate and unsatisfied wives, the Wife observes that the neighbor looks so cheerful, and she can go wherever she wants. Everyone respects her while she stays at home without having anything to wear. She asks why she receives a visit, suspecting her husband’s interest in her neighbor. Moreover, she says that

168

Chapter Six

if she has an acquaintance or friend, her husband will rage and act like a demon if she makes any innocent visits. Then the husband comes home angry and preaches, confused, from his seat. He continues telling the Wife that this is a great shame and that he only thinks of the expense of marrying a poor girl. Furthermore, if the wife is rich and comes from a good family, it is hell to tolerate her pride, dark moods, and fantasies. Continuing this reasoning about every wife’s general inconvenience, it is considered that if she is beautiful, the husband changes his mind and says that every rascal soon wants to have her doomed to lose her honor because she is besieged on all sides. From verse 257 to 264, the Wife makes an accurate, critical analysis of what can be understood as topics of a wife’s misogynist objectification. In this respect, wives are valued for what they have and not for what they are. In that sense, she says that it is well known that some people desire wives for their wealth, others for their appearance, and others for their type. Either for their sex appeal or lineage. Some want a girl who dances or who can sing. Furthermore, it is their outstretched hands and arms that they want. Then, the devil takes the path instead. No one can defend the castle walls for very long if they are attacked day after day. Continuing to talk about the defects and imperfections naturalized in the wife by the masculinist complex view, in verses 265–277, the Wife complains indignantly about this prejudice. She says that if the wife is modest, then the husband says that she focuses on the hood on every man she sees. She will then jump on him, flattering like a sycophant, until someone buys what she wants to sell. Furthermore, in an allusive metaphorical tone, she continues commenting that her husband says that a goose never remains so gray in a lake, but she will find her male. She still says, referring to her husband’s opinion, that it is hard to direct or control something that no man would maintain of his own free will. In a crescendo of angry curses against him, she says that this is how he talks, the pig, when he goes to bed. She says that he comments that no sane man would ever marry, nor would any man who hopes to go to heaven. The Wife responds by calling him miserable, cursing that his whitish, wrinkled neck may be broken in two by thunder and lightning. Verses 278–281 continue to reproduce proverbial sayings of misogyny in the Wife’s voice. Thus, she says that her husband comments that a leaky roof, smoke, and irritating wives are the three things that make a man run away from home, reproducing here the same references of Saint Jerome in Adversus Jovinianum53 and Jean de Meun in Le Roman de la Rose54 on the subject. 53

Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.47.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

169

Then, from verse 282 to 284, the Wife, relating her husband’s misogynist opinions, says that he then complains that they, the women, hide their faults until the knot is sufficiently tight to show them. Annoyed, she says this is a so-called villain’s or scoundrel’s proverb. This false attitude of wives hiding their defects before marriage, quite glossed over in medieval misogyny, appears in Saint Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum,55 Le Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun,56 and Jehan Le Fèvre’s Les Lamentations de Matheolus.57 Verses 285–292 continue the Wife’s libel against the husbands’ misogynist attitudes, which does not democratize women’s voice. As previously mentioned, what is happening with this woman’s indignant speech is that only repeating the injury does not alienate it but merely repeats the prevailing misogyny’s status quo. Furthermore, the moments in which the female speech and its discourse are exalted in irascibility only serve to caricature its ill-fated defect of unrestraint, its natural lack of control, as criticized by misogyny. This is exemplified by what the Wife says about her husband’s claims in a speech that reifies her as a good thing to use like oxen, donkeys, horses, or hunting dogs that can be tested and tried several times. Moreover, the same goes for bowls, benches, spoons, and housewares before they are bought. Pans, cloths, and clothes too. However, the Wife says that the husband asks who can try a wife before he marries her. The enraged Wife curses the old cachet, the pig, even more for saying that they, the wives, only show the faults they hide after the marriage. The Wife continues in verses 293–302, remembering here Saint Jerome in Adversus Jovinianum,58 indignant at the husband, who says that she gets angry if he forgets to praise her beauty; if he is not always looking at her face, giving her compliments in every place; if on her birthday he does not have a party, buy new dresses, and make a fuss of her; or if he is disgraceful with her nurse, maid, or, worse, if he is rude to her father’s relatives and friends. Finally, she calls her husband a barrel full of lies. In verses 303–322, the Wife curses her husband, asking him to tell her if God gave him pity because he hides the keys to the safe from her. It is hers as much as his, their property, yet she is the lady of the house, and he makes her look like an idiot and fool. She says that, no matter how much he scolds her, he will never be master of both her body and gold. He will 54

De Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, 8553–8607. Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.47. 56 De Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, 8661–8686. 57 Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, III.293–418. 58 Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.47. 55

170

Chapter Six

have to forfeit one or the other. Then, the Wife asks the husband what the value of his gossip and espionage is, why he sometimes thinks that he wants to seal her in his safe when he should be telling her to go wherever she wants and have fun. She says that the husband comments that he should not believe the malicious stories out there because he knows the Wife to be a faithful wife. The Wife says that women do not love any man who carefully watches their comings and goings. They want freedom. In verses 323–336, the Wife continues by telling her husband that, despite everything, he has sex with her. She says that the astrologer Ptolemy, who is blessed above all other men, wrote in his book, Almagest, the proverb that says that, of all men, he who does not care who has the world in his hands is the wisest, probably here relying on a collection of sayings added to the Latin translation of Ptolemy’s astronomical treatise. From this proverb, the Wife tells her husband that he must understand that if he has enough, why care about how well off others are. Calling her husband a cachectic old man, she says that everything is fine, that he will have enough of her vavina every night. And, in a doubleedged pun, which also appears in Le Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun59 and in Ovid’s Ars amatoria,60 she says that the person who does not let another light a candle in his lantern is much more miserable because then he will have no light at all. After that, she tells the old husband to shut up and stop complaining. In verses 337–347, the Wife, addressing the issue of the husband recommending discretion in the toilet, says that he tells the women in expensive dresses and jewelry that this will only put their chastity at risk. In this statement, he says that he gets confused because he should quote the text and rely on the words of Saint Paul. More precisely, he is referring to the words that say that women should be chaste and modest in a toilet. Not with decorated hair and jewelry, such as pearls and gold, and not with an expensive dress, as can be read in 1 Timothy 2:9. Moreover, the Wife says that she will pay no more attention to the husband’s text and his rubric than to a mosquito. The Wife, continuing with the malicious description that she says that her husband makes of her in verses 348–356, comments that he says that she is like a cat who would never leave home if he had his fur scorched. However, if the coat is soft and bright, he will not stop at home for half a day. The first thing she would do in the morning would be to show off her coat and meow. To which the Wife replies that this would be the case if 59 60

De Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, 7399 ff. Ovid, “Ars amatoria,” 1982, III.89 ff.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

171

she were all dressed up, but the fact is that she says she goes out in rags to show them instead. From verse 357 to 361, the Wife, calling her husband Mister Fool, says that it is not worthwhile to spy on her. For, even if he begs Argos with his hundred eyes to be her bodyguard, there still exists little that he would see. He tried unsuccessfully, at Juno’s command, to guard Io against the harassment of Jupiter. The conclusion is that women were proverbially very clever in this matter of deceit, as can be read in Ovid’s Ars amatoria61 and in Le Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun.62 In verses 362–370, the Wife says that the husband also said that three things hinder the whole earth and that no living man could endure a fourth. She curses the husband, who preaches that a hateful wife is to be counted as one of the misfortunes. She asks if there are no other comparisons he can make without considering a poor innocent wife as one of those things. In verses 371–378, the Wife says that the husband likens a woman’s love to hell, to drylands where the rain never falls. However, he says that it is like Greek fire; the more it burns, the stronger its desire to burn everything that can be burned. Moreover, just as larvae and worms eat a tree, a woman destroys her husband. Everyone chained to their wives knows this. The husband concludes by remembering the woman’s figure as a temptation in Proverbs 7:4–27 and what Saint Jerome says about the subject in Adversus Jovinianum.63 In verses 379–394, the Wife asks for everyone’s attention for the husbands’ cynical complaints. She finishes by ironically lamenting the pain of such innocent creatures. She says that she could bite and neigh like a horse, that she could scold them even if she were wrong because otherwise she would always be considered a fret. Moreover, she concludes in her usual tone of popular wisdom that, in a way, emancipates her from the misogynist passivity, saying that whoever comes to the mill first is the first to grind. She came first, and she would stay there until they could find a quick excuse to give in to the things that they never did in their entire lives. Then the war would be won; she had caught them, and, cynically, it did not matter because they were so sick that they could not even stand up. From verse 395 to 406, ambiguously, the reaction to misogyny pairs its recrudescence, finally resulting in the usual misogynist detraction of the female character. In this sense, the Wife comments that she supervised her husband and that this still enchanted him in his heart because he thought about how proud she was in having him as a husband. Furthermore, she 61

Ovid, “Ars amatoria,” 1982, III.618–652. De Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, 14381–14384. 63 Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.28. 62

172

Chapter Six

says that she swears that all her walking at night was to spy on the women that he was following and that, disguised, she had had much fun. Here it is said that women acquire this ability from their mothers at birth, and while they live, God will reward women with three natural things: lies, tears, and weaving. In the end, they will boast of their victory. In all senses, they will gain the superior position by force or fraud, or by some stratagem such as small talk and endless complaints, remembering here what Jehan Le Fèvre says in Les Lamentations de Matheolus.64 In verses 407–430, the Wife continues to expose her vengeful spirit, although her predicates continue to cast her down. She says that the bed, in particular, was her husbands’ bad fortune. It was the place where she scolded them and saw them not having fun, reproducing here a traditional motif in misogynist literature, like Juvenal in Satire VI,65 Boccaccio in Il Corbaccio, and Jehan Lè Fèvre in Les Lamentations de Matheolus.66 She would stop in bed for a moment if she felt her husband’s arm over her side. She says that her services should be paid first, and then she would let him do whatever he wanted because everything has its price. No one can attract the hawk empty-handed, remembering in this passage what Andreas Capellanus says in De amore67 on the subject of sex for sale with its due price and Jean de Meun in Le Roman de la Rose.68 The Wife says that she put up with her husband’s desire when she wanted something and even pretended to have an appetite for him, although she never said that she appreciated old meat. Moreover, this was what made her bore them all the time; even if the Pope was sitting beside them, she would not spare them at the table either but would pay them back, word for word. The Wife swears that she did not owe her husband a comment; they were all paid back and had concentrated her wits until they gave up. They had to do so because they knew it would be better, or otherwise, they would never rest because, even if the husband looked as angry as a lion, he would still fail to have his satisfaction. In verses 431–452, the Wife addresses her husband with mocking sweet caresses, asking for the right way to treat him. Therefore, she asks if she should turn around and say, come, come, my dear. Come to me, sweetie, let me kiss your cheek. However, she soon changes her sarcastic and ironic tone to obscenity, saying that he must be all patience, meek, and 64

Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, II.1–114. Juvenal, “Satire VI,” 268–285. 66 Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, I.732–764; II.1– 114. 67 Capellanus, De amore, III.65. 68 De Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, 13037 et seq. 65

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

173

always have a suspicious conscience or pray to Job for patience. Always be patient, she says to the husband, and practice what he preaches because if he does not, he will have to learn something, which is that, in order to have a wife in peace, one of them must give in, and since the man is a more rational creature than the woman, he must endure. Here, in a visionary moment, she intelligently turns the misogynist claim of inferior glossed female rationality against man, discussed in Ancrene Riwle,69 De amore by Andreas Capellanus,70 and Les Lamentations de Matheolus by Jehan Le Fèvre,71 among other countless sources. After this pro-feminine tour de force, the Wife denigrates herself in the licentious insult, evidently taken from the perspective of masculinist ethics. She asks what the problem is now, why moan and lament if the husband wants her pussy only for him because it is all his. She loves it all because she would be as sweet as a rose if she tried to sell her beautiful pussy. However, no, she will keep it just for him. Saying that only Lord knows that her husband is wrong and that this is the purest truth, the Wife now announces that she will speak of her fourth husband, making it clear that all the content of her previous speech concerns the three old, decrepit, and vicious bad husbands she had. In verses 453–468, the Wife says that her fourth husband was a libertine, that is, he kept a concubine. The Wife was young and passionate, cheerful, stubborn, healthy, and happy as a goose-catcher. He danced to a harp and sang like a nightingale when he drank a bottle of mature wine. The husband recalls Egnatius Metellus, who beat his wife to death. About this, the Wife says that if she had been his wife, he would not have frightened her by drinking, recalling here both the story that comes from Valerius Maximus and Andreas Capellanus, who, in De amore,72 talks about women and drinking. The Wife says that, after drinking wine, she was inclined to think of Venus, of course, just as frost makes one think of cold and a willing mouth indicates a willing tail. She adds that a woman full of wine has no defense and that all lascivious people know this from experience. In verses 469–480, the Wife confesses the lack of her youthful days, the memory of which heats the cockles of her heart. She says that even today it is good for her spirit to think about her adventurous times. However, the age, unfortunately, that cools everything took away her beauty and spirit. The flower is gone; there is nothing more to say. Now 69

Anonymous, Ancrene Riwle, part IV. Capellanus, De amore, III.75. 71 Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, II.2759–2790. 72 Capellanus, De amore, III.99. 70

174

Chapter Six

she says that she has to sell the bran as best possible. However, in the same way, she says that she still wants to have fun. She says that she will now speak of her fourth husband. This excerpt from the Wife’s speech, like many others, disengages from the misogynist stereotype with which it is reproduced when, in moments of pathos like this, it seems to lose its criticized caricature wrapper to reach the status of a more complex character, worthy of praise for a higher dimension. From verses 481 to 502, the Wife talks about how she hurt her husband and his burial, returning to his usual vindictive tone, a characteristic buzzword style implicating the misogynist discourse. She says she will explain how much anger and pain in her heart causes her to have pleasure in another heart, but he paid for it entirely. She says that she made him a scourge from that same bush, not with her body and not as a bitch, but she dealt with him in such a way until she cooked him in his juice, with fury and with pure jealousy. On earth, she was his purgatory. That is why he used to say that he hoped his soul would be in Paradise, remembering here what Jehan Le Fèvre says in Le Lamentations de Matheolus73 when considering marriage as a stage that men go through to obtain salvation. Martyrizing the husband in the same tone, the wife says that when his shoe nips most cruelly, bitterly, and in how many ways, she will twist his withers so that there is no one to guess or know except he and God in heaven. She says that he died when she came from Jerusalem. He is now buried, although his grave is not as beautiful as Darius’ grave that Apelles carved so skillfully because to have buried him at such a high cost would have been a waste. Then, the wife said goodbye to her fourth husband, wishing that God give him rest because he is in his grave now, closed in his coffin. In verses 503–524, the wife speaks of her fifth husband. She says that she expects God to save his soul from hell, despite him being the worst of all the husbands she had, because she felt it in her ribs, in each of them, and will always feel it until her death. Despite this mistreatment, she says that he was very loose and cheerful in their bed and knew very well how to flatter when he wanted her belle chose. Although he hit each bone of hers, he could quickly gain her affection again. She thinks she loved him more than anyone because he was cautious in his love. After all, she says, women know, and she was not telling any lies, that if there is one thing that one cannot have easy, it is the thing called for all day. Forbid something, and this is wanted more, she says. This subject is commented on in a treatise format by Andreas Capellanus in De amore74 73 74

Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce, III.1674 ff. Capellanus, De amore, III.89–90.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

175

and Jean de Meun in Le Roman de la Rose.75 The Wife adds that nobody is willing to show his goods because a large crowd in the market makes things less expensive, and nobody values something bought at such a low price. Every woman knows that, if she is intelligent, the Wife finishes. From verse 525 to 542, the Wife talks about her fifth husband and the slander she did to him. She says that she took him for love, not money. He had been a student at Oxford, but then he left college and came home to live with the Wife’s best friend, then living in the city. She says that her name was Alison, that she knew her and her heart’s secrets better than a parish priest. The Wife made her her confidante and told her everything, whether her husband had pissed on the wall or done something that would cost him his life. She had told her friend about her husband, her dearest niece, and about another lady friend. She says that she betrayed her husband’s secrets, all of them, and many times. This often made him blush and feverish with great shame. He was gone, he who had put such great trust in her. Capellanus addresses this same theme of female disloyalty to discretion and being the sincere accomplice of secrets and intimacies in De amore,76 as does de Meun in Le Roman de la Rose.77 In verses 543–562, the Wife recounts her custom as a party woman. She says that she went out on one Lent day with her friend because she loved to have fun, wandering from house to house in the spring, in March, April, and May, to hear the gossip, reproducing here what is written in Timothy 1:5–13 about female restlessness. Jankin, the student, his friend, and the Wife went out to the fields. Her husband was in London all that Lent, so she was free to follow her own will, to see and be seen by the happy crowd, remembering this misogynist theme of the woman’s poisonous sight that can be seen, among others, in De cultu feminarum by Tertullian.78 She asks excitedly how she could know to whom, and in what place, her favors were meant to be given. There were so many such occasions since she attended pilgrimages, sermons, and other such places of miracles; she went to weddings dressed in her best attire and her long shiny scarlet cloak that no larvae, mold, or insect had a chance to gnaw on because it was used constantly. From verse 563 to 574, the Wife announces that she will say what happened to her on that journey out to the fields. She says that they wandered over there, and she and Jankin got along so well that she started to think first and told him that if she were a widow, they could get 75

De Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, 13697 et seq. Capellanus, De amore, III.87, 102. 77 De Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, 16347–16677 et seq. 78 Tertullian, De cultu feminarum, II.11. 76

176

Chapter Six

married. She confesses that until then, she had never been unprepared when it came to matters of marriage and other things, too. To illustrate this proverbially, she said that a rat’s life is not worth a clove of garlic to the one that only has a hole to hide in. Because, if that works for the rat, then it is the same for everyone, remembering here what Jean de Meun comments on the subject in Le Roman de la Rose.79 In verses 575–584, the Wife, always malicious and false, says that she let Jankin think that he had bewitched her and that it was her mother who had taught her this ploy. She also said that she dreamed of him at night. That he was coming to kill her while the whole bed was soaked with blood and that she still hoped he would bring her luck because, in dreams, blood means gold. All lies, says the Wife, because she had not dreamed of any of this. In this and many other things, as usual, she was following her mother’s teachings. The Wife is reproducing a long satirical tradition of mothers’ guardianships in bad teachings to their daughters here. In this case, it concerns lying and pretending, which can also be exemplified, among others, by Le Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun,80 Juvenal’s Satire VI,81 and Il Corbaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio in the passage that deals with the protection of the mother in the malicious and pernicious knowledge transmitted to her daughters. In verses 585–592, the Wife continues her story by saying that when her fourth husband lay in the funeral car, she wept for him, with a sad face, as all wives should because it is the custom. She covered her face with her handkerchief. However, as she was, she says, provided with a good companion, she indeed cried little. From verse 593 to 626, the Wife paints an extensive self-portrait of her uncontrollable libido, indiscriminately predisposed to anyone. However, this profile does not lack a specific tone of genuine authenticity, despite being condemned by the time’s misogynist morality. On her husband’s funeral, the fourth now, the Wife says that they carried him from the church in the morning, followed by the neighbors, all in mourning, and among them was Jankin. When she saw him passing by, she noticed his beautiful and clean pair of legs and feet. She then confesses that she lost her heart for him, reproducing here the theme of hunting husbands at the funeral, a very glossed one in medieval misogynist literature, whose roots are already present in Ovid’s Ars amatoria.82

79

De Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, 13145 et seq. De Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, 9313 et seq. 81 Juvenal “Satire VI,” 231–241. 82 Ovid, Ars amatoria, III.431. 80

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

177

He was about twenty, and she was forty, but an itching took her all over. She had a cracked tooth, but that was appropriate because Venus had given it to her as a birthmark and seal. However, she was a cheerful, beautiful, and lucky person, fun and young, and, as her husbands always said, she had what she had for good. She was undoubtedly all venereal in feeling; in courage, Martian. Venus gave her lust, the bull was her sign, with Mars inside, recalling here the aspect of medieval misogyny that deals with the relationship between women and astrology, addressed in Juvenal’s Satire VI83 and in De amore by Andreas Capellanus.84 However, the Wife regrets that love has always been a sin. Thus, she followed her inclination, as if shaped by the stars’ influence, which made Venus not grudgingly make her offer her bed to a boy. She says that she still had the mark of Mars on her face and also in another secret place because she never made love in moderation, but always according to her appetite, whether the partner was short or tall, black or white, poor or of any other status, she did not care, as long as he pleased her, recalling here the theme of the libidinous female insatiability, a condemnatory feature of medieval misogyny that can be seen, among many others, in Il Corbaccio by Boccaccio, Juvenal’s Satire VI,85 and Capellanus’ De amore.86 Then, from verse 627 to 646, the Wife says that there is still a little thing to say: by the end of the month, this charming, cheerful and gallant student Jankin had married her with all due ceremony. She says that she gave him all her land and property, everything she had inherited. However, later on, she was sorry for that; he would not let her do anything she wanted. She says that he once punched her in the ear because she had torn a page from his book, and after the punch, her ear was quite deaf. He confesses that she was as untouchable as a lioness, her tongue unstoppable and chatty, and she walked as she wanted, from house to house, no matter how much he cursed her. He gave lectures and told her old Roman stories, like that of a Simplicius Gallus who left his wife just because, one day, he saw her looking out of the door without covering her head, an incident taken from the Roman historian Valerius Maximus. In verses 647–665, the Wife says that her husband told her of yet another Roman who, because his wife had gone to a summer game without his consent, left her. Then he took his Bible to consult Ecclesiasticus in that passage that, with absolute rigor, forbids a man to let his wife to go 83

Ovid, “Satire VI,” 553–581. Capellanus, De amore, III.107 85 Juvenal, “Satire VI,” 597–600. 86 Capellanus, De amore, III.104. 84

178

Chapter Six

gad about. He quoted the saying that whoever builds his house in willow, rides a blind horse over furrows, or lets his wife trot behind the saints’ altars certainly deserves to be hung from the scaffold. She says that she cared nothing for his sayings, his old rhymes, and his disapproval. Moreover, she hated a man who told her about her vices because, in any case, she would not submit to him, reproducing here what Jean de Meun comments on the subject in Le Roman de la Rose.87 From verse 666 to 681, the true reason why the Wife tore her husband's book becomes known, recounted from her own mouth. The reason was that he beat her to the point of making her deaf. He had a book he loved to read, which he read morning and night for his entertainment. Valerius and Theophrastus, he called it. Poring over that book, he laughed, and there was a wise man who lived in Rome, a cardinal named Saint Jerome, who wrote a book attacking Jovinian. And there were also books by Tertullian, Chrysippus, Trotula, and Heloise, an abbess not far from Paris. Solomon’s parables, Ovid’s Ars amatoria, and many others were all bound in the same volume. It should be noted here that portions of the misogynist texts by Saint Jerome and Walter Map were often bound at the time (late 14th century), but the same cannot be said concerning the names of Chrysippus, Trotula, and Heloise. In verses 682–710, the Wife says that her husband, when he had time off or freedom from his occupations, used to read from his book about bad women night and day. He knew more biographies and stories about them than there are about good women in the Bible. Furthermore, it should be recognized that the Vitae (Lives) of bad women have more humor than those of holy women, as Marbod of Rennes attests.88 Interestingly, bad women are treated with a better satirical streak, which may mean that medieval misogyny was a complex secular culture, not exactly a biblical one. The Wife says that any scholar can speak well of women unless they are holy in their hagiographies but not from any woman. She asks who drew the picture of the lion, referring here to one of Aesop’s fables, in which a man proves his superiority over lions by showing it a picture of a man defeating a lion. This example reinforces the idea that misogyny is supported by the promotional image of the representation of the male authority’s monopoly from a historical guarantee. She says that if women had written stories like the scholars cloistered in their oratories, they would have written more about the evils of men than all the sons of Adam 87

De Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, 9959 et seq. Marbod of Rennes, “De meretrice,” in Liber decem capitulorum, ed. Rosario Leotta (Rome: Herder, 1984), cols. 1602–3, 72–97. 88

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

179

could have done. Because women are the daughters of Venus and Mercury, the two have opposing proposals in everything they do. Mercury loves wisdom, knowledge, science, and Venus loves revelry and extravagance. Because of their contrary disposition, one sinks while the other ascends. Mercury has no power when Venus is ascendant in Pisces, and Venus sinks when Mercury rises. This is why a scholar never praises a woman. When they are too old to make love, just as a boot becomes worn out, they, in their senility, sit down and write that women cannot keep the wedding vows that they made. One might consider if one of the circumstances of the formation of misogyny is this complex of male frustration and impotence in old age. In verses 711–720, the Wife continues explaining that her husband had beaten her merely because of a book. One night, Jankin, her lord and husband, was reading about Eve in his book while sitting by the fireplace. Her wickedness brought the entire human race into disaster, because of which Jesus himself was crucified. He who redeemed everyone with the blood of his heart. Starting with this unique sacrifice of Christ of rescuing the ruin of the world and humanity from evil, introduced by the first created woman, verses 721 to 723 talk about the pernicious women who brought, in history and mythology, their particular and collective misfortunes to the world of men. The Wife says that Jankin read to her how Samson lost his powerful hair. He slept, and his lover cut it with her scissors, and through this betrayal, he lost his strength. From verse 724 to 726, she says that he then read to her about Hercules and his Deianeira and how this woman made the immortal hero set fire to himself. Remember here that Eve, Samson, and Deianeira are conventional examples found in the misogynist medieval literature, as in the case of Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat by Walter Map, in the passages previously commented on in this work. In verses 727–732, the Wife says that the husband, continuing to read about the famous bad wives in the book, did not fail to mention the pain and suffering that the married man experienced on his second nuptials. Socrates, for example, went through this when Xanthippe poured urine on his head, and the poor man stood as if dead. He cleared his head, not daring to complain, and said, in the form of a joke, that before the thunder stopped, there was rain, reminiscent of what Saint Jerome says on the same subject in Adversus Jovinianum.89 89

Saint Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, I.48.

180

Chapter Six

Next, she speaks of the most extravagant libidinous compulsion in the book. In verses 733–737, she mentions that her husband, seized by a bloody mentality, recounted the story of Pasiphaë, queen of Crete, reviled for her abominable tastes and excessive lust. In verses 737 to 739, on Clytemnestra’s depravity and how she cheated on her husband until his death, the Wife says that her husband used to read about these things with great pleasure. In verses 740–746, the Wife says that her husband also told her about what happened in Thebes that caused Amphiarus to lose his life. She also says that her husband had a story about Eriphyle. For a golden brooch, she secretly revealed to the Greeks where they could find the hideout of her husband who, then, found his miserable destiny in Thebes, here aligning with the misogynist tradition that Pasiphaë, Clytemnestra, and Eriphyle are conventional misogynistic examples of women of a seditious and disloyal character, as attested by Saint Jerome in Adversus Joviniaum90 and Ovid in Ars amatoria.91 Jankin, the husband of the Wife of Bath, continues his misogynist list of wives defending the true moral values of marriage in verses 747–756, which concern Livia and Lucilia, who both caused the death of their husbands, one for love, the other out of disgust. Livia poisoned hers late at night because she hated him; the lustful Lucilia, on the contrary, loved her husband so much that, so that he could only remember her, she prepared an aphrodisiac drink for him that was so strong that he was dead before dawn. The husbands of women like these always came off worst, as can also be read in Walter Map’s Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat in the passage that recalls the subject. In verses 757–764, the husband says how a certain Latumius once lamented to his friend Arrius that there was a tree in his garden, from which his three wives, deeply resentful, hanged themselves. This fact led Arrius to ask him for a sprout of the wonderful tree to plant in his garden, an anecdotal episode to which Walter Map also refers in Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat. From verse 765 to 772, the Wife says, in continuity with the reports of mariticide, that, concerning women of recent times, he read about how some killed their husbands in their beds and let their lovers possess them, with the body being laid all night on the floor. While their husbands slept, others drove nails into their skulls and thus murdered them. Still others put poison in their drinks. She concludes by saying that he spoke of more evil than the heart can ever feel. 90 91

Saint Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, I.48. Ovid, Ars amatoria, I.269–343, III.9–43.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

181

In verses 773–787, one of the leading models of the exercise of the bookish and popular misogynist heritage is recalled, namely, the practice of proverbialism denigrating the female character. In this sense, the Wife says that her husband knew more sayings than grass on the earth. He quotes the proverb that it is better to live with a lion or dragon than with a repressive woman; that it is better to live on the roof of the attic than with a quarrelsome woman in the house, recalling the occurrence of this proverb in Ecclesiasticus 25:23, Proverbs 21 and 29, and in Adversus Jovinianum.92 They are so bad and contrary that they hate what their husbands like, recalling Juvenal’s Satire VI.93 He also said that a woman gets rid of shame and modesty when she takes off her apron, as Saint Jerome reminds us in Adversus Jovinianum.94 If not chaste, a beautiful woman is like a gold ring attached to a pig’s snout, as can be read in Proverbs 11:22. Through all this, the Wife reveals her pain, feeling, and torment. In verses 788–802, the Wife says that when she realized he would never finish but would read things from that damn book all night long, she suddenly stood up and tore three pages from it while he was reading it. And she hit him with her fist on his cheek. After he rolled into the fireplace, he got up and jumped like a lion, and he hit her with his fist on the head so hard that she fell on the floor and stayed there as if dead. When he saw that she was lying motionless, he was alarmed and, she says, he would have run away if she had not returned from her fainting. She says that he attacked her just because of his property, but she also says that she would kiss him again before she dies. Then, from verse 803 to 816, the Wife says that he went over to her and gently knelt and promised not to hit her again in the name of God. After endless sadness and pain, she says that, finally, her husband gave her the reins, not only of the direction of the house and lands but also of his tongue, and of course his fist, and then she made him burn his book. Verses 817–828, at the end of the Prologue, are quite significant for giving yet another example of the already referenced rhetorical resource of female politics present in her blackmail speech for the inversion of values that is nothing more than a naturalized expedient of androcentric speech. In any case, the method’s resource comes from the locus of the man’s rationality, proving the Pauline maxim that the woman can only be rescued if she becomes masculine. Furthermore, that is what, by analyzing the motifs and themes that contextualize the misogynist nature of The Wife of 92

Saint Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, I.28. Juvenal, “Satire VI,” 206–230. 94 Saint Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, I.48. 93

182

Chapter Six

Bath’s Prologue, might explain its political denouement, commented on by the Wife when she says that she got complete command in her hands. Her husband told her that she was his only true wife. Moreover, she could do as she pleased and would keep his honor and take care of his assets. From that day on, she says that they had no more clashes and that she was as kind and true to him as any wife from then until the end of the world. Finally, the Wife says to pray to God who reigns in his majesty for the grace and blessing of her only husband’s soul, the most truly loved of all of her past husbands. This kind of reversion of command to the feminine is nothing more than a reinforcement of masculine principles. It confers the structures of the androcentric formations of misogyny on women and their empowerment. In this sense, the Wife of Bath only triumphs by climbing an imaginary pedestal that, in reality, is nothing but a doormat.

Sources Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” In The Canterbury Tales, translated by David Wright, 219–239. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale: An Interlinear Translation. The Middle English Text, General Edition. Edited by Larry D. Benson. The Riverside Chaucer. Houghton Miflin Company. https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/wbt-par.htm. Accessed February 17, 2021. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The Roman of the Rose by Guillaume of Lorris and Jean de Meun, 5 vols. Ernest Langlois edition. Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot, 1914–1924. Guillaume of Lorris and Jean de Meun. The Romance of the Rose. Translated by Charles Dahlberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971

References Abelard and Heloise. “The History of his Misfortunes.” In The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, translated by B. Radice. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Andreas Capellanus. Andreas Capellanus On Love. Edited and translated by P. G. Walsh. London: Duckworth, 1982.

The Misogynist Contribution of Vernacular Adaptation

183

Andreas Capellanus. De amore libri tres. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/capellanus.html. Accessed February 12, 2021. Anonymous. Ancrene Riwle. Translated by M. B. Salu. London: Burns & Oates, 1955. Augustine, St. St Augustine: City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1972. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Corbaccio. Translated by Anthony K. Cassell. Urbana, IL and London: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by Victor Watts. London: Penguin, 1999. Ferrante, Joan M. Woman as Image in Medieval Literature from the Twelfth Century to Dante. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. The Holy Bible. Translated from the Vulgata Latina. Belfast, 1892. Jerome, St. “Against Jovinian.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 779–907. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. Juvenal. “Satire VI.” In The Satires of Juvenal, translated by R. Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958. Le Fèvre, Jehan. Les Lamentations de Matheolus et le Livre de Leesce. Edited by A.-G. Van Hamel, 2 vols. Paris: Bouillon, 1892–1905. Mann, Jill. Geoffrey Chaucer. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Map, Walter. “The Letter of Valerius to Ruffinus, against Marriage.” In De Nugis Curialium, Courtiers’ Trifles, edited and translated by M. R. James, Rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors, 287–313. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Marbod of Rennes. “De meretrice.” In Liber decem capitulorum, edited by Rosario Leotta. Rome: Herder, 1984. Marbodus Redonensis Episcopus. “De meretrice.” In Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Liber decem capitulorum. Series Latina. Paris: 1844–1890. http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/02m/10351123,_Marbodus_ Redonensis_Episcopus,_Liber_Decem_Capitulorum,_MLT.pdf Ovid. “Amores.” In Ovid: The Erotic Poems, translated by P. Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Ovid. “Ars amatoria.” In Ovid: The Erotic Poems, translated by P. Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.

184

Chapter Six

Ovid. Heroides, Amores, Art of Love, Cosmetics, Remedies for Love, Ibis, Walnut-tree, Sea Fishing, Consolation, Metamorphoses, Fasti, Tristia, Ex Ponto. Edited by G. P. Goold et al. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1977–1989. Ovid. The Cures for Love. Translated by A. S. Kline, 2001. http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/CuresforLove.php. Richard de Bury. Philobiblon. Edited by Michael MacLagan, translated by E. C. Thomas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1960. Tertullian. “The Apparel of Women,” translated by E. Quain. In Tertullian: Disciplinary, Moral and Ascetical Works, translated by E. J. Daly and E. A. Quain. FOC XL. New York: Fathers of the Church, 1959. Titus Livius. The History of Rome, vol. 1. Translated by George Baker, A. M. New York: Peter A. Mesier et al., 1823. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/livy-the-history-of-rome-vol-1 Virgílio. Eneida. Translated by José Victorino Barreto Feio and José Maria da Costa e Silva. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2004.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE PRAISE OF WOMEN IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE

The medieval literary form that occasionally happened as a ‘response’ in defense of women defamed by misogyny in the Middle Ages constitutes the corpus of study of this book, represented by texts of the most varied nature. The following are considered representative for analysis: The Thrush and the Nightingale (late 12th century) by an anonymous author; De matrona (The Good Woman) in Liber decem capitulorum (The Book of Ten Chapters) by Marbod of Rennes (c. 1035–1123); Abelard’s Letter 6, De Auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium (On the Origin of Nuns) (1079–1142); Liber consolationis et consilii (The Book of Consolation and Advice, c. 1193) by Albertano of Brescia (c. 1193–c. 1260); the response to Richard de Fournival’s Li Bestiaire d’Amor (The Bestiary of Love, c. 1250) by an anonymous author (1201–?); The Southern Passion (dated before 1290) by an anonymous author; Confessio amantis (A Lover’s Confession, 1386– 1390) by John Gower (c. 1325–1408); the treatise in refutation of Walter Brut, possibly by John Necton and William Colville and Bishop Trefnant’s Registrum (both the treatise and the Registrum were related to the trial (1391) of Walter Brut; and Dives and Pauper (1405–1410) by an anonymous author. However, it is to be considered that, in the literature of classical antiquity, this kind of response to misogyny goes back to one of the earliest defenses of women presented in around 380 BC, when Plato’s Republic was introduced to political philosophy. Such a response could be considered as the root of sympathy for women in the medieval context, were it not for the fact that it was practically unknown during the Middle Ages.1 In an investigation of the allocation of space commonly devoted to the defense and apology of women in the literature of the Middle Ages, the relatively small proportion dedicated to this mode of literature is clearly noted. This is a fact that directly reflects the small number of writings intended to respond direct or indirectly to the prevalent misogynist 1 Rosemary Agonito, ed., History of Ideas on Woman (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 23–39.

186

Chapter Seven

discourse of the medieval period. However, if there is a small proportion of direct ‘responses’ to this kind of discourse, it is not the same case for the huge amount of indirect misogynist references from all sides, which was very well noted by Christine de Pizan when she stated her feeling that philosophers and poets have spoken more massively and frequently against women than against men.2 Endorsing de Pizan’s words, a not considerable number of passages in the Church Fathers’ writings seem to reveal a compensatory predisposition to recognize the virtuous aspects of the feminine character. Such is the case of Saint Jerome and his praise of loyal wives, the Virgin Mary, and the honesty of the female compared to male hypocrisy; Saint Augustine and the apology of women on the Day of Judgment; and Saint Ambrose about the virtuous Deborah. However, the praising of women in medieval writers like these is somewhat controversial and leads to a debate since it is also contentious whether passages such as these are really dedicated to defending women or if they are intended to defend them to promote virginity or chaste widowhood as a form of politically devised religious transcendence. To illustrate this ambiguous situation, in which women were praised for transcending their natural and moral imposed limitations, Sermon 66 of Sermones vulgares (Sermons for All) by Jacques de Vitry (c. 1170–1240) is a rather good example. What happens here is a simple identification of misogyny, not a confrontation by men who complacently identified with its content. The sermon begins with an attack on licentious men, who, not content with a single wife, drown themselves amid women with destructive lust, like a fox attacking all sheep in the flock, even though a single sheep could satisfy its hunger.3 Some additional words about selecting this corpus laudatoribus deserve to be said regarding the controversial coexistence of misogynist and laudatory attitudes in the same literary medieval author. Perhaps this occurrence can be better explained in Geoffrey Chaucer’s case, where his misogyny is considerably more spectacular than his apology of the feminine. It seems that women’s praise tends to be treated in a superficial, rhetorical manner as if it were an editorial style. With this treatment, his female characters lose the possibility of having a fair characterization in

2

Christine de Pizan, “L’Epistre au Dieu d’Amours,” in Oeuvres Poétiques de Christine de Pizan, ii, ed. M. Roy (Paris: SATF, 1891), II.168, 185. 3 Jacques de Vitry, Sermones vulgares sive ad status, in Les Sources de l’histoire de France – Des origines aux guerres d’Italie (1494), III. Les Capétiens, 1180– 1328, trans. Auguste Molinier (Paris: A. Picard et fils, 1903), 146–147.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

187

language and thought. That the laudatory passion is less noticeable than its misogynist counterpart is intentional. This justifies why the Legend of Good Women was not included among the laudatory works of women listed at the start of this chapter. In this respect, the Legend’s classification as a laudatory work in defense of women is controversial. Critical considerations indicate the book to be a parody of low mimetic intention, fulfilling only the idea of taking stories of classical origin and distorting them to give them contemporary moral meanings. There is even a satirical treatment in the work if one considers that the stories about these good women are all somewhat similar and standardized, with little characterization, leading to the idea that the work was deliberately poorly written and shallow in discussing women.

Anonymous The Thrush and the Nightingale The Thrush and the Nightingale, an anonymous poem written in the medieval English language of the late thirteenth century, presents its defense of women in verse, in which the two contenders are birds. However, this type of defense seems to target a particular type of woman and, from the start, denotes a biased particularization of the subject. This example of the literary genre known as debate poetry is considered representative of many medieval texts that match positive and negative points of view for discussion of values (in this instance, of women) by pitting them against each other in quite a dialectical style that is much preferred by the argumentative mode of expression of medieval culture and literature. Thus, the poem The Thrush and the Nightingale, featuring two wellknown birds of the medieval European context, presents the resolution of the debate about positive female properties as opposed to negative ones in a very conventional way because the vindication of women finally comes from the invocation of the Virgin Mary. Nevertheless, this kind of antimisogynist, deus ex machina literary device and its sympathy for women represented a common strategy that was much complained about. This is seen in the case of Il Corbaccio (The Corbaccio), which, evidently from the masculine point of view, complains about the presence of the Virgin as an arbitrary and unfair resource, since her appearance is always an emblematic guarantee of unconditional success for the female cause.4 4

Boccaccio, The Corbaccio, 32–33.

188

Chapter Seven

The poem is not very ambitious in exposing the apologetic theme of the female figure. However, it maintains a fascinating cultural and social distinction among birds by embodying the strategy, with a certain rhetorical subtlety, of engendering, where the nightingale is female and her opponent male. Therefore, the Thrush always refers to “women,” whereas the Nightingale most often refers to “ladies.” The Nightingale, symbolically engendered in the feminine, assumes solidarity with the ladies, defending their territorial rights over the gardens, where the debate takes place, or enhancing their courtly environment. Since nightingales are traditionally a symbol of romantic love, this bird advocates the right to confidential access to the ladies’ emotional lives. This chapter aims to read the poem in its strophic form and presents each stanza in separate paragraphs. The poem introduces the two birds, who have been released on the arrival of summer, mentioning the coming of love with blossoms, bird sounds, and hazelnut buds. Valleys filled with dew and nightingales precede the sounds of birds.5 In this delightful landscape, the ‘lyric I’ of the poem, addressing the reader, says that he had heard two birds that began to fight, one had taken a stark view, the other a radiant one; one won the women and their graces, the other did not. The narrator goes on to say that the reader will know in an instant that there will be a disgrace for the bad-tongued bird. The Nightingale would keep the woman’s name preserved and ward off threats, but the Thrush interferes and insists on not stopping, saying that women are the devil’s company. He says that women take down men who believe them most, no matter how nice their faces look; they are very volatile because they fail when tested, so it is better to be without them because they spread distress. To this, the Nightingale replies that the Thrush should stop blaming the ladies because they are noble and kind. This is a shame because there is no forced quarrel that a woman cannot cure, whatever the cause. To calm sick temperaments between ups and downs, the Nightingale says that women, with brilliant receptivity, know how to do everything well and that the world would be imperfect if women had not been born because, of all the things created as men’s allies, they are still the sweetest of all.

5

Anonymous, The Thrush and the Nightingale, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Digby 86, ff. 136vb-138rb, Wessex Parallel Web Texts Project, set up by Bella Millett, 2014. http://wpwt.soton.ac.uk/digby86/thrushtxt.htm, accessed 17 December 2019. The references are from this edition, and can be checked in John W. Conlee, ed., The Thrush and the Nightingale, Middle English Debate Poetry (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1991), 237–248.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

189

In his usual caustic tone, the Thrush points out that he cannot praise women at all, that he had heard that they are fallible, liars, and, although radiant and beautiful in sight, they are at bottom fraudulent, as he has found. Possibly alluding to the episode of Candace’s betrayal, the Thrush continues his ranting speech of women, now referring to the fact that even Alexander the Great had trouble with them. Even though he was the most powerful man in the world who cried out men of acknowledged success to witness his ruin at the hands of that sex. The Nightingale, screaming angrily, replies that the Thrush seems detestable to him by telling these stories. He, probably denying what Ecclesiastes 7:28–9 says, asks the Thrush to consider a row of ladies and consider them carefully: not even one in a thousand is bad. Continuing his complimentary comments on women, the Nightingale says that they care very much about their honor, being soft and gentle behind closed doors inside their rooms; that there is nothing more lovely for men to embrace; that a woman is a pleasure to look at. The Thrush replies that what the Nightingale advocates does not go well with what transpires in the bedroom, where women fulfill their desires. For a small gift, he says that they will do stealthy things, losing their souls amid sinful intrigue, remembering in this reference what Andreas Capellanus comments on the subject in De amore.6 He says that the Nightingale seems to him to be a liar, though gentle and a creature of peace, because he says what he wants. He says that Adam’s testimony should be considered and claims that the first man’s case already proves women’s vices. The Nightingale says that the Thrush and his insults to women suggest that he is crazy because there is no sweeter source of love than a woman, and she is far above her gracious demeanor. He goes on rhetorically, asking if the greatest happiness attributed to men is not when they bring a woman into their arms’ embrace. So blaming these ladies, the Nightingale says, is such a misfortune that the Thrush will regret it because she will ban the Thrush from such embraces. To this, the Thrush replies that the Nightingale is wrong for wanting to send him out of the country, saying that he is right, taking the testimony of Sir Gawain, the famous warrior to whom God gave so much power and strength to fight. The Thrush says that as far as the warrior traveled, he never met a faithful woman, day or night. He ends by saying that the Nightingale’s tongue is false and that he should be alert when that conversation becomes known, and he flies off. 6

Andreas Capellanus, Andreas Capellanus On Love, ed. and trans. P. G. (Walsh. London: Duckworth, 1982), III.65.

190

Chapter Seven

The Nightingale retorts that he must stay there in that arbor in the garden to sing his musical notes because the manners of the ladies he knows are fine and always noble besides the joy they bring. He says that the ladies tell him of delightful things because they live a life of desire, and now the Thrush lands on a hazelnut branch and blames them, saying that this is wrong and that the things he says will spread widely. The Thrush replies that of course they will spread because such a conversation is not new and that an unknowing person will hear it from him, the Nightingale. He says he will show him the ways of women since he did not mind learning the lesson. The Thrush continues, eager to show women’s ways to the Nightingale, with the memory of the Queen of Constantine, whose fine clothes suited her, complaining that she shared her bed and table with a disabled person. Thus, the Thrush concludes, how could one claim that faithful women exist? The Nightingale replies that his singing still says that the Thrush is wrong and that men have known all along that a beautiful woman surpasses the dawn of a long warm summer day. He says that if the Thrush enters a woman’s territory, she will put him in prison, and there he will stay until the day he renounces the lies he has spoken, and how much humiliation he will have suffered then. The Thrush retorts that the Nightingale must speak of himself by saying that women will put him to death. He tells the Nightingale to check the Scripture, where he will find that women overthrow many vain and strong men. For example, Samson’s wife, who, by selling him, did him great harm. The Thrush also tells the Nightingale to check the treasure of Eden’s bliss because the worst that Christ did there was the woman. Then the Nightingale remarks how fast the Thrush is in his stories and commands him to listen to him, saying that women are long-lasting flowers, pleasing everywhere for their good beauty. With their sensitive mind and solicitude, it is not possible to find better creatures to heal the wounds of men. He says that the Thrush will regret his opinions because they have no endorsement and commands his opponent to stop harming women and abandon this bad slander. To this, the Thrush replies that it is not wise to ascribe such high values to women because their rewards will undoubtedly be very scarce, because of a hundred women, hardly five will remain chaste, be they maidens or wives. This is so because they prefer to bring trouble all over the place or ruin men. The Thrush finishes by saying that as long as they conduct the debate, the Nightingale will never speak the truth in this matter.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

191

The Nightingale replies that now the Thrush has disgraced his mouth and asks who intermediated the rescue of the world if not a gentle maiden from whom a holy child was born in Bethlehem, a child who could tame the wild. The Virgin knew nothing of sin or shame; Christ protected her, and Mary was her name. After saying that, the Nightingale asserts that he prohibits the Thrush, because of his false words, from remaining in the woods and then sends him away. The Thrush says that he had been a real fool or very inexperienced in arguing with the Nightingale, admitting his defeat because of the one who had given birth to the Son wounded by five stigmas. The Thrush finishes by swearing in the name of the holy body of Christ that henceforth women would be free from his condemnation since he intended to fly out of those lands somewhere, no matter what.

Marbod of Rennes Marbod of Rennes (Marbodus Redonensis Episcopus, c. 1035–1123) belongs, along with Peter Abelard and many others, to the category of literature produced in the Middle Ages characterized, in terms of gender discourse, as an ambivalent representation of women insofar as the author portrayed them under the lens of misogyny and sometimes from the perspective of praise or apology. Marbod did his studies and taught at the School of Angers Cathedral and, when he was sixty years old, became Bishop of Rennes (in Brittany). In terms of vocation and literary qualities, his tenacious dedication to writing distinguished itself by encompassing a vast repertoire of topics with which he dealt with great tenacity, often appreciated for his elaborate stylistic care, such as the complex verse form, the leonine hexameter, which was his preference. The book of Marbod of Rennes, Liber decem capitulorum (Book of Ten Chapters), selected for inclusion in this study to mark the presence of the encomiastic treatment of women in the medieval literary period, succeeds in achieving this goal through one of its chapters entitled De matrona (The Good Wife). As commented earlier, the book includes one of the boldest chapters of what can be considered as an anthological example of medieval misogynist literature on the evil character, moral viciousness, and natural malignity of all women ever, mythological or historical. Called De meretrice, it constitutes the third chapter of the book, sometimes translated as “On the Prostitute” or, in a more attenuated form, as “The Evil Woman.” However, not all of Liber decem capitulorum deserves its acknowledged stigma for its dubious opinions about female reality.

192

Chapter Seven

Appearing to have been written in the author’s old age—as it brings reminiscences of a literary career that began in what he now considers to have been of a youthful lightness—what is interesting in the composition of Liber decem capitulorum is the fact that Chapter 3 forms, together with Chapter 4, a diptych. Furthermore, these twinned and paired chapters can be read in opposite and antithetical ways. In this formation, the Manichean posture of the medieval religious mentality postulating good in defense against evil explains why Chapter 4, De matrona, which deals with the good woman, comes after Chapter 3, De meretrice, which deals with the evil woman. It reproduces here the biblical scheme of the redemption of evil through good, as the viciousness of the meretrix is redeemed by the virtuosity of the matrona. Given this rhetorical dichotomy, it is indeed tempting to consider that the practice of misogynist discourse during the medieval period, represented many times by the simple custom or taste for denunciation for the sake of denouncing, had been merely a game of rhetorical formulas or even a stage or theater suitable for the display of literary skills and gifts. In this sense, many medieval misogynist writers, such as Marbod of Rennes, as previously commented, sportingly matched their attacks and defenses of women. However, considering the exercise of misogyny, as discussed throughout this book, as a mere game or a sport still does not exempt this practice from the disregard of discrimination and violent ideological cuts. In this sense, it was always women who were placed in the process of subjection, objects framed by a male player who was arrogant in asserting the prerogatives of his own gender and positioned in a situation of control and dominance.

De matrona Marbod of Rennes, adopting the male poetic voice, begins De matrona by commenting that of all things that are consented to be seen through God’s gift to humanity, nothing is considered more beautiful or better than a good woman, which is part of human dignity. At the beginning of his apology of women, Marbod invokes the theme of the equality or parity of the creation of man and woman, remembering the tópos of the same flesh, in this way questioning the principle of masculine superiority conceived by the idea of the primacy of the male Eden creation. The principle, Marbod says, recalling the idea of the social good of marriage at the beginning of De bono coniugali (The Good Marriage), that nature compels men to love women is quite deserved, and this is for the sake of society, even if they cause them problems.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

193

Since everyone is equal, their lives are governed by the same conditions, and there is nothing that men do not have in common with women, being similar in all things except sex. In the beginning, the law of nature treated everyone equally. Men and women ate the same fruit, their need for clothing was the same, and everyone provoked tears and laughter by similar emotions. Each one of them distinguished with equal understanding which things were good or bad, what was fair or unfair; they spoke the same language, knew how to thank each other as equals, to deserve gifts from each other because of their kindness, and to give advice to each other in order to avoid injury. In column 1700, lines 18–33 of De matrona,7 Marbod continues to advocate this praised gender parity by saying that men and women are equally capable in all the things mentioned above, which, of course, are denied to ignorant animals. He says that despite this, many people desire animals and admit that they are the most lovable. Marbod then discusses a fourfold model of natural creation to justify the connection between man and woman on a first level. In this sense, he comments on the linkage between humans and animals at a second level, vegetables at a third level, and inanimate things at a fourth level. He points out that although animals lack reason, they are living beings and move in an order close to humans. Herbs and flowers, he says, and every living thing on earth that the mixture of heat and moisture nourishes, giving growth and power to produce fruit, all this man considers beautiful, fully aware that they have no soul, yet they move and grow. Marbod—resonating Boethius in Consolatio Philosophiae (c. 524) about things that are precious for the beauty of Creation but inferior to humanity because they lack movement and soul8—comments that the place of these things on the third natural level shows that they should be less esteemed. Thus, clothes, silver, jewels, gold, and all things without movement, even if visually appealing, are further from us, for they belong to the fourth level in the law of nature.

7

Marbodus Redonensis Episcopus, “De matrona,” in Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Liber decem capitulorum, series latina (Paris: 1844–1890), 171, cols. 1699–1702, http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/02m/1035-1123, _Marbodus_Redonensis_Episcopus, _Liber_ Decem_Capitulorum, _MLT.pdf. The references are to this edition, and they can be checked in Marbod of Rennes, “De matrona,” in Liber decem capitulorum, ed. Rosario Leotta (Rome: Herder, 1984), chap. IV, and for better location refer only to the respective book, columns, and lines in which they are found. 8 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, II. pr. 5.

194

Chapter Seven

However, these things that are denied of such faculties as movement still have qualities to be admired. He argues about the natural value of the things created by God and takes the movement and presence of the soul as a parameter. In this respect, placing women above all of them for their excellent qualities, Marbod demonstrates a reflection on the natural values given to women. This way, it is clear that women are more valuable than all things, more beautiful than silver, more precious than gold, and more radiant than jewels. In the wake of these ideas, in column 1700, lines 34–53, Marbod proves that admiration for women, or love, is greater than for all these things. He goes on to say that because of these reasons, though coming from a single order that each sex shares equally, men are bound by the just love of Nature, and those things are no less appropriate to men than to women. However, there are many things in which consideration for the feminine is superior, and women have a unique purpose in the world. If this purpose were canceled out, the human race would be in danger because if there is no ground, what use would the seeds have? Who could be a father if there were no woman to be a mother, Marbod asks, adding that he will not speak of the hard and long labors of pregnancy or the anxious moments of suffering from the pains of giving birth. That is the price the loving mother pays for giving birth, but soon, she forgets the suffering. Then Marbod asks who can be compared with such kindness for love and who can say that he has never had a mother. In columns 1700–1701, lines 54–61, Marbod continues his apology of the maternal women by saying that they also contribute with many things that are less important than motherhood but that the daily life in the community requires. He then asks who but women take responsibility for feeding and if any man can support their life without a woman. Who but they prepare the wool and threads and turn the wheel, who will complete the spinning day or will patiently weave? Marbod points out that all of this is done for the benefit of men and that women are so useful that if they were missing, men’s quality of life would diminish. In column 1701, lines 62–71, Marbod continues his apology of the women’s domestic dedication by saying that they perform many things that homework requires with special care and more efficiently and face many things that male vanity rejects. They treat the sick more kindly, listen painfully at the bedside, provide food, and drink more devoutly. They have greater care and are faster to respond to commands. They can be molded into a desirable pattern like soft wax, here recalling Andreas

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

195

Capellanus in De amore9 and Ovid in Metamorphoses.10 Moreover, Marbod says that women perform orders that arrogant men’s rebellious mentality resist and rarely bear their yokes, all claiming that they are not inferior. Marbod, in column 1701, lines 72–97, continues his praise of women abstracted in the singular for their desirable qualities, saying that, above all, in this weak sex, zeal for virtue is more praiseworthy and defects are more easily forgiven. However, Marbod’s defense does not go beyond defying prevailing views about the inferiority of women. He goes on to say that if virtue is found less often in the lower sex and not wrongly seen in the higher, how has woman been so bad as to outweigh the absolute evil of Judas, a man, and what man can equal the value of Mary? Marbod, incurring a disqualification that is very noticeable in Il Corbaccio’s misogynist discourse,11 suggests leaving this comparison because he considers it unique. Furthermore, he continues by saying that much can be read about women who have shown the courage of men and even surpassed them, and because of their brave hearts, they have won good and well-deserved praises. Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Esther, Judith, Anna, and Naomi are considered as seven biblical stars that the ancient times produced who equaled or surpassed men. Judith performed a memorable feat that no man had dared before. Upon returning to her homeland after killing Holofernes, when a woman had given security back to the city of Bethulia, she drove the defeated enemy from other cities as well. Marbod recalls this sensational liberation of the city of Bethulia by Judith, narrated in the Book of Judith 12–15 in the Vulgate Bible, in tune with this exceptional fact that greatly fascinated the Middle Ages. She murdered the enemy of her people, the tyrant Holofernes, by slashing him with her sword in the tent which he had allowed her to enter. Then Marbod recalls the fame surrounding Queen Esther, who, even married to a cruel tyrant, such as the lamb with the wolf, was not afraid, risking her own life, to go through the door that no one was allowed to enter without being summoned, as can be read in the Book of Esther 4:11. The queen risked her own life to look for her husband, King Ahasuerus, to appeal on behalf of the Jews being persecuted and threatened by Aman, and the decree was repealed.

9

Capellanus, Andreas Capellanus on Love, III.83. Ovid, Heroides, Amores, Art of Love, Cosmetics, Remedies for Love, Ibis, Walnut-tree, Sea Fishing, Consolation, Metamorphoses, Fasti, Tristia, Ex Ponto, vols. i–vi, ed. G. P. Goold et al., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA and London: Havard University Press, 1977–1989), X.85. 11 Boccaccio, The Corbaccio, 32–33. 10

196

Chapter Seven

In the sequence, Marbod says that the queen risked her safety for her nation and directed the decree of death made against her people against the enemy instead. Marbod then says that he will not report the entire story of Ruth. She, alone in having obeyed her virtuous stepmother, is considered worthy of breeding offspring that became part of a royal lineage when she fled from her homeland in the name of faith. The story ends with the reference that after the death of her husband and the two children, Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem. Her stepdaughter Ruth, though not an Israelite, loyally followed her, then she married Boaz, whose son Obed would be David’s grandfather. Next, in column 1701, lines 98–106, Marbod comments that since the New Law, that is, the New Testament, when the glory of feminine purity shone in the birth of the Virgin, honored around the world, history has been teeming with young women. They valued their chastity more than life, and prevailing against their enemies has taught men that torture does not suppress mental courage. Among these maidens considered superior for their outstanding value, Agnes, Fides, Agatha, Lucy, Cecilia, and Thecla conquered gross tyrants through their distinct virtues. Marbod, continuing on the list of these famous women, in columns 1701–1702, lines 107–119, says he could add the names of celebrated death-defying pagan women always remembered for their caste modesty. In this respect, he recalls Lucretia, who, on her death, gained a remarkable reputation, reacting against the injuries to her chastity by hastily committing suicide when she was the object of dishonor. Next, Marbod recounts the case of Alcestis, who saved the life of her husband, the king, by her death, according to a harsh agreement in which the cruel facts required the death of one of them. After this comes the case of chaste Arria, who pierced her breast with a sword, wanting to anticipate her condemned husband’s fate. She became famous for the final words she spoke to him as she passed him the dagger, saying that the wounds she had done to herself did not cause her so much pain as the ones he would cause, even after her death. In column 1702, lines 120–124, Marbod concludes this excellent complement to admittedly worthy women by saying that it is evident from the cases and arguments he presented at the beginning of the poem that people should not censure women solely for being women and honor men because they are men. It is a vice to think in this way: people should blame both sexes, and virtue deserves to be praised equally in both too.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

197

Peter Abelard Moments of the recognition and praise of women in medieval texts following the panegyric tradition were hardly anything other than repetitive exceptionalities exemplifying the misogynist metaphor of the pedestal doormat that ironically pantheonized great heroines. However, all this ‘recognition’ had, at times, a productive counter-effect, since this traditional laudatory treatment of women permitted certain reevaluations, as in the case of Abelard. Chapter 4 of this book considered the history of Abelard and Heloise from an autobiographical perspective in the process of recording letters written by both characters in its approach to the theme of misogyny as a medieval legacy of the Church Fathers of the first centuries of the Middle Ages. The chapter contemplated Abelard’s Historia calamitatum (The History of My Calamities), which demonstrates mimetic aspects of the derogatory reality of the women who, like Heloise, become ‘masculinized’ by acquiring misogynist overdetermination in the expression of gender. Based on that same ground of androcentric prerogatives, as a denouement of the conflict imposed on the two lovers, Heloise invokes the patriarchal disposition of her ex-husband Abelard. She asks him to write, as an exemplary and edifying work, the story of the nuns after whom Letter 6 was entitled De auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium. Abelard, like Marbod of Rennes, represents one of the most curious figures in the multiform game representing misogyny, a malleability in treating female reality, either condemning or apologetically defending women. However, it seems nothing other than a game committed to the efficiency of the dialectical synthesis that seems to characterize medieval thought, mainly in the religious and moral fields. In this thought, the thesis’ principles are surprisingly reinvigorating, whereas the antithesis is merely an adequate representation. A supreme example of this scenario is formed by the large panel of the final Apocalypse, in which it theoretically advances that good will always overcome evil. Therefore, the presence of Abelard writing the story of cloistered women, supposedly exemplary in their religious faith and morals, legitimizes the figure of men mentoring theological prerogatives and intellectual capacity in the form of auctoritas. Abelard was one of the great masters and thinkers of the time until, descending to the appeals of carnal love, he passionately lost himself to Heloise, committing the celebrated punitive transgression of the tragic hero. It was a tendentious episode that adds much consideration to the traditional panegyric treatment of women. His intellectual discernment allowed him to critically reexamine biblical

198

Chapter Seven

treatments and other sources about the female figure. Due to this revisiting, he was able to reevaluate conventional examples such as Judith, Esther, and the Virgin with new evidence of women’s greater service to the Church than the Church itself allowed them. In De auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium (On the Origin of Nuns), Abelard’s well-known Letter 6, the author first mediates between the meaning of Christ’s anointment by Mary Magdalene—as the Evangelists report, a thing never done by any man with similar fervor—and the significant sacramental implications that such an act could have.

De auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium Abelard begins his apology of the sacramental anointing of Christ with a woman granting Mary Magdalene a carefully considered dignity, probably deliberately emulating the discussion about the dignity of man, the dignitas hominis, in terms of honorable functions. He comments that women anointed Christ twice during his life, on his feet and head, receiving the sacraments of brotherhood and priesthood. It is considered here that men also anointed Christ in his death, as can be seen in John 19:38–40, and that, as Abelard himself had already pointed out, only men administered the sacraments after this anointing. Abelard comments that Christ’s disciples felt outraged at a woman being so presumptuous, and the apostle Mark mentions that they grumbled at her. However, after softening their anger with gentle answers, Jesus praised the kindness of the woman who had anointed him and insisted that this act be written in the Gospels, that it should be preached wherever they went, in memory and praise of a woman who had done what the disciples claimed to have involved great presumption. Abelard also says that there are no known services reported by anyone that were commented on or ratified in such a way by the authority of the Lord. In fact, men did various things for Christ, and Peter boasted that he and his companions had left everything to follow the Messiah. Nevertheless, Christ praised the women more, and they showed their loyal devotion in his death while the disciples fled and even denied their knowledge of him.12 12

Abelard and Heloise, “Letter Sixth” (De Auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium), in The Letters and Other Writings, trans. William Levitan (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 2007), 127–169. The references are from this edition, and they can be checked in J. T. Muckle, “The Letter of Heloise on Religious Life and Abelard’s First Reply,” Medieval Studies 17 (1955): 255–258, 264, 268–269, 270–271.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

199

Abelard then comments on the loyal devotion of women in the Passion of Christ, saying that while the shepherds of the Lord’s flock had fled, the sheep remained fearless. The Lord reproved the former as weak flesh because they could not stay an hour with him in the Passion stage, as can be read in Matthew 26:40 when the disciples fell asleep at Gethsemane. However, it was a woman who, spending a night of vigil at his tomb, deserved to be the first to see the glory of the risen Christ. Thus, more in deeds than in words, women showed the Lord, by their loyalty in his death, how much they loved him throughout his life. When the Shabbat was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary (James’ mother), and Salome went to the tomb very early in the morning of the Resurrection Day. Thus, Abelard goes on to say that just as he had shown their devotion, he will now show the honor they deserved. Mark the Evangelist does not hide the fact that they were the first to be sent by the angel to tell the disciples the news. He says that the angel told the women that the Lord had risen, that he was not there, that they were to go and tell the disciples and Peter that he was going to be with them in Galilee. In addition, the Lord himself, first appearing to Mary Magdalene, told her to go to his brothers and tell them that he had ascended to the Father, as can be read in John 20:17. Abelard says that the holy women were chosen, as it were, as Apostles of the Apostles. Moreover, this was so because, being sent by the Lord or the angels, the women proclaimed the joyful and anticipated Resurrection to everyone. Thus, the Apostles were to relearn from these women what they would later preach to the whole world. The women accompanied the Apostles as well, and Abelard found evidence about the inclusion of women in early prayer communities. Hence, he comments on Miriam as an epitome of women’s active role in the ancient liturgy. He further suggests that in the Levite priesthood, it seems that women’s religious practices were not separate from the clerical order. Abelard interprets the instructions in 1 Timothy 5:9–11 as rules for selecting widows as deaconesses. Next, Abelard goes on to comment on them. He recalls the case of Phoebe, whom the Apostle Paul greatly praised to the Romans. Appealing on her behalf, he tells them that he recommended her as a religious sister in the church ministry in Cenchreae. Moreover, they should receive her as a saint in the Lord and help her in whatever business she needed because she had helped many and him as well, as can be read in Romans 16:1–2. Abelard says that Cassiodorus and Claudius, commenting on this passage, mention that she was a deaconess of that church. Cassiodorus comments that she held this function at the Mother Church, a position still held in Greek localities of those days when the practice of baptism was not

200

Chapter Seven

denied to women. Abelard adds that Claudius considers that this passage teaches about the apostolic authority that women appointed as ministers of the Church could acquire, citing here a comment lost today from Cassiodorus and a pronouncement by Claudius of Turin.13 Abelard gives his testimony about the remarkable holiness of consecrated virgins and develops a favorite theme in the Middle Ages, namely, the special divine grace reserved for the so-called weaker sex. Seemingly paradoxical, he then discusses the issue of the perfection of female weakness. He says that because women’s sex is more fragile than men’s, their virtue is more pleasing to God and more perfect, according to the Lord’s testimony, coinciding here with Marbod of Rennes’ pronouncement in De matrona.14 When God encouraged the Apostle to fight, despite his weakness for the crown of victory, he said that his grace would be sufficient for him because power is perfected with a lack of firmness, as can be seen in 2 Corinthians 12:9. Yet God, speaking to the Apostle about the members of his body, that is, his Church, comments in 1 Corinthians 14:35 that those who seem to be the weakest members are much more needed. Upon those thought to be the least honorary parts of the body is placed more abundant honor, as it says in 2 Corinthians 12:22–23. Moreover, Abelard asks where this has always been completely accomplished, with the endowment of divine grace, if not in the weakness of women, in which sin and nature became demanding. It is interesting to note that this seemingly paradoxical doctrine of women’s superior gift as weakness lies precisely in the inferiority of their nature, as both Abelard and Heloise note.15 Next, Abelard alludes to the traditional picture of the three strata or gradus of women, also remembered by Saint Jerome in Adversus Jovinianum (Against Jovinian).16 He suggests examining the presence of this feminine gift of frailty in the various levels of their sex, not only in virgins, widows, or married women but also in prostitutes. In all these categories of women, 13 Mary M. McLaughlin, “Peter Abelard and the Dignity of Women: Twelfth Century Feminism in Theory and Practice,” in Pierre Abelard–Pierre le Vénérable: les courants philosophiques, littéraires et artistiques en Occident au milieu du xiie siècle, Actes, Colloque International Cluny (Paris: CNRS, 1972), 287–334. 14 Marbod of Rennes, “De matrona,” in Liber decem capitulorum, ed. Rosario Leotta (Rome: Herder, 1984), 1844–1890, col. 1701, ls. 62–67. 15 Sr Prudence Allen, RSM, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC–AD 1250 (Montreal: Eden Press, 1985), 278; Betty Radice, trans., “Letter 3,” in Abelard and Heloise, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 97, 164–165. 16 Saint Jerome, “Against Jovinian,” I.9, 779–907, I.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

201

Abelard comments that God’s grace is complete—according to what the Lord says about the latter being the first and the first being the last—where sin abounds, because grace abounds even more, as can be read in Matthew 20:16 and Romans 5:20. Abelard continues to address this theme of divine grace recognized in the weakness of women, saying that if one looks again at the very beginning of the world for the favors and honor shown by divine grace to women, one can immediately see a certain dignity enhancing the creation of her. God made her in Paradise, but the man outside it, remembering here the conventionally recognized tópos of woman’s privileges in the Creation. Consequently, Abelard says, women are reminded to note that Paradise is their native land and that they are aptly able to follow the celibate life of Paradise, as Saint Jerome remarks in Epistula 22, ad Eustochium.17 Abelard then presents his conventional apologies of obligatory references to dignified women, recalling the names of Deborah, Judith, and Esther, along with other lesser-known cases, such as the mention of a mother tortured by Antiochus and the self-sacrifice of the daughter of Jephthah, whose biblical references are in Maccabees 2.7 and Judges 12:30. Continuing his commissioned apologetic discourse, Abelard addresses the issue of the privilege of a woman for bringing Christ into the world. Rhetorically, he asks, putting everything else aside, who has been more essential to human redemption and the salvation of the whole world than the female who begat the Savior himself. He also asks if any glory can match what the woman obtained in the person of Christ’s mother. If he had wished, our Redeemer could have got his body from a man, just as it was God’s will to form the first woman from a man’s body. However, he transferred this singular grace of his humility as an honor to the weaker sex. In addition, he could have been born from another part of a woman’s body, more valuable and different from the one from where other men are born, precisely from the same portion of her body where they are conceived. However, to the incomparable honor of the weaker body, he consecrated its genitals much more at birth than he had consecrated men through circumcision. Here, Abelard’s speech considers the precedence of certain ideas traced on the subject in the work of Saint Augustine. Abelard continues his gallery of exemplary women by focusing on Erythraean Sibyl and the Samaritan woman at the well, whom Christ favored with his conversation and request for drinking water. Abelard contends that Christ’s love for women was such that he even raised the 17

Saint Jerome, “Letter 22, to Eustochium,” 100–137.

202

Chapter Seven

dead for their sake, ending his Letter 6 to Heloise with reflections on virginity drawn mainly from the writings of Saint Jerome.

Albertano of Brescia Albertano of Brescia (Albertanus da Brescia, c.1193–c.1260) was a prominent Italian jurist in the troubled political landscape of his day. He presented each of his children with a treatise of great moral edification when they reached adulthood. The treatise Liber consolationis et consilii (The Book of Consolation and Advice, 1246) circulated widely during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in many places of Medieval Europe. Renaud de Louens made a compact French edition of the treatise after 1336, known in at least twenty-six manuscripts, which Chaucer translated under the title The Tale of Melibee. The subject of Albertano’s treatise concerns a debate between Melibeus, a nobleman interested in taking revenge on the enemies who had violently invaded his home, and his wise wife Prudentia. She begs her husband not to throw himself into such retaliation. In the extract selected below, Melibeus’ initial disregard for his wife’s interventions prepares her to make a quiet assessment of her husband’s misogynist clichés.

Liber consolationis et consilii In Chapter 3 of Liber consolationis et consilii, which gives rise to a bitter misogynist criticism of women, Melibeus tells his wife Prudentia that, for many reasons, he had decided to make very little use of her counseling. First, because everyone would think he was a fool to change according to her advice or understanding. Second, because women are evil and none are good, as Solomon had declared that he did not find any good man among a thousand and any good woman in general, as can be read in Ecclesiastes 7:28. Third, because if he were to act according to his wife’s understanding and advice, he would give her supremacy and, through that, he would make her dangerous to him and give her power when she should have very little. Because Jesus, the son of Sirach, said that if a woman has supremacy, she is dangerous to her husband. Albertano continues, in the voice of Melibeus, by saying that Solomon advised the people, all nations, and rulers of the Church not to give power over themselves to their sons, wives, brothers, or friends. The reason was that it is better for a son to be dependent upon his father than the contrary, as can be read in Ecclesiastes 33:19–20 and 22. The fourth reason given by Melibeus is that if he were to follow his wife’s counsel at any time when it

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

203

was necessary to keep a secret, it would inevitably end up revealed. Women’s babbling only knows how to guard what she does not know, as can be read in Seneca’s Controversiae.18 Finally, the fifth reason is the word of the philosopher who said that women conquer men through bad advice, probably here referring to one of Publilius Syrus’ maxims or Sententia (Sentences) of the first century BC.19 Chapter 4 of Liber consolationis et consilii provides a justification of women in the medieval misogynist scenario represented by Melibeus in his debate with Lucretia. It is an apologetic replica of the female figure, and Albertano initiates it by saying that when the patient wife kindly listened to and understood the things her husband had told her, she asked for permission to respond. She then begins by saying that she could not answer her husband’s first argument because she did not think it was foolish advice to change one’s opinion, recalling here what Seneca comments on the subject in De beneficiis (On Benefits).20 She tells her husband that although he had promised to do what he said before, he would not be a liar if he changed his mind for a just reason because the wise man does not lie when he changes his mind for the better. The wife goes on by telling her husband that even what he says is not an obstacle because it is always better for the virtue and benefits of things to be settled by a few wise men than determined by a noisy crowd, because the weary crowd has no virtue. At this point, the wife comments on her husband’s second argument that all women are bad because a good woman does not exist. She says that she respectfully believes that he should not underestimate women with such personal terms and condemn their ignorance. The one who undoes all offends everyone, pointing here to the use of this rhetorical resource of generalization present in medieval misogynist discourse. The wife, quoting Seneca’s guide for men to lead an honorable life, tells her husband that he should not look down on anyone’s ignorance and that he could be a distinguished speaker and should be tolerant in listening to others seriously. She then begins a litany of advice: do not be harsh; be cheerful, do not be contemptuous; be greedy for wisdom and quick teachings; be without 18

Seneca, Controversiae, The Classic Pages/Latin Texts (2019), II.13, 12. Albertano of Brescia, Albertani Brixiensis Liber consolationis et consilii: Ex Quo Hausta Est Fabula Gallica (1873) (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2010). The references are from this edition, being cited in their respective chapters only. They can be checked in Thor Sundby, ed., Albertani Brixiensis Liber consolationis et consilii, Chaucer Society, 2nd ser. viii (London, 1973). 20 Seneca, De beneficiis, trans. Aubrey Stuart (London: George Bell and Sons, 1887), IV, 38, I. 19

204

Chapter Seven

arrogance; communicate what one knows to someone who asks; and kindly ask for what one does not know, without suggesting ignorance. Albertano identifies the source of this advice in Martinus Dumiensis’ Formula honestae vitae (Honest Life Formula).21 The wife goes on to say that there is a large number of good women, as demonstrated by divine reason, because if no good wife were found, Jesus Christ would have refused to have been born of a woman. He would not have incarnated the womb of a virgin, as can be read in The Thrush and the Nightingale22 and Abelard’s Letter 6.23 The wife says that no one can ignore the fact that there are very blessed and good women. Moreover, even Our Lord Jesus Christ, because of the goodness of women, considered it appropriate, after the Resurrection, to show himself to women before men, because he showed himself to Mary Magdalene before the Apostles, as can be read in Letter 6 by Abelard. However, the wife continues by saying that when Solomon said that he had not found any good women, this is not an obstacle because while he had found no good woman, many did. Perhaps Solomon was looking for women, says the wife, of the highest level of excellence, because no one is perfect in every respect nor perfectly good except God, as he says in the Gospels, as can be found in Luke 18:19. Next, the wife answers the third reason why the husband should not act based on her advice and understanding because, according to him, that would give the wife supremacy and power. She says that this is foolish and, indeed, of no consideration because if she were to obtain supremacy and lordship over everyone from whom she took advice, no one would be willing to take advice from anyone else because everyone is free to choose to disregard or render attention to the given advice. Likewise, the wife says that she does not consider the husband’s fourth reason about the babbling of women knowing how to guard only what they do not know. This only refers to the worst kind of babbling and the practice of women generally said to be one of the three things that lead a man to flee the house: smoke, continually dripping water, and a bad wife. It was in reference to these things that Solomon said that it is better to live in the desert than with a quarrelsome and annoying woman, as remembered in Proverbs 21:19. However, the wife tells her husband that 21 Martini Episcopi Bracarensis, “Formula honestae vitae,” in Opera Omnia, ed. Claude W. Barlow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), chap. 3. 22 Anonymous, “The Thrush and The Nigthingale,” ed. John W. Conlee, in Middle English Debate Poetry (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1991), 237–248. 23 J. T. Muckle, “The Letter of Heloise on Religious Life and Abelard’s First Reply,” Medieval Studies 17 (1955): 255–258, 264, 268–269, 270–271.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

205

he has found none of these things in her because he has experienced the loneliest silence and a reluctance to speak. Continuing her speech, the wife goes on to argue against her husband’s fifth proposition, namely, that women overcome men through evil advice. She says that this does not apply to her because her husband does not want to follow any bad advice. If husbands wanted to follow bad advice and wives advise them on that bad advice, they would not be guilty. On the contrary, men should praise these women. The Apostle Paul said that one should not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good, as can be read in Romans 12:21. The wife goes on to say that if her husband says that women badly advise men who wish to obtain good advice and overcome them with this bad advice, this should be charged to the men who are in control of the advice, since they can reject the bad advice and choose the good. Because the same Saint Paul says that everything should be tested while holding onto what is good, as can be seen in 1 Thessalonians 5:21. Concluding this argument, the wife comments that if her husband considers it relevant, the most vicious and bad women advise foolish men. Nevertheless, she remarks that this does not apply to their present case. Chapter 5 of Liber consolationis et consilii, continuing the apology of women, shows the wife telling her husband that when he has heard all the arguments that justify women, he will understand five other reasons why women are good and especially good partners in marriage. Husbands should hear their advice, and if it seems good to be followed, it is because it is commonly said that advice from women is either overly valid or completely worthless. The wife says that she understands the “excessively valid” as the “most highly valid” because there is nothing superfluous about it, just as it is said about God’s friends that they are esteemed beyond measure, as read in Psalms 138:17. And this is certainly true, says the wife, though there are villainous women whose counsel is worthless, yet the best advice is found in many. Jacob, through the good counsel of his mother Rebekah, obtained the blessing of his father Isaac and the command of his brothers, as can be read in Genesis 27:1. Likewise, continues the wife, Judith, through her good advice, freed the city in which she lived from the hands of Holofernes, who wanted to destroy it in a siege. In addition, Abigail, by her own good advice, freed her husband Nabal from the wrath of King David, who wanted to kill him, as can be read in 1 Kings 25, where Nabal unselfishly refuses David’s command for provisions, but Abigail placates David, quickly fixing the situation by apologizing. Similarly, the wife goes on, Esther raised the Jews through her good counsel to Mordecai during the reign of Ahasuerus. The wife

206

Chapter Seven

adds that many more examples can be found of countless good women and their good advice. The wife goes on to give a second reason why good advice from women should be heeded and followed by all men of common sense. When God made man, he said that woman should be made to be his helper, and then he created Eve using a man’s rib and called her a helper since the woman must help and care for the man. With this argument, the wife says that people should call women helpers and, consequently, counselors, because without the help and advice of women, nobody would be able to tolerate life. Surely, women would be very precarious helpers given to men by God if they were obliged to seek women’s advice only as a last resort, since one can hardly exist without the other. The third reason that the wife brings in addition to the precedents is that women are better than gold and precious stones, and their understanding is sharper and surpasses other understandings. It is customary to say in verses that what is better than gold is jade; what is better than jade, understanding; what is better than understanding, the woman; what is better than women, none, reproducing here in this laudatory discourse presented by the wife a popular saying that, however, can be subverted parodically.24 Seneca, the wife continues, introduces men to consider wives affectionately above all things, saying that just as nothing is better than a good wife, nothing is more cruel than a troubled wife. Just as a wise woman risks her own life for the safety of her husband, an evil woman puts her own life ahead of her husband’s death, as is said probably in Fulgentius.25 Next, the wife refers to Cato while introducing the fifth argument in favor of women, saying that the husband should consider his wife’s language if she is honest.26 A good wife is always a good mate, as it is customary to say that a good woman is a faithful protector and her house is good.27 Because a good wife, says the wife, by doing good and obeying her husband, attracts him more so that she is able not only to consult him but also to exercise some authority over him. Thus, as is commonly said by a wise man, a married chaste woman rules by obeying her husband, and

24

Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, 122. Fulgentius, Mythologiarum, trans. Leslie George (Whitbred, OH: Ohio State University, 1971), I.27. 26 Dionysius Cato, De moribus (Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2010), III, Dist. 24. 27 Petrus Alfonsi, Disciplina clericalis, The Classic Page/Latin Texts, 15.11, 15.12, http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/alfonsi.disciplina.html. 25

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

207

the one who serves wisely has a share of power.28 Therefore, the wife says that if the husband wants to act wisely and with good counsel, if the Lord wills it, she will bring his daughter back in good health and she will arrange for him to come out of all that with honor. When Melibeus heard these words, his face lit up and he said that the eloquence was a honeycomb of sweetness, pleasing to the soul and healthy to the body, as can be read in Proverbs 16:24. In addition, the husband finishes by saying that, by the good and gentle words of his wife and through her previous experience, he had recognized her as wise, faithful, and grateful and all that, so he had changed his mind and wished to act on her advice.

Anonymous Response to Richard de Fournival’s Li Bestiaire d’Amour Richard de Fournival (1201–1260) was a surgeon and dignitary of the Church in Amiens. Among other productions of his scholarly training, one can find a curious narrative of hybrid form, unusual in its day, in which ideas and symbolic and figurative constructions about the animal world were adapted in order to direct to the beloved the feelings of an unrequited lover. The attitude of this lover is quite composite in the stylistic terms of his innovative prose, mixing several emotions and attitudes, ranging from attempts at persuasion to even aggression. Perhaps it was due to this hybrid challenge that de Fournival’s text soon received a ‘response,’ possibly written by a woman. One of the main characteristics of the rhetorical strategies of this response consists in the use of the same animal lore to offer women the advice to be on their guard against the dangerous power of the sweet speech of men. Li Bestiaire d’Amour (The Bestiary of Love) begins with an interesting rhetorical tirade stating that no one person can know everything, but what one person does not know, another does. The response to Richard de Fournival’s bestiary presents a rereading of this conclusion in a kind of parodic deconstruction by means of an irreverent and unorthodox narrative to this principle. Here is introduced someone who does not know everything of Creation in a satirical parody of the Genesis narratives, in which Adam appears as the murderer of his first partner and inferior to his second, demonstrating that this dual theory of creation was quite wellknown in the twelfth century. In this rereading of Genesis, the understanding 28

Publilius Syrus, Sententiae, ed. R. A. H. Bickford (London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1895), 93, 544.

208

Chapter Seven

that Eve is of Adam, as can be read in Genesis 2:23, is commented upon, and it is deduced that before Eve there was another woman created, like Adam, from the earth.29 The anonymous person who responded to Li Bestiaire d’Amour, produced around 1250, begins their arguments that they intend to make about the book’s misogynist contents by ironically addressing the author as “just master” and making use of the rhetorical humilitatis formula. Probably a female, she asks him not to interpret it as villainy if she adds to his intelligence. Because although she may not know everything he knows, she still knows some things he does not. Therefore, the anonymous person says that it is very useful to make her comment, as her need is so great. She confesses that she is a woman in accordance with God’s good pleasure, who does not want to make her anything less good than the author of the book does. And she says that it gives her pleasure to tell him how it happens.30 The respondent goes on to tell the author of the bestiary that God, who in his dignity and power created the whole world and first made heaven and earth and all that was established in one and the other, thereafter made man of a substance that is not very appropriate among the most appropriate of substances. In addition, of this substance, according to certain authorities, he formed such a woman who did not please the man that God had previously made. Then it came to pass that when God gave life to them, Adam killed his wife, and God asked him why he had done it, and he replied that she was nothing to him and thus he could not love her. Then Our Lord came to Adam, where he slept, and took one of his ribs, and of this rib formed Eve, from whom all men are descendants. However, some claim that if that first woman had remained, Adam would never have consented to the sin, as a result of which all men are in pain. The respondent goes on by saying that because of Adam’s great love for the woman who was made of him, he loved her in a way that became apparent because his love for her preceded the commandment of Our Lord, as can be seen in De Genesi ad litteram (On the Literal Meaning of Genesis).31

29

Jeanette Beer, trans., Master Richard’s Bestiary of Love and Response (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1986), xxxi. 30 Richard de Fournival, Master Richard’s Bestiary of Love and Response, trans. Jeanette Beer (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1986). All references to this edition are contained in pages 41–43. 31 Saint Augustine, St Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. J. H. Taylor, SJ, Ancient Christian Writers, no. 42 (New York and Ramsey, NJ: Newman Press, 1982), XI.42.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

209

Next, the respondent moves on to summarize the subject and return to what she was commenting on before. Thus, she goes on to say that since God has given man lordship over all creatures—even the woman who had been formed of a more appropriate substance than man—the Scripture makes an argument as to why God did it. However, God, who is the Lord of every man formed of whatever material was at his disposal, took from the man himself, as stated above, and made and molded for him the woman. The respondent continues in her reasoning to culminate with the flattering idea of the noble original creation of the woman, saying that she understands that just as man was molded by such a noble artisan, the substance was quite appropriate for this process. Thus, for this reason, woman was made of equal, if not better material than man. Moreover, in this sense, the respondent talks about the Lord’s greater grace in creating woman of a nobler material than man. However, the respondent says that despite this apparent situation of privileged female autonomy, women are to obey men. However, God has done nothing without reason, because it is appropriate that one thing that derives from the other should be obedient to it. Thus, women must be obedient to men, men to earth, and earth to God, because God is the Creator and Sovereign of every creature. So everyone should know that they must obey the one from whom they came, and especially God, who did everything. For this theological reason, the respondent tells Richard de Fournival that she, being a woman, owes obedience to him, he being a man, which means that she intends to put into practice what seems good to her and, if anything is missing, let it wait until it can be helpful to her or to others.

Anonymous The Southern Passion Composed in medieval English verses and incorporating remarks with a special personal flavor to expand what was orthodox in the thirteenth century about the theme of the ministry and sufferings of Christ, The Southern Passion, probably written before 1290, is a detailed narrative of the Passion of Jesus. Of its innovative and creative embodiments, one of them, perhaps the most memorable, occurs when the reviewer develops an extensive argument in favor of women from the observation, often textually recorded at the time, that the risen Christ honored them all by first appearing to one of them. Since women demonstrated conspicuous

210

Chapter Seven

loyalty to Christ in the Sacred History, this part of the crucifixion story has served as a protest against conventional misogyny. However, what seems very interesting, and was apparently surprising at the time, is the indignation at this protest that occurs in The Southern Passion, especially concerning the part of the book that deals with the misogynist double standard regarding sexual issues. However, contrary to the view that this protest is the product of independent authorial observations, this issue of sexual duplicity in the patriarchal view has analogous arguments that are present in the Church Fathers, especially in Saint Jerome, and in other works of the late Middle Ages, such as the anonymous Dives and Pauper and Christine de Pizan’s works. The anonymous author of The Southern Passion begins his narrative of the Passion of the Christ by commenting on the first time the sweet Risen Jesus appeared to a mortal person. On Easter Day, Jesus preferred to show himself to Mary Magdalene first. With this decision, he did a great honor to women, indeed to all sinful people, for she was one of them. The author says that sinners do not need to lose hope since Jesus wants to come to them just as he came to Mary Magdalene. Here, in this example, the narrator goes on to say that anyone who understands can realize that women are quite loyal when they surrender to virtue. This is contrary to the disciples that loved the Lord and his closest relatives so much: Saint James and Saint John were filled with pain, yet they left him alone in his sepulcher, while Mary Magdalene sought him out. Even after Saint Peter and Saint John had gone to the tomb, they left and let things happen. However, Mary Magdalene stood there crying, very distressed, not wanting to leave. She alone showed more love for him than any living person did, even the disciples and relatives, as stated before. In lines 1923–1952, the anonymous author says that he concludes that there is no more loyal love than that of a committed woman.32 How, then, are women so criticized in verses, sayings, and books for being false, unreliable, fickle, and bad to the detriment of many men? Ask them to explain where to find any woman who goes around asking men to lie to her while men ask women to do so all the time, using their wealth to give them silver or other gifts to satisfy their lust. He keeps asking where to find a man so firm that he would not change his tone and concede if a beautiful, attractive, charming woman were to come and ask for sex. If he did not, he would be a saint prepared to be in a chapel. The author also asks how to qualify a woman, and this includes many women, who does not give in to any amount of harassment, as can be seen every day. There 32 Anonymous, The Southern Passion, ed. Beatrice Brown, EETS, os 168 (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), ls. 1923–1952.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

211

would be no consideration on her part; she would pass unnoticed. What logic is there in this attitude, in this double standard, the author asks, and who in the world could find meaning in this?33 However, if a woman is found to have deviated even once, she will be guilty at least a thousand times more than a man. Even more, if a woman gets a bad reputation, even if it is contrary to the facts, any man will be reluctant to marry her, as can be seen all the time. However, consider a man who has slept with a hundred women and may be the most evil villain on earth; it will not be long before a wife is found for him, no matter if he is a warrior, baron, or something else if he is rich. The girl can be absolutely virginal and innocent, and her husband as corrupt as he wants. There is no logic to that, adds the narrator, describing it as debauchery, perversity, and outrageous promiscuity. In the passage between lines 1953 and 1972, the author asks if it is so bad to be promiscuous, as the Bible and the Lord say. Who is then to blame: the one who instigates this, or the one who does not do it but suffers from what is done? Following this reasoning, the author says that it is man who instigates promiscuity and whoever says otherwise is wrong and lying. In commenting on the activity of the wanton man, the author seems to fall into the “active-passive” categorization of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologiae34 and of Aristotle in Generation of Animals35 in addressing the issue of natural gender relations. The nature of all other animals, the author of The Southern Passion continues, will teach the truth, namely, that the goodness and chastity of women exceeds that of men, so it is not fair to criticize them. Among all sorts of animals, the females remain quiet, not aroused, as if sex did not exist, except when their season is approaching. In fact, some of the females are sexually inactive all year long, or even for two years, unless they are placed in lush surroundings. Males do not behave the same way, at least many of them, because if they have a chance, they are always ready for sex, whether in summer or winter, and when they can meet their 33

Oliver S. Pickering, “The Southern Passion and the Ministry and Passion. The Work of a Middle English Reviser,” Leeds Studies in English 15 (1984), 24–56; Oliver S. Pickering, “The ‘Defense of Women’ from The Southern Passion: A New Edition,” in The South English Legendary: A Critical Assessment, ed. Klaus P. Jankovsky (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1992). 34 Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, xiii. Gen. ed. Thomas Gilby, OP, 60 vols, trans. Edmund Hill OP and R. J. Batten (London: Blackfriars, in conjunction with Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1963, 1975), 1a. 92, article 1. 35 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 729b.

212

Chapter Seven

mate, very few of them are quiet. In addition, if they smell mating in the distance away from the city, they will soon be there, doing the act so sinfully that one cannot think. Next, the author suggests that clowns can learn a lesson from this and drown out their malicious speech. When they are having fun on the bar stool with a jar, a glass, and a waiter to serve, then their conversation and their fun is to judge some innocent girl. God let them drown in a beer keg for that, affirms the author. Then he asks why these men do not think of other animals and see that the nature of women is chaster than theirs. He says that these liars sitting with their friends commit slander against women. And then he goes on to explain how, if a cleric or priest stupidly committed a robbery or villainy, then each one of the rascals, with a little slander, tells of seeing what those clerics did, saying that the disgusting clerics, who are all the same, should be shredded to the last of them. Thus, if men come across a cleric who has done wrong, each clown will say that this is characteristic of all clerics. The author says that it is simply malicious and silly gossip to generalize about everyone based on the guilt of one man who did wrong. In lines 1973–1978, the author adds that women are typified and charged by malicious language. When a man listens, which is rare, and hears that a woman has gone astray, no doubt due to the importunity of some wanton, since few would do otherwise, then a number of rascals will speak of the women’s filth, saying that if anyone has seen that woman who seduced that boy, they should believe that this is characteristic of every woman. Asking what she did in the face of this, how she behaved, he concludes that it is evident what every woman is, that she should not be believed, because all women are false and evil. Therefore, when a worthless man accuses a woman, though it is not rare to happen or it is a lie, all men will criticize all women, including the good ones, and say that they all act fallibly. However, what is the point in criticizing an innocent majority who seldom makes a single mistake? This objection to generalization, about which the author is outraged, is expressively discussed in Abertano of Brescia’s Liber consolationis et consilii36 and Ovid’s Ars amatoria (The Art of Love),37 among others. In the passage between lines 1979–1982, the author continues his reflection on the prejudice of generalized guilt, asking why someone who does wrong does not receive blame individually but rather inflicts guilt on 36

Albertano of Brescia, Albertani Brixiensis Liber consolationis et consilii, ed. Thor Sundby, Chaucer Society, 2nd ser. viii (London, 1973). 37 Ovid. “Ars amatoria,” in Ovid: The Erotic Poems, trans. P. Green (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), III.9–43.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

213

all. However, for Christ’s sake, says the author, those who have any sense should not blame the innocent without reason. For if every time one errs and is accused, it will not take long to say that every man should be hanged. If one man is a vampire, that does not mean everyone is. Because if a man were hanged and quartered for theft, and it is proposed that the same treatment be applied to everyone else, that would surely be considered illegal. One should think of others what one should want others to think of him. If a woman is harassed by a wanton misstep, do not apply false logic by claiming that all women do so and that they all deserve misfortune. A woman’s mistake should not cause any other person to be blamed because each one is to carry her own blame, because no one would want to be convicted if she was innocent. Finally, in lines 1983 and following, the author examines such arguments from the theological perspective by saying that when all this is said, God may cast shame upon all who incriminate a good woman without reason, because there is no greater gentleness and kindness in earthly creatures, nor greater kindness and loyalty than in a good woman. Mary Magdalene alone sought the Lord when all the Apostles who were with him abandoned him. Which love was more obvious, hers or theirs, asks the author of The Southern Passion. Then he asks that a lie not be told when one is asked who had been more constant than the blessed Mary Magdalene and finally purposefully reiterates the previously posed question of where one could find such a steady and steadfast man in order to destroy the common claim that all women, unlike men, are fickle and unstable.

John Gower The project of John Gower (1325–1408) was rather great. Between 1386 and 1390, he wrote Confessio amantis (A Lover’s Confession), an English poem comprising eight books that had a huge initial purpose in intending to present a grand scenario that would be sympathetic in a twofold direction. One of these directions was to build a setting to honor the traditional courtly treatment of the unrequited expression of love. The other was to construct a room to shelter reflections of rational and moral discipline in the cultivation of this kind of feeling. Thus, a presumptive narrator named Lover (Amans) is painfully convinced that he is a helpless victim of his own love for a lady whose mild indifference makes his obsessive attentions laughable. At one point in the poem, the Lover’s Confessor explains to him that each person is a kingdom in miniature and that it is the individual’s task not to mismanage this kingdom.

214

Chapter Seven

Thus, both literally and metaphorically, the infatuated Lover is the victim of his own assent only. This emphasis on personal responsibility from the outset reveals an abolition of the alleged guilt of men’s moral bankruptcy, credited to women by traditional misogynist literature. On the other hand, as a counter-effect, it is somewhat clear from the poem that an infatuated man no longer compromises his masculinity to the extent that he feminizes himself. The passage below occurs during the Confessor’s analysis of the so-called Five Points of Policing that Aristotle supposedly taught to his young disciple Alexander, later the Great.

Confessio amantis The Confessor, thus presenting these Aristotelian Five Points of Policing, says that the fifth element of government is chastity, which very rarely appears anywhere these days.38 Still, he says, there is no one who can be completely chaste without an exceptional dispensation of grace. However, because of the elevated position of an anointed and consecrated king as head of secular power, by virtue of the dignity of his crown, he should be more reserved than one of a humbler stratum who is not of noble descent. Thus, a prince must stop and think before falling into debauchery and be especially careful of that passion that transforms the quality of his masculinity into femininity,39 as can be seen in Etymologiae by Saint Isidore of Seville.40 In lines 4257–4291, the narrator of the analysis of the Points taught by Aristotle comments that he read, as the philosopher told Alexander, that his spirit would rise if he looked into the faces of beautiful women. However, he also gave him a guideline in saying that he should control his body, not exceed the limits of behavior to make himself a disappointment. He goes on to say there is no disappointment on the part of the women when men are disconcerting themselves if they disappoint in their own abilities. Any man who allows his mind to fix on the image that his imagination has foolishly made of women is blowing the flames within

38

John Gower, “A Lover’s Confession,” in The English Works of John Gower, 2 vols., ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS, ES 81. ii, 81 and 82 (London: Oxford University Press, 1900), 354–355. 39 Mahmoud A. Manzalaoui, ed., Secretum secretorum, i, EETS, os 276 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 135. 40 Saint Isidore of Seville, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi: Etymologiarum sive Originum libri xx, 2 vols., ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), XI.ii.23.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

215

himself, and since the woman knows nothing of it, blame should not fall upon her. If a man urges himself to drown and does not contain himself, it is not the fault of the water. Gold can do nothing, although people crave it. If a man wants the frolic of love, the woman has not forced him; if he hurts his own heart, she cannot prevent this folly; and even if he happens to be friends with her, it is still the man who sought it first. The woman withdraws and he pursues, so it is rational that, whatever happens, it is the man who must take the responsibility for falling when it is difficult to get up again. In lines 4292–4300, the narrator goes on to say that many intelligent men have done foolishness similar to that of the Lover because, as has always been and still is the case with men today, in this love situation, the strongest is the weakest. The mode of nature makes love appropriate to man, but it is not natural for man to lose his skills for love. If July freezes and December is hot, one knows the year is out of control. Seeing a man lose his status because of his feminine enthusiasm, abandoning what a man should do, is like seeing his socks out of his shoes, an aberration for any man, remembering here, regarding this feminization, the story of Sardanapalus, in which it is shown that the tendency toward the feminine is antithetically opposed to military leadership and cavalry.

Anonymous Dives and Pauper A brilliant exposition of the Ten Commandments of God’s Law, focusing on its thematic content, is found in Dives and Pauper (1405–1410). The narrative presenting the subject is conducted in the form of a dialogue, a much-preferred genre in the Middle Ages for the debate of reasons of knowledge or for questioning ideological contents. Dives and Pauper’s dialogue, considered by the permissiveness of the time, safeguards the intention of apologizing to women as one of the possible confrontations to the misogynist medieval literary hegemony. In the dialogue, a rich person (Dives), who seems to represent a layman concerned with the things of the world, talks to a poor man (Pauper). Pauper is a quite curious clerical voice. He seems to embrace orthodox doctrinal traces of the Christian faith with some radicalism while, at the same time, defending women. This is what happens, for example, with some Patristic prescriptions about the well-known double standard of the husband as practiced in marital relationships. This is the case with the VI Commandment discussed by Saint Augustine in De decem chordis (The Ten Strings), which is about

216

Chapter Seven

the Ten Commandments. Here, he criticizes the husbands who refuse to adopt the patterns of sexual restrictions that they demand from their wives.41 Nevertheless, the association between this severe line of traditional thinking and an apparent defense of women is already quite visible in some earlier texts, such as in The Southern Passion, as discussed before in this book. However, Pauper develops this connection and the defense of women in a degree of quiet commitment, even though he is still ready to support the concept of male supremacy as natural and divine ordination, which surprises his interlocutor Dives. The excerpt selected to exemplify this problem begins with the discussion in which Pauper mentions the creation of Adam and Eve, originally regarded as a theological paradigm of marriage. Concerning the VI Commandment in Chapter 4 of the book, Dives asks why God made a woman from Adam’s rib, not from another bone. To this, Pauper replies that it was so made because the rib is closer to the heart, meaning that God did so for the woman to be a man’s companion in love and his helper. Just as the rib is the closest bone to the heart, so the wife should be closer in love to her husband than to all other women and men. God did not make woman from the foot, meaning servitude to man, or the head, so as to be superior to him, but from his side and his rib, to be his companion in love and his helper in difficulty. Dives and Pauper here offers a comprehensive explanation for the time, also found, for example, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale and Sermon 66 from Sermones vulgares by Jacques de Vitry. It can even be said that such pro-woman reasoning can be found in Hugh of Saint Victor’s De sacramentis (On Sacraments), familiar with the Sentences of Peter Lombard. However, when Eve sinned, the woman was subjected to the man, so the wife would then be regulated by her husband and be afraid of him and would serve him as a companion in love, an aide in difficulty, and an intimate comfort in anguish. Not as a dominated slave and servant, because a husband must respect and esteem his wife since they are both of the same flesh and blood.42 After Pauper sensitively defends this gender parity by rescuing the woman from her damned biblical inferiority, Dives asks why God did not 41

C. T. Huegelmeyer, trans., “Adulterous Marriages,” in Saint Augustine: Treatises on Marriage, trans. C. T. Wilcox et al., FOC, ccvii (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1955), 108–109. 42 Anonymous, Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscila Barnum, I, part 2, EETS, 280 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). The references are to this edition, being cited only the chapter where they are between pages 66–72 and 80–83.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

217

also make the woman from the earth like Adam. To this, Pauper replies that the explanation for this was to increase the love of both and to give the woman a basis of humility. This increased the love of both because since woman is part of man’s body, he must love her as his own flesh and blood, and she must love man as her origin and her flesh and blood. More than that, she must have considerable grounds for humility, thinking greatly about how man is her perfection and her origin. She should respect man as her own perfection, the principal, and the origin that preceded her in the order of creation, as noted in Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae.43 God made all humanity from one person, since he wanted all humankind to be united in charity precisely because they all came from one. Next, Dives and Pauper completes its apology of women by addressing adultery in both sexes. Dives, in Chapter 5 of the book, asks if adultery is a greater sin in men than in women. To this, Pauper replies that adultery is more sinful in men than in women because the higher one’s position, the more serious sin is. By nature, men have more strength and greater intelligence and reason to stand and be alert against the cunning of the devil. Moreover, because man was made the master and guardian of the woman to direct her in virtue and to protect her from vice, if he falls into vices and adultery, he is guiltier than the woman and deserves to be reprimanded reproachfully. Hence, Saint Augustine in De decem chordis disapproved of husbands who fell into adultery, telling each of them that God had commanded them not to commit lust, that is, to have sex with no wives but their own, and to ask wives not to have sex with anyone but them, their husbands. However, Saint Augustine says that husbands are unwilling to observe the same prohibition. Moreover, where husbands must be ahead in terms of virtue, they collapse into lust. The saint tells the husbands that they want their wives to overthrow lust and the devil but that they themselves are willing for their conquest as cowards, prostrated in lust. Although they are the head of the wife, as is read in Ephesians 5:23, the wife comes to God before them and the head falls back into hell. Pauper says that complaints are often made against men’s lust, and yet wives dare not point out the faults of their husbands. Male lust is so blatant and habitual that it has now reached the point that men tell their wives that lust and adultery are legitimate for men but not for women. This is what Saint Augustine says, says Pauper. Dives, in turn, comments that sometimes one hears of wives caught in the act with their servants and are brought to trial with great disgrace. However, husbands are not frequently brought to trial for sleeping with 43

Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, xiii, 1963, 1a. 92, article 1.

218

Chapter Seven

one of their servants. Pauper replies that even Saint Augustine says in the same book that it is as much a sin for the husband as for the wife; in fact, it is greater in his case. However, Saint Augustine says it is not God but Evil that considers men less guilty than women for the same sin. Men are less caught up in and punished for adultery than women, not because they are less guilty but because they are guiltier, bolder, and more knowledgeable in presenting their sins, while virtually all of them support each other. Men are witnesses, judges, and enforcers of the punishment against adultery in women. Because they are deeply guilty, they are unanimous in their efforts to support their promiscuity. Since adultery is rarely seen in women, it attracts more notoriety and severe punishment when it occurs among them. However, adultery is so commonplace among men that it is unlikely to cause misfortune. Here, Saint Augustine would pale if wives were to imitate their husbands in protesting that adultery with a servant was an insignificant thing. Pauper continues his reflections on the asymmetry of moral judgment between husbands and wives, saying that it is better for a wife to suffer anguish over her husband’s sin than to emulate his bad examples. Thinking in this way, Pauper says that the wife is chaste, a truly devout Christian, and that she is distressed by her husband’s lust, more for his lack of charity than for material reasons. She wanted him to do nothing wrong, not because she does not err, but because it is not beneficial to her husband. Next is remembered the compassionate and redemptive question that Christ comforts and encourages the wife to be patient, to follow not “the head” that is her earthly husband, but her spiritual husband, Christ, “the head” of the Church. Continuing in his Augustinian preaching, Pauper says that the saint commands lewd men to change their ways and that henceforth they are chaste. Moreover, men do not say that they are unable to remain chaste because it is a disgrace to say that a man cannot do what a woman does or be as chaste as a woman. The woman herself has weak flesh, like a man’s, and the serpent deceived her, but chaste wives show husbands that they too can be chaste if they are. In Chapter 6 of the book, Pauper argues that women’s strictest chastity does not come from being closely watched, as Dives supposes, but because of their fear of God and their concern for decent behavior, for not shaming their husbands. Men receive greater freedom from God and, therefore, greater responsibility, but they betray that confidence with their promiscuity. Pauper goes on to say that Saint Augustine comments that men are not ashamed of their sin because many commit it. The wickedness of men is

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

219

now such that they are more ashamed of chastity than of lust. Murderers, thieves, perjurers, false witnesses, marauders, and fraudsters are generally loathed and hated by people. However, the one who sleeps with his servant in blatant lust is liked and admired for it, and people make light of his damage. Pauper continues in the words of Saint Augustine, saying that if any man dares to say that he is chaste and loyal to his wife and that this is known, he is ashamed to mingle with other men whose behavior is not as his because these men would enjoy and undo him and say that he is not a real man because the wickedness of men today is such that no one is considered to be a man if not taken by lust. In contrast, that man who overcomes lust and remains chaste is considered less of a man. Hearing this Augustinian reasoning, Dives replies that he is astonished that the saint and Pauper also accuse the man of lust as much as the woman and blame the man more than the woman. Pauper answers that Christ did the same. The biblical story of the woman caught in adultery implies that Christ found men who accused her more guilty of sexual sin than her. This attitude of Christ leads to discussions of various legal issues that are motivated by adultery and fornication among unmarried people. Chapter 10 of Dives and Pauper treats the traditional misogynist tópos of women as a trap. In it, Dives says that reason and the Holy Scripture lead him to agree that both adultery and fornication among unmarried people are serious sins. However, adultery is less serious, and he would like to guard against these sins. However, women, he goes on, are the Devil’s traps, tempting men toward lust, such that it is complicated for men to keep on their guard. Next, Dives quotes a Latin verse that says that women deceived Adam, Samson, Peter, David, and Solomon and asks who can thus be safe from a woman’s mistake. Next, in the same chapter, Pauper presents his considerations on the subject by saying that many men have been deceived by women, more through their madness than by their deception. However, many more women have been maliciously deceived by men than men deceived by women. Surely, the lewd woman is called the Devil’s trap, which haunts a man’s soul because Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 7:27 that he found the woman more bitter than death. Women are the hunter’s trap, their hearts are the nets, and their hands are the very tight ropes. Solomon, quoted by Pauper, goes on to say that he who pleases God must escape from women, but they will seize the sinful men. However, Pauper says that men are called the Devil’s trap and his open net is set on Mount Tabor to catch many at once (Hosea 5:11). Men’s malice is called a fine net opened on this high hill because it is blatantly committed, not by a few but by many. Then, when the Holy Scripture disapproves of the malice of men, it speaks

220

Chapter Seven

in the plural, addressing many. However, when it censors the malice of women, it speaks in the singular, indicating a few, showing that there are more bad men than women and generally more malice among men than among women, although some women are quite malicious. Violence, theft, murder, uncovered lust, gluttony, deception, falsehood, perjury, betrayal, fraud, and other disgusting sins dominate men more than women. Pauper continues by saying that this fraudulent excuse, with which men blame their sins because of women’s malice, began with Adam and made him and all humankind lost. When God rebuked the man, he sinfully blamed his sin on the woman. He also blamed God for making the woman when he arrogantly answered, as men still do, that the woman that God had given him to be his mate had given him fruit from the tree and that he ate of it (Genesis 3:12), meaning that if God had not given her to be his company, he would not have sinned. Therefore, even if his fault was greater than that of the woman, he would not recognize it but attribute it instead to the woman and especially to God, who had made her. Dives asks how Adam’s lack was greater than Eve’s, and Pauper replies that it was so because it was primarily to him that God gave the command that he should not eat from that tree, and Eve knew it only through Adam. The woman was noticeably tempted by the serpent-shaped demon who moved to her feet and had a woman’s face, according to Bede and Peter Comestor. Eve was deceived with beautiful promises and the Devil’s cleverness because he promised that they would not die but would be like gods, with knowledge of good and evil. Adam had no outward temptation, only the artless words of his wife, who offered him the apple. It is not found that she spoke any misleading words to him, Pauper concludes. Pauper continues in his argument in defense of women by saying that man was forbidden by God’s own mouth, and she only by man’s. Since man had less temptation but would not accuse himself or admit his guilt, but would rather blame woman and God, he sinned more than woman did. It was like this because woman admitted her guilt and asked no mercy. Making no excuse, she completely admitted her fault by saying that the serpent had deceived her, as can be read in Genesis 3:15. In De Paradiso (On Paradise), Saint Ambrose points out that Eve admitted her guilt.44 Thus, Eve recognized that she had been deceived, had done wrong, and had been without wisdom, contrary to what she should have done. Because woman humbled herself and acknowledged her lack of wisdom and folly, 44

Saint Ambrose, “Paradise,” in Ambrose, Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, trans. J. J. Savage, FOC, xlii (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1961), IV.71, 349.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

221

God at that juncture placed hope for our salvation in the woman when he told the serpent that he would put enmity between her and the woman, and between the woman’s seed and hers, and that the woman would crush the head of the serpent, as can be read in Genesis 3:15. It is interesting to suppose that the seeds of the woman are her good deeds and even the origin of Christ. However, Adam was smarter than Eve and would not have believed the stories of the devil, as Saint Augustine puts it in De Genesi ad litteram.45 However, though smarter, he sinned and deceived himself more with a vanity no less than Eve’s. That Adam’s sin exceeds that of Eve’s is confirmed by Saint Paul when he says that all men must die for Adam’s sin. To this, Dives replies in Chapter 11 of the book that Pauper’s words are remarkable and that he will not disagree with him for fear of Our Lady, mother and virgin, who has brought grace and can help humanity in every need. Dives reiterates, as he had said before, that it was a woman who deceived Samson, who was so strong. Pauper replies that the woman did not deceive Samson until he deceived himself by his lust and failure to govern himself. First, he married a heathen for sinful lust and love, against God’s law and the will of his parents, as can be read in Judges 14–15. Then he slept with a heathen whore, as is said in Judges 16:1. He took another whore named Delilah as his mistress, and she deceived him and sentenced him to death. He had been disloyal to God, and women were unfaithful to him. Women said he was foolishly enthusiastic about them, so they treated him like a fool. He deceived himself and behaved without wisdom when he allowed a woman to bind him between his enemies and when he told her his secret, how his enemies could harm him. Although God created Samson’s deeds to honor himself and his law, Samson was not excused for his actions because he was very wrong and very stupid, as can be read in Judges 16:4–31. Pauper continues his discourse about men’s impropriety, and to lighten the burden of women’s guilt and condemnation, he cites the case of David, who had been deceived by his sinful lust, not by the woman Bathsheba, though Dives defended the opposite. It should be noted here that the figure of Bathsheba is emblematic as a motive for misogynist or anti-misogynist disputes, proving that the same subject could be rhetorically manipulated according to the political interests of men for the framing of women. In the first case, the position of the anonymously authored Ancrene Riwle (Rule 45

Saint Augustine, St Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. J. H. Taylor, SJ, Ancient Christian Writers, no. 42, (New York e Ramsey, NJ: Newman Press, 1982), XI.42.

222

Chapter Seven

for the Anchoresses)46 and Walter Map in Dissuasio valerii ad rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat (The Letter of Valerius to Rufinus, against Marriage)47 can be mentioned. Pauper says that it can read from the Holy Scripture in 2 Kings 11:2– 17 that one day, when King David rose from his afternoon sleep and was strolling upstairs in his palace, he saw a beautiful woman washing herself upstairs. He did not know the woman, nor did she know of him or know anything of his sinful desire, as the Bible clearly states. Soon he sent messengers to this woman, and when she came to his palace, he slept with her and got her pregnant. As soon as he found out she was pregnant, in order to hide her sin, David sent a message to her husband Uriah to return home and naturally have sex with her so that the child would be identified as the husband’s son. However, Uriah was a good warrior who would not allow himself the pleasure of sex while God’s army was on the battlefield besieging a city called Rabat. Then David sent another letter to Joab, the commander of the army, and betrayed Uriah, causing his death. David, it can be seen, was taken entirely by lust and deceived by the Devil before the woman came to him. As Christ says in the Gospel, whoever looks at a woman and wants to sin with her immediately commits lust and transgresses the commandment not to commit adultery, as can be seen in Matthew 5:28. David looked at that woman and desired to commit lust while she had no evil thoughts. He sent for her as if she were his vassal, and she did not know why. When she came to him, as he was her king, he slept with her sinfully, so it was very difficult for her to prevent him. As for Solomon’s initiative to take pagan concubines, Pauper says that was his decision, and while women were stable in their faith, he was unstable in his. Pauper comments that lewd men walk and ride from town to town to grab women for their pleasure. They go after women, and it is not women who go looking for them. They devise all sorts of tricks to seek women’s consent to sin. Men usually take the initiative to instigate lust, and so, whether or not women consent, men are the ones who are guilty. It often happens that when a man thinks he has the consent of a woman, she will not do so for fear of God. She may regret it and turn away from the bad man’s company. Then this lewd man will slander all women and say that they are false and deceptive because they who cannot satisfy their dirty 46 Anonymous, Ancrene Riwle, trans. M. B. Salu (London: Burns & Oates, 1955), II.23–25. 47 Walter Map, “The Letter of Valerius to Rufinus, against Marriage,” in De Nugis Curialium, Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. M. R. James, rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 287–313.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

223

appetites with women at hand are lustful, and so he makes the most vile accusations of them. Since, Pauper continues, they cannot destroy women with their bodies, they destroy them with their tongues, making evil innuendoes, defaming them, and doing them as much harm as they can. This fact can be seen in Susanna’s story, in which two old governors tried to compromise her when she resisted their harassment, as can be read in Daniel 13:1–64. In Chapter 12, Dives says that, despite everything, many women will still readily consent to sexual procedures. To this, Pauper replies that all this is true, but women are not as ready in consenting as men are to harass and that the one who harasses and takes the initiative is the first to consent and makes the most mistakes. Dives then says that Pauper is absolving women and accusing men, to which Pauper replies that he does not accuse the good men, only the evil, lascivious ones. Nor does he acquit any evil women, only the good ones slanderously accused of lust, and even then not individually but in the generality of their sex. For men, in their arrogant malice, irrationally defame females, and, as Adam did, they attribute their sins to women and would not blame their malice for forgiveness. Dives comments, then, that Solomon said a great deal about the evil of women, and Pauper adds that he also spoke much about the good of women. A small battle of quotations then takes place in the book, culminating when Dives paraphrases Ecclesiasticus 19:2. Thus, he says that wine and women make the intelligent man forsake God’s law and err. Pauper replies that the deficiency is not in the wine and very often not in the woman. The fault lies in those who do not make the right use of God’s wine, woman, or any other creation. Even if one gets drunk on wine and through such greed falls into lust, the culprit is not wine but the person who was unable or unwilling to discipline himself. Moreover, even if a man looks at a woman and becomes caught up in her beauty and consents to sin, the woman is not guilty, nor should her God-given beauty be belittled. On the contrary, this man is guilty of not keeping his heart clean of evil thoughts. Where men should praise God, they have bad intentions and offend God by misusing his beautiful creation. If a man is tempted by the sight of a woman, he should control his gaze better. And if she flirts and stirs up lust, the man must escape flirtation; if the man knows she is hungry for sex, escape from her company because going out is the best way to combat lust. Pauper here is reproducing an idea of Ovid commented on by Marbod of Rennes in De meretrice (Marbodus Redonensis Episcopus).48 Man is free to flee from 48

Marbodus Redonensis Episcopus, “De meretrice,” col. 1699, 71–80.

224

Chapter Seven

the lewd woman who does not embarrass him to commit lust more than a lustful heart that is his. Dives then criticizes the provocatively dressed women, and Pauper says that this should be rebuked in both sexes, but he modifies the effect of the biblical authorities on the subject by recontextualizing them. Thus, in Chapter 13 of the book, Pauper quotes 1 Timothy 2:9–10, where Saint Paul commands women to dress in respectable clothing, modestly and soberly, not to braid their hair elaborately or to wear gold, silver, or pearls or extravagantly expensive stuff. He says that Saint Peter comments on the same subject in 1 Peter 3:3–5, in which he commands husbands to respect their wives and keep them with honor. To that, Dives replies that women today dress very contrary to what Saint Peter and Saint Paul teach, so it seems that they sin more seriously. Pauper replies that the saints did not generally forbid dressing. They forbade women to dress vainly, as if to invite people to lust, or to wear a style of dress exceeding their status, recalling here the norm that dress in the Middle Ages was governed by people’s statuses in their respective bylaws. Following this, Pauper gives the example of Saint Cecilia and many other devout women who dressed in gold fabrics and fine pearls but wore hair shirts under this grand costume. Further, Saint Peter and Saint Paul made these recommendations, especially concerning prayer, for times such as Easter, fasting days, days of prayer, Fridays, vigils, and times of crisis, when public processions are held. At such times, men and women should abandon all ostentation and display in clothing because, as the Bible recommends, displayed clothing gets nothing from God and makes people make bad judgments, especially if the clothing goes beyond respectability. Saint Paul’s main intention, when he says those words, is to inform men and women about the prayer, to whom they should pray, why, when, and where, and he instructs them to pray humbly, without dressing elaborately in ostentatious clothes. Next, the issue of gender credibility is addressed in Dives and Pauper. Dives says that men, preceding women in the natural order of things, are firmer, more stable in their positions, stronger, and more discreet than women, and they should be more virtuous and steadfast in good deeds than them. He then considers how women often have to keep their chastity more than men do and are firmer in good deeds than them. Pauper replies that, by nature, men are firmer than women are and have more discretion than they do, but by grace, women are far more stable in good deeds and in goodness than men. Dives asks why, and Pauper says that it is because men are so self-confident and do not place equal credit in God. Women, knowing their weakness, do not put faith in themselves but only in God,

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

225

committing themselves to God more than men; they are more afraid of offending God than men are.

Summary Having mentioned here that many medieval misogynists somehow defended what they defamed, one may wonder what existed during the hegemony of this medieval anthropocentric literature in terms of prowoman or antimisogynist writings. As a matter of fact, but in a timid and circumstantial way, in the time of the Church Fathers, one can note the existence of certain praiseworthy or panegyric writings on the woman of male authorship. Such laudatory literature, quite suspicious for its biased doctrinal content of interest focused on the androcentric ideological order, commented thematically on three types of perfection encouraged as achievable by women, namely, the faithfulness of the wife’s life, chaste widowhood, and virginity. The virtue of chastity was singular among others. It was often considered as the doctrinal commitment of the founding fathers of the early Christian Church. It appeared with significant prominence in catalogs of the Scripture heroines, in Saint Jerome and Saint Ambrose, as the primordial virtue of Christianity, revered with the highest esteem and admiration. Exemplar models for the praise of female virginity can be found in the Vitae of the holy martyrs of the Church. Virgins, like the pioneer Saint Catherine of Alexandria, martyred in 307, defended their chastity with decency and fortitude, transcending the moral weakness of their sex.49 Of course, given the excellence of her precedence in the list of virgins, the Virgin Mary was the perfect model to follow because the indefectible perfection of her image defeated her misogynist adversaries with the mere mention of her name, as happens, for example, in The Thrush and the Nightingale. However, one can see an irony, perhaps deliberately constructed with discrimination and prejudice, in this special respect of the medieval misogynists for the Virgin. This irony could be because the Virgin Mary’s model constituted a truly utopian reference. Although her birth made her unique among all women of her kind, she still served as the supreme model for mere mortal virgins if the requirement of moralization about chastity exceeded the examples that Sarah, Rebekah, Esther, Judith, Anna, Naomi, and many others could give. On the other hand, the irony of considering the Virgin as a model echoes, besides the reasons mentioned, the fact that this model works as a penitential incrimination because Saint 49

Elizabeth Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1979).

226

Chapter Seven

Mary’s points of description, in a kind of side effect, served to underline the flaws of the normal women while the Virgin completely exempted herself from these failures. In tune with this problem, Saint Ambrose’s description of the sublime beatitude and holiness of the Virgin Mary in his treatise on virgins is striking. It is a commentary, of course, to humiliate and downgrade any women of the time, daughters of mere mortals on the trail of failures and imperfections of a decadent life of sin. However, Saint Ambrose described the Virgin Mary as untouchable by guilt, frugal in speech, and without envy from her companions. Also, he says that there was nothing biased in his words and nothing strange in her actions. There was no frivolous movement in her, no undecided step, nor was her voice petulant.50 Given the context in which these remarks were written, it is to be believed that the invocation of the Virgin’s example intended to remind the reader to remember the flaws suggested as prevalent in the females. Thus, the defense of Saint Ambrose’s virgins can be argued as fallacious in the sense that they tried to defend women by denying the grounds for their accusation in a utopian realm of virginal excellence, as in the case of the Virgin’s example. Reflections of this kind about women, centered on men’s views, were not infrequent in the Middle Ages. However, and from a political perspective, this question in the Middle Ages of the virginity and celibacy of devout and spiritualized women constituted, for the androcentric view of the period, a kind of solution guaranteeing the mental and spiritual tranquility of men. Little is known, and what is known is inconsistent, about the issue from women’s point of view, who often preferred to remain virgins so as not to suffer the abuses, hardships, and pains of marriage. In any case, whether virgin or married, women were always accessories to the dispositions of men, victims of their detracting and discriminatory comments, negating them a place of speech. Often, the very praise given to them was the foundation of an opposing and contradictory view, concerned with conceptualizing them as bad by nature.51 Even in the instances and occasions in which the defense of women occurred in medieval literature, there seems to have existed a taste for repeating misogynist dogmas, as if it wanted to recall concerns about women inherent in institutions established by traditional cultural values. 50 Saint Ambrose, “On Virgins,” in The Principal Works of St Ambrose, trans. H. de Romestin, Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Oxford: Parker & Co.; New York: Christian Literature Co., 1896), II.7, 374–375. 51 Sheila Delany, Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 159.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

227

Ultimately, this procedure consisted of justifying the female figure within the parameters traditionally set by masculine cultures, perhaps the main one of them being the ad aeternum subordination of the feminine. A fundamental example of ancestry and historicity centralizing this question is the tópos of Adam’s rib. Notwithstanding this real litany of denigrating women, supporters of the supposedly weak sex, considering the biblical stance of Eve as secondary in Creation, elaborated the completely ironic rhetoric of the superiority of Adam’s rib. It was from this bone that Eve was formed in contrast to the dust of the earth that initially served God to create the first man. Thus, Eve’s position of parity with Adam resulted in the understanding that women should accompany their husbands side-by-side, not serve them as slaves thrown at their feet. In the medieval religious context dominated by the pronouncements and assumptions of the Judeo-Christian tradition, women’s defenders often used the same arguments of discriminatory superiority devised by men to hold them accountable in many of their acts and behavior. If males were more active and females more passive, such advocators, in response to misogynist attitudes and following scholastic Aristotelian precepts, understood that men were guiltier in moral matters than women since man was created first and, therefore, was more necessary and perfect. This is a classic example of the popular saying “the shot backfired,” ironically explained by the counter-effect of the misogynist discourse, which was notably of a sophist and contradictory nature. One of these mischievous assumptions, cynically ironic, referred to the already mentioned natural weakness of women, whose condition of frailty was almost always accepted without contestation. However, this acceptance was one of the misogynist strategies to encourage female fortitude, which would be cynically applauded for revealing itself as satisfying men’s expectations of women’s behavior. Perhaps it is in this way that the position of many misogynists like Marbod of Rennes can be understood, whose criterion is distinctly based on androcentric values, as meritorious for having recognized the women’s contributions to society, by which they should be honored. However, facing a voluminous wave of misogynist voices in the medieval literary tradition that enforced their barriers vigorously, a critical revision of this hegemonic complex proposed to shake its foundations in late medieval times. In this scenario, the defense of women could be overtly engendered in the feminine voice, as represented by Christine de Pizan, who, beyond controversy and debate, claimed the women’s rights of recognition and justice. De Pizan was known in her own time for her

228

Chapter Seven

fresh and vigorous power, not only against the suppression and depreciation of the female intellect and capacity but also against the validity of traditional and authoritarian concerns forged by the everlasting understanding of women as a reality of androcentric derivation.

Sources Abelard and Heloise. “Letter 6” (De Auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium). In The Letters and Other Writings, translated by William Levitan, 127–169. Indianopolis/Cambridge: 2007. Albertano of Brescia. Albertani Brixiensis Liber consolationis et consilii. Edited by Thor Sundby. London: Chaucer Society, 1973. Albertano of Brescia. Albertani Brixiensis Liber consolationis et consilii: Ex Quo Hausta Est Fabula Gallica (1873). Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010. Anonymous. Dives and Pauper. Edited by P. Barnum. EETS 280, I, part 2. London: Oxford University Press, 1980. Anonymous. The Southern Passion. Edited by Beatrice Brown. EETS 168. London: Oxford University Press, 1927. Anonymous. The Thrush and the Nightingale. Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86, ff. 136vb-138rb. Wessex Parallel Web Texts Project. http://wpwt.soton.ac.uk/digby86/thrushtxt.htm. Accessed March 10, 2021. Gower, John. “A Lover’s Confession.” In The English Works of John Gower, vol. 1, edited by G. C. Macaulay, 354–355. EETS 81–82. London: Oxford University Press, 1900. Marbod of Rennes. “De matrona.” In Liber decem capitulorum, edited by Rosario Leotta. Rome: Herder, 1984. Marbodus Redonensis Episcopus. “De matrona.” In Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Liber decem capitulorum. Series Latina. Paris: 1844–1890. http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/02m/10351123,_Marbodus_Redonensis_Episcopus,_Liber_ Decem_Capitulorum,_MLT.pdf. Accessed March 11, 2021. Muckle, Joseph T. “The Letter of Heloise on Religious Life and Aberlard’s First Reply.” Mediaeval Studies 17 (1955): 240–281. Richard de Fournival. Master Richard’s Bestiary of Love and Response. Translated by Jeanette Beer. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1986.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

229

References Agonito, Rosemary, ed. History of Ideas on Woman. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977. Allen, Sr Prudence, RSM. The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC–AD 1250. Montreal: Eden Press, 1985. Ambrose, St. “On Virgins.” In The Principal Works of St Ambrose, translated by H. de Romestin, 398–399. Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers II.7. Oxford: Parker & Co.; New York: Christian Literature Co., 1896. Ambrose, St. “Paradise.” In Ambrose. Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, translated by J. J. Savage. FOC XLII. New York: Fathers of the Church, 1961. Andreas Capellanus. Andreas Capellanus On Love. Edited and translated by P. G. Walsh. London: Duckworth, 1982. Anonymous. Ancrene Riwle. Translated by M. B. Salu. London: Burns & Oates, 1955. Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologiae, vol. XIII. Edited by Thomas Gilby, OP, translated by Edmund Hill OP and R. J. Batten. London: Blackfriars, in conjunction with Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963. Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologiae, vol. XXXIV. Edited by Thomas Gilby, translated by R. J. Benton. London: Blackfriars, in conjunction with Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1975. Aristotle. Generation of Animals. Translated by A. L. Peck. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943. https://archive.org/details/generationofanim00arisuoft/page/100/mode/ 2up. Accessed February 12, 2021. Augustine, St. St Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis, vol. 2. Translated by John Hammond. Ancient Christian Writers 42. New York: Ramsey and Newman Press, 1982. Beer, Jeanette, trans. Master Richard’s Bestiary of Love and Response. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1986. Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Corbaccio. Translated by Anthony K. Cassell. Urbana, IL and London: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by Victor Watts. London: Penguin, 1999. Cassell, Anthony K. The Corbaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1975.

230

Chapter Seven

Clark, Elizabeth. Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends. New York: Edwin Mellen, 1979. Delany, Sheila. Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Dionysius Cato. De moribus. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2010. Fulgentius. Mythologiarum. Translated by Leslie George Whitbread. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1971. The Holy Bible. Translated from the Vulgata Latina. Belfast, 1892. Huegelmeyer, C. T., trans. “Adulterous Marriages.” In Saint Augustine: Treatises on Marriage, translated by C. T. Wilcox et al., 61–132. FOC CCVII. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1955. Isidore of Seville, St. Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi: Etymologiarum sive Originum libri xx. Edited by W. M. Lindsay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Jerome, St. “Against Jovinian.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 779–907. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. Jerome, St. “Letter 22, to Eustochium.” In The Principal Works of St Jerome, edited by P. Schaff, translated by W. H. Fremantle, 100–137. Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. 6. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1892. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.pdf. Mann, Jill. Geoffrey Chaucer. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Manzalaoui, Mahmoud A. Editor Secretum secretorum. EETS 276. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Map, Walter. “The Letter of Valerius to Ruffinus, against Marriage.” In De Nugis Curialium, Courtiers’ Trifles, edited and translated by M. R. James, Rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors, 287–313. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Marbodus Redonensis Episcopus. “De meretrice.” In Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, Liber decem capitulorum. Series Latina. Paris: 1844–1890. http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/02m/10351123,_Marbodus_ Redonensis_Episcopus,_Liber_Decem_Capitulorum,_MLT.pdf. Martini Episcopi Bracarensis. “Formula honestae vitae.” In Opera Omnia, edited by Claude W. Barlow. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960.

The Praise of Women in Medieval Literature

231

Mclaughlin, Eleanor. “Les Femmes et l’hérésie médiévale: un problème dans l’histoire de la spiritualité.” Concilium 111 (1976): 73–90. Mclaughlin, Mary M. “Peter Abelard and the Dignity of Women: Twelfth Century Feminism in Theory and Practice.” In Pierre Abelard–Pierre le Vénérable: les courants philosophiques, littéraires et artistiques en occident au milieu du XIIe siècle, 287–334. Colloques Internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 546. Paris: CNRS, 1975. Muckle, Joseph T. “The Letter of Heloise on Religious Life and Aberlard’s First Reply.” Mediaeval Studies 17 (1955): 240–281. Ovid. “Ars amatoria.” In Ovid: The Erotic Poems, translated by P. Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. Ovid. Heroides, Amores, Art of Love, Cosmetics, Remedies for Love, Ibis, Walnut-tree, Sea Fishing, Consolation, Metamorphoses, Fasti, Tristia, Ex Ponto. Edited by G. P. Goold et al. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1977–1989. Petrus Alfonsi. Disciplina clericalis. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/alfonsi.disciplina.html. Pickering, Oliver S. “The ‘Defense of Women’ from The Southern Passion: A New Edition.” In The South English Legendary: A Critical Assessment, edited by Klaus P. Jankovsky. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1992. Pickering, Oliver S. “The Southern Passion and the Ministry and Passion. The Work of a Middle English Reviser.” Leeds Studies in English 15 (1984): 24–26. Pizan, Christine de. “L’Epistre au Dieu d’Amours.” In Oeuvres Poétiques de Christine de Pizan, vol. 2, edited by M. Roy, 1–27. Paris: SATF, 1891. Publilius Syrus. Sententiae. Edited by. R. A. H. Bickford. London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1895. Radice, Betty, trans. “Letter 3.” In Abelard and Heloise. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Seneca. Controversia. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/seneca.html. Seneca. De beneficiis. Translated by Aubrey Stuart. London: George Bell and Sons York Street, Convent Garden, 1887. Vitry, Jacques de. “Sermones vulgares sive ad status.” In Les Sources de l’histoire de France – Des origines aux guerres d’Italie (1494), vol. III: Les Capétiens, 1180–1328, translated by Auguste Molinier, 146– 147. Paris: A. Picard et fils, 1903.

INDEX

A Abelard, Peter vi, xii, xiii, 36, 46, 61, 63-64, 94, 102-107, 110, 117-119, 144-145, 182, 185, 191, 197-201, 204, 228, 231 see women defamed in literature: medieval legacy of Patristic literature: Peter Abelard’s Historia calamitatum (The History of His Misfortunes) see also women defended in medieval literature: Peter Abelard’s De auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium (On the Origin of Nuns) Theologia Christiana 36, 46, 64, 106 Adam 2, 4, 26, 29-30, 44-45, 75, 8688, 90-91, 93, 101, 178-179, 207-208, 216-217, 219-221, 223, 227 allegory of Fall 45 deceived 101 earthy 75 heaven 75 humankind 102 mate 88 mind 45, 90 murderer 207 nominator 2, 26 precedence 29 rib 88, 206, 208, 216 adultery 73-74, 80, 133, 217-219 Aeneas 128, 153 Agatha 196

Albert the Great De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women) 22, 3940, 43 Albertano of Brescia vi, xiii, 185, 202-204, 212, 228 see women defended in medieval literature: Albertano of Brescia’s Liber consolationis et consilii (The Book of Consolation and Advice) Alexander the Great 189, 214 Alighieri, Dante ix Allen, P. 19, 28, 34, 37, 64, 103, 118, 200, 229 Almagest 167, 170 Ambrose, St. 4, 25, 34, 45, 63-64, 69, 72, 92, 100-102, 109, 111, 118, 186, 220, 225-226, 229 De viduis (On Widows) 63, 72 Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam (Commentary on Luke) 63, 109 Ambroise Paré 11, 14, 18 De monstres et prodiges (On Monsters and Prodigies) 11 Ambrosiaster 98, 100 Amphiaraus 83 analogy 11, 28, 72 Ancrene Riwle vi, 47-48, 53-54, 6364, 68, 111-118, 173, 183, 222, 229 see women defamed in literature: medieval legacy of Patristic literature: Ancrene Riwle (Rule for Anchoresses) Andrea Alciato 13

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages Andreas Capellanus vi, xii, 22, 27, 34, 42, 50-51, 59, 64, 120-122, 132, 134, 142, 157, 159, 172174, 177, 182-183, 189, 194195, 229 see women defamed in literature: satirical tradition in medieval Latin: Andreas Capellanus’ De amore (On Love) androcentrism xiii, 87, 90, 111 natural order 6, 32, 84-85, 98, 107 patriarchal etymologies 26-27 et passim superiority 27, 43, 54, 69, 84, 87, 90, 99, 102, 104, 107, 178, 192, 227 Anna 62, 195, 225 Annia 78 Anselm, St. v, xi, 28-29, 32-33, 63 see women defamed in literature: Ancient science and legacy: Anselm’s, St., Monologium Antoine de La Sale 3, 18, 48, 68 Apelles 174 Apis 11 Aquinas, St. Thomas v, xi, 9, 15, 19, 28, 30-34, 45, 63-65, 86, 89, 92, 211, 217, 229 see women defamed in literature: Ancient science and legacy: Thomas Aquinas’, St., Summa Theologiae Aristotle v, xi, 5-6, 17, 19--24, 2633, 37-38, 40-42, 46, 65, 83, 89, 211, 214, 229 see women defamed in literature: Ancient science and legacy: Aristotle’s De generatione animalium (Generation of Animals) see androcentrism Five Points of Policing 214

233

Armand, O. 6, 10, 17 Arrius 180 Artemisia 78 auctoritas see misogyny/rhetoric Augustine, St. v, xii, 10-11, 17, 3032, 34, 43, 45, 63, 65, 70, 84-93, 96-100, 142, 183, 186, 201, 208, 215- 219, 221, 229-230 see women defamed in literature: Patristic literature: Augustine’s, St., De Genesi ad litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis) De bono coniugali (The Good Marriage) 192 De decem chordis (The Ten Strings) 215, 217 De Trinitate (On Trinity) 45 Quaestiones in Heptateuchum, v, Quaestiones in Deuteronium (Questions on the Pentateuch, v, Questions on Deuteronomy) 99 Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti: Quaestiones ex utroque mixtim (Questions on the Old and New Testaments: Mixed questions on both) 98 Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, i, Quaestiones in Genesis (Questions on the Heptateuch, book seven, i, (Questions on Genesis) 85 Quaestionum in Heptateuchum libri septem, iv, Quaestiones in Numeros (Questions on the Heptateuch, book seven, iv, Questions on Numbers) 96 B baptism 16, 77, 199 Bartholomeus Anglicus 9 basilisk 7, 8

234 baths 156 Bathsheba 52-54, 113-114, 221 beauty adornment 147 chastity 147 complimented 80 Creation 101, 148, 193 deceit 7, 47 envious 125 exhibition 52 fake 47 gorgonian 8 natural 146 neutral 112 praise 151, 169 provocation 47 seditious 7 sin 223 threat 112 Beauvoir, S. de 4, 5, 17 Bede 220 Beer, J. 208, 228, 229 Benton, J. 33, 42, 65 Bernard, St. 54, 111 bestiary 6-8, 18, 26, 33, 185, 207208, 228-229 Cambridge 26 etymology 26 misogyny 26 Bethulia 62, 195 biology see women defamed in literature: Ancient science and legacy: Aristotle’s De generatione animalium (Generation of Animals) Bloch, R. H. 2, 17, 25, 34, 45, 4849, 54, 65 Boccaccio, Giovanni 44, 55, 57, 59, 62, 64-65, 94, 146, 172, 176177, 183, 187, 195, 229 De claris mulieribus (Famous Women) 44, 59 Il Corbaccio (The Corbaccio) 55, 57, 59, 62, 64, 146, 172, 176, 177, 183, 187, 195

Index body see eunuch females’ deformity 21, 23, 41 heat female’s coldness 20-21, 23-24, 40-41 male’s heat 20-21, 23-24, 40-41 males’ perfection/females’ imperfection 5-6, 24, 41, 4344, 102, 108-109, 165, 168, 200, 217, 225-226 Boethius 145-148, 183, 193, 229 De Consolatione Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy) 145 Book of the Wiles of Women 64 Book of the Beasts, The 7, 18 Borresen, K. 30, 34, 45, 65, 86, 92 Brooke, C. N. L. 104, 118 Brown, P. 86, 92 Brunetto Latini 7, 18 Bullough, V. L.109, 118 C canon law 5, 57, 85, 101 Capes, W. 49, 65 Cassel, A. K. 55, 65, 146, 183, 229 Cassiodorus 199, 200 Catherine of Alexandria, St. 225 Cato 206 Cecco d’Ascoli 60 Cecilia, St.224 celibacy 5, 36, 46-47, 69, 71, 95, 106, 162-165, 226 see eunuch Cenchreae 199 Chaucer, Geoffrey vi, ix, xii, 49, 5657, 64-65, 67, 103, 119, 160162, 165, 182-183, 186, 202203, 206, 212, 216, 228 see women defamed in literature: vernacular medieval adaptation: Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath Prologue

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages The Merchant’s Tale 160 Legend of Good Women 160 children childbearing 75, 87 obedience 85 obstacle 105 witches 9, 15-16, 122, 131 Chimera see monster: fatal love Christian humanism 4 Christine de Pizan ix, 42-44, 50, 58, 60, 67, 186, 210, 227, 231 Cicero 82 Clark, E. 225, 230 Clytemnestra 83, 180 Conroy, C. 52, 65 Creation beings 2, 5, 31, 44, 193 D David, King 52-54, 113-114, 124, 196, 205, 219, 221-222 Deianeira 149, 179 Delany, S. 226, 230 Delhaye, P. 36, 46, 66, 71, 92 Delilah 53, 149, 159, 221 Demophöon 154 Deschamps, E. 58, 60 devil 4, 7, 9-13, 15-16, 48-49, 70, 76, 116, 168, 188, 217, 219-222 see sex: devil: incubus see sex: devil: succubus see serpent Dido77, 128, 153-154 Dinah 53-54, 111-114 Dipsas 152 Dives and Pauper vii, xiii, 45, 51, 53-54, 64, 185, 210, 215-217, 219, 224, 228 see women defended in medieval literature: Dives and Pauper dramatis personae 138 Dronke, P. 103, 118

235

dressing conscience 44 expensive 52, 79, 145, 149, 170, 224 induction to lust 52 ostensibly 52, 145, 170 piously 4 respectably 52 richly 224 sinfully 79 tampering image 148 vainly 224 Durand, G. 13, 17 E Eliade, M. 3, 17 Esther xi, 62, 195, 198, 201, 205, 225 eunuch 46-47, 74, 80 Eve consequences of fault 220 creation 29, 206, 208, 227 damager 83 deceiver 101 Eve/Ave 2 leader to sin 4 presumption 30 second wife 208 secondary 29 subjection 216 substance 227 etymologies verbum/res 26 F fabliau 50, 67-68, 160 Fall 45, 51, 62, 89 false testimony 99 fasting vows 95 feminization 3, 215 Ferrante, J. M. 137, 152, 183 Fides 196 Fiero, G. K. 60, 66 Fifteen Joys of Marriage, The 48, 67-68 fecundation 40-41

236 Form/Matter 5, 6, 20, 25, 28, 30, 40, 89 Fonseca, P. 6 Fulgentius 14, 206, 230 G Galen v, 23-25, 33, 37-38, 40-41, 66 see women defamed in literature: Ancient science and legacy: Galen’s De usu partium corporis humani (On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body) Gautier Le Leu 57, 64 Gawain 189 Gervase of Tilbury 7 generation vi, 5-6, 17, 19-21, 23-24, 26, 28-29, 31, 33, 37, 40-42, 65, 88, 165, 211, 229 see Form/Matter Gethsemane 199 Gottfried von Strassburg vi, xii, 63, 108-110, 117-118 see women defamed in literature: medieval legacy of Patristic literature: Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan Gorgon 8 Gower, John vii, xiii, 50, 66, 185, 213-214, 228 see women defended in literature: John Gower’s A Lover’s Confession Gratian vi, xii, 26-27, 34, 63, 66, 73, 85, 92, 95-102, 107, 117, 165 see women defamed in literature: medieval legacy of Patristic literature: Gratian’s Decretum (Ordinance) Gregory, St. 5, 117-118 Guido delle Cologne 63 Guillaume d’Auvergne 10 Guilaume de Lorris see Jean de Meun

Index H Hamor 113 heat as value female’s coldness 20-21, 23-24, 40-41 male’s heat 20-21, 23-24, 40-41 Hephaestus 72 heresies 70 Lollards 49 Waldenses 49 Hercules 149, 179 Herodotus 82-83, 92 Hesiod 19, 37 Hildebert of Tours 60 Holofernes 62, 195, 205 Huegelmeyer, C. T. 216, 230 Hugh of Fouilloy 60 Hugh of Saint Victor 111, 216 De Sacramentis (On Sacraments) 216 humanism see Christian humanism humanity 2, 86, 98, 101-102, 105, 156, 179, 192-193, 217, 221 humilitatis formula 208 I Iarbas 77 Innocent III, Pope 39, 68 De miseria condicionis humane (On the Misery of Human Condition) 39, 68 Isaac 205 Isidore of Seville, St. v, xi, 7-9, 14, 25, 27-29, 32-33, 37-40, 50, 63, 66, 128, 214, 230 see women defamed in literature: Ancient science and legacy: Isidore of Seville’s, St., Etymologiae (Etymologies) Isolde 108, 118

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages J Jacob 11, 112, 163, 205 Jacquart, D., and Thomasset, C. 2223, 34, 37, 39, 42, 66, 128, 134 Jacques de Vitry 186, 216 Sermon 66 of Sermones vulgares (Sermons for All) 186 Jean d’Arras 7 Jean de Meun vi, xii, 7, 14, 18, 43, 58-59, 64, 137-139, 142, 152, 159, 169-172, 175-178, 182, 208, 228-229 see women defamed in literature: vernacular adaptation: Jean de Meun’s Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) Jehan le Fèvre 43, 50, 55, 57, 59-61, 64, 67, 146, 169, 172-174, 183 Le Livre de Leesce (The Book of Leesce) 43, 50, 58, 60-61, 67, 146, 169, 172-174, 183 Les Lamentations de Matheolus (The Lamentations of Matheolus) 43-44, 50, 55, 57-58, 60-61, 64, 67, 146, 169, 172-174, 183 Jerome, St. v, xii, 5, 22, 34-36, 4547, 49, 51, 53-54, 56, 63, 66, 69-84, 87, 91-93, 99, 103, 105107, 111, 119, 121, 123-124, 129, 135, 140, 143-144, , 161166, 168-169, 171, 178-181, 183, 186, 200-202, 210, 225, 230 see women defamed in literature: Patristic literature: Jerome’s, St. Adversus Jovinianum (Against Jovinian) see also Theophratus Commentary on Epistolam ad Titum Liber Unus (Epistle to Titus, book one) 99 Epistula 107, ad Laeta (Letter 107, to Laeta) 111

237

Epistula 22, ad Eustochium (Letter 22, to Eustochium) 53, 63, 84, 92, 124, 129, 135, 165, 201, 230 Epistula 77, ad Oceanum (Letter 77, to Oceanus) 63, 84, 87, 123 Jovinian’s polemic 70 John Chrysostom, St. 4, 48, 54-55, 63, 67, 87 Homily IX 54-55, 63, 67 John of Salisbury 36, 46 Policraticus 36, 46 Judith 55, 62, 195 Jupiter 143, 171 Juvenal 49, 51, 56-57, 59, 67, 7981, 93, 107, 132-133, 135, 143144, 148-150, 158, 163, 172173, 176-177, 181, 183 Satire VI 49, 56, 57, 59, 67, 8081, 93, 132-133, 135, 143144, 148-150, 158, 163, 172, 176-177, 181, 183 K Kaplan, C. 1, 17 Kelly, J. N. D. 70, 93 Kramer, Heirinch, and Sprenger, James 9-10, 15-17 see Malleus maleficarum L Labé, L. 4, 17 Lamech 163 Lascault, G. 10, 14-15, 17 law see canon law Latumius 180 Legend of Aristotle and Phyllis 154 Lemay, H. 40, 67 Leonard, St. 145 Livia 180 Livy 142, 184 Lucretia 78, 141-142, 196, 203 Luscombe, D. E. 104, 119

238 M Malleus maleficarum 9-10, 13, 1517 Mann, J. 57, 67, 103, 119, 161, 183, 206, 230 Manzalaoui, M. A. 214, 230 Map, Walter 35-36, 51-52, 64, 120, 124, 140, 142-143, 178-179, 180, 222 Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum philosophum nec uxorem ducat (The Letter of Valerius to Rufinus, against Marriage) 36, 51, 55,63, 124, 140, 142-144, 150, 179, 180, 222 De nugis curialium (Of the Trifles of Courtiers) 36, 46, 52-53, 60, 67, 222, 230 Marbod of Rennes vi, xiii, 48-49, 61-63, 67, 94, 120, 128, 178, 183, 185, 191-193, 197, 200, 223, 227-228 see women defended in medieval literature: Marbod of Rennes’ De matrona (The Good Woman) De meretrice (The Prostitute) 48-49, 61, 63, 67, 178, 183, 192, 223, 230 Marcia 78 Marco Polo 3 marriage 5, 35-36, 45-48, 50, 52-53, 56-58, 64, 66-75, 77, 79, 81-83, 85-86, 93, 95-97, 103-106, 118, 121, 124. 128, 134, 139-141, 144-145, 150, 161-167, 169, 174, 176, 180, 183, 192, 205, 216, 222, 226, 230 adultery 53, 73-74, 80, 124, 133, 217-219, 222 annoyances 106 biblical commentaries 164 books 79 chastity 69, 74 conditional 72

Index Christianity 45 disgrace 3 distraction 45 failure 5 fornication 71 friends 81 inconveniences 36 mercenary 104 philosophy 82 preference 47 religious life 73 theology 35 unwillingness 35 virginity 164 Mars 177 Mary, the Virgin 4, 61, 186-187, 225-226 Martianus Capella 128, 134 Martinus Dumiensis Formula honestae vitae (Honest Life Formula) 204 Mathieu de Bologne Liber lamentationum Matheoluli (Book of the Lamentations of Little Matheolus) 57, 58 Mausolus 78 McLaughlin, E. 49, 67, 231 McLaughlin, M. M. 200, 231 Medea 154 Melusine 7 men’s values see Form/Mater see also heat as value sex royalties 95 menstruation 8, 20-23, 39 abnormality 39 corruption 13 malignancy 28 femmephobia 22 Mercury 128, 134, 179 mermaid 7, 8, 139 Migne, J.-P. 85, 92, 96, 98-101, 118-119, 183, 193, 228, 230 Minos 13 Miriam 199

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages Misogyny/rhetoric asymmetry 96, 102, 218 auctoritas 5, 19, 96-97, 100, 117, 142, 157, 197 allegorical treatment 76 catalog 56, 78, 81, 156, 225 Capital Sins theme 125, 130 cohesion and logical order 55 controversial method 70, 186 counterattack 46, 71 courtly love 49, 59, 103, 108, 120-122, 137, 188, 213 decontextualization of citations 52 double pattern 87, 99, 122, 210211, 215 dreamlike vision 59 etymologies 38 female fragility 103 founders 37 game or sport 60-62, 192 internalization 103-104 Latin education manly 137 logic of oppositions 71, 81, 140 mariticide 180 motifs 51, 55, 181 obsessive repetitions 51 quoting 60 models 55-57 panegyric discourse 55, 197, 225 parabolic 116 paradox of perfection see courtly love see also equilibrium Eve/Ave popular proverbial sayings 153 promotional image 178 skills 60, 62-63, 192 speech hybridism 160 structural models 55-56, 225 theological gynecology 25 vernacular usage 136-137 et passim virtuosity of game 60-62, 192, 197 women absent 59

239

monster 6, 8-9, 11-15 apocalyptical 13 cosmological 12 demons see sex: devil: incubus/succubus fatal love 15 historical 12 lust 13 eschatological 13 women 6, 8-9, 11-15 mother 3, 13, 21, 28-31, 41, 83, 88, 93, 128, 148-149, 155, 163, 172, 176, 194, 196, 199, 201, 205, 221 Christ as mother 29 generation 41 Great Mother 13 Mother Earth 3 secondary 30 stepmother 83, 148, 196 Mordecai 205 Muckle, J. T. 198, 204, 228, 231 N Nabal 205 Naomi 62, 195-196, 225 Nature/human female/male xi, 5-6, 8, 10, 2021, 27, 43 Niceratus, wife of 77 O Original Sin 5, 15, 30, 62, 86, 8889, 101 Ovid 37, 43, 49, 51, 80, 83, 147, 151, 156, 180, 195, 223 Amores 49, 67, 124, 130-131, 135, 149, 152, 156, 183184, 195, 231 Ars amatoria (Art of Love) 80, 83, 93, 120, 124, 135, 147, 151-152, 154, 170-171, 176, 178, 180, 183, 212, 231

240 Fasti (About the Roman Calendar) 131, 135, 184, 195, 231 Metamorphoses 131, 135, 184, 195, 231 Remedia amoris (The Cures for Love) 121, 151 Owst, G. R. 47, 67 P Pagels, E. 86, 93 Paradise 25, 34, 44-45, 54, 63-64, 101, 128, 174, 201, 220, 229 Patterson, L. 49, 54, 67 Paul, St. xi, 4, 28, 54, 58, 67, 71, 73-74, 87, 90-91, 95, 98, 101, 105, 109, 121, 162-164, 199, 221, 224 Penelope 141-142 Peter Lombard 216 Peter, St. 52, 149, 198, 210, 219, 224 Pfeffer, W. 60, 66 Phoebe 199 Phoroneus 144 Phyllis 154 Physiologus 9 Pickering, O. 211, 231 Pitts, B. 48, 68 Pliny the Elder 28, 39, 68 Plutarch 83 Potiphar’s wife 73 Pratt, A. 6, 17, 33, 65 Pratt, R. A. 36, 68 priesthood 85, 95, 98, 109, 119, 198-199 pseudo-Augustine 98, 108 pseudo-Ovid 58 De vetula (On Old Woman) 58 Publilius, Syrus 203, 207, 231 R Raming, I. 85, 95, 98, 109, 119 Renaud de Louens 202 Rhetoric see misogyny/rhetoric

Index Response to the Bestiary of Love see women defended in medieval literature: Richard de Fournival’s Response to the Li bestiaire d’Amour (The Bestiary of Love) Richard de Bury 36, 68, 136, 184 Philobiblon (The Love of Books) 36, 68, 136, 184 Robertson, E. 54, 68, 111, 119 Rogers, K. M. 3, 4, 18, 51, 68 Rousselle, A.23, 34, 37, 42, 68 Ruiz, J. 60 S Said, E. W. 3, 18 Salome 199 Samson 52-53, 129, 149, 159, 179, 190, 219, 221 Sarah 62, 195, 225 Schmitt, C. 36, 46, 68, 71, 93 Schulz, F. 12, 18, 36 serpent 7,13, 25, 30, 35, 86-88, 9091, 93, 157-158, 218, 220-221 Shabbat 14, 16, 199 shamanism 10 Sebastian Brant Das Narrenschyff ad Narragoniam (Ship of Fools) 12 semen male/female 6, 10, 20-21, 23-25, 30, 40-42, 72 Seneca 46, 75, 83, 106, 119, 203, 206, 231 Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, Epistula 72.3 (Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 72.3) 106 De beneficiis (On Benefits) 203, 231 silvanos 10 symplegades 3 sex abstinence 70, 95-97, 102 aversion to female genitals see vagina dentata

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages continentia see abstinence devil: incubus/succubus 10, 11 devitalizing 23 generation see Aristotle genitals see analogies 23 see genitals uses 165 hierarchy 41, 98 masculinization see woman defended as virtus monstrous/female 3, 6-7, 9, 1016 provocative 47, 51, 112, 224 Resurrection Day 87 sale 149, 172 theological gynecology 25 Simplicius Gallus 177 sirens 6, 7 Socrates 82, 107, 179 Solomon 52, 61, 75-76, 91, 124, 134, 150, 157, 160, 163, 178, 202, 204, 219, 222-223 soul 14, 20-21, 29, 31, 40-41, 44, 47-48, 115, 117, 121, 144, 151, 158, 174, 182, 189, 193-194, 207, 219 Southern Passion, The vii, xiii, 68, 185, 209-211, 213, 216, 228, 231 Spencer, R. 50, 68 Stephen, St. 109 T Terence 83, 93 Hecyra (The Stepmother) 83 Tertullian xii, 4, 46-47, 63, 68-69, 72, 77, 93, 110, 114, 148, 175, 178, 184 De cultu feminarum (On the Apparel of Women) 47, 63, 148, 175

241

De exhortatione castitatis (On Exhortation to Chastity) 72, 77, 93 Theophrastus 35-36, 46, 56, 58, 68, 71, 78-82, 93, 106, 136, 140, 143, 161, 178 Liber de nuptiis (Book on Marriage) 35, 46, 56, 78, 106 Aureolus 140 Thomas of Cantimpré 8, 10 Thrush and the Nightingale, The vi, xiii, 185, 187-188, 204, 225, 228 see women defended in medieval literature: Thrush and the Nightingale, The Titus Livius 141-142, 157, 184 Ab Urbe Condita Libri (History of Rome) 142, 157 tópos Adam’s rib see Adam female gaze 8, 48, 53, 111-114, 223 first in Creation 29 Original Sin see Original Sin pit 47-48 sword 47-48 Trefnant, Thomas Bishop 49, 65, 185 Truax, J. 86, 93 U Uriah 114, 124, 222 V vagina dentata 3, 13, 42 Valerius see Map, Walter Valerius Maximus 52, 173, 177 Varius Geminus 75 venom see menstruation Venus 147, 173, 177, 179

242 Vincent of Beauvais 8-9 Virgil 77, 157-158, 184 Virgin Mary 4, 61, 186-187, 225226 virginity 46, 56, 69, 71, 74-75, 77, 84, 111-112, 161-162, 164-166, 186, 202, 225-226 Vulgata 17, 66, 119, 183, 230 W Walker, B. 3, 8, 18, 42, 68 Walther, Hans 129, 130-131, 135 White, T. H. 7, 18, 26-27, 33 women defamed abandonment 4 abbess 107 accomplice 175 anger 112, 123, 130, 145, 174 animals 4, 157, 211 apparel 47, 68, 148, 184 arrogance 130, 131, 141, 204 astrology 134, 177 backbiting see slander beauty 7, 8, 47, 53, 58, 80, 83, 112, 114, 126, 131, 143, 145-148, 151, 153-154, 169, 173, 223 caprice 148 collapse 49, 217 coldness see body: heat: female’s coldness complaints 78, 84, 140, 149, 167 cosmetology 47 consortium hellish beings see witches covetousness 157 credulity see superstition cruelty 139, 157, 167, 174, 206 damaging 16, 22, 39, 47, 54, 83, 157

Index deceiving 7, 11, 54, 61, 101, 139, 147, 152, 154, 157, 219-221 see infidelity see also lies deception 7, 110, 129, 219, 220 defect 30, 31, 40, 49, 54, 109110, 121, 129, 139, 168169, 195 deformed men 20, 21, 23, 40 devil’s gateway 4 disobedience 5, 55, 125, 129130 exclusion 42, 62, 85, 95, 98, 109, 119 exposure 53 fickleness 125, 128, 210, 213 fire like 15, 72-74, 76, 125, 164, 171 first to sin 89 flirtation 223 frivolity 35, 58, 60, 63, 136, 226 funerals hunting husbands 176 gifts 81, 125-127, 156, 210 glance see tópos: female gaze gluttony 5, 127, 220 greed 124-127, 137, 223 guiltiness 99, 107, 113, 115, 130, 211, 218, 220, 227 harlot see whore hateful 76, 171 heat see body: heat: female’s coldness imperfection see body: females’ deformity impurity 13-15, 39, 41, 107 incompatibilities 47, 147, 150 inconstancy 124-125, 128, 129, 150 indecency 127 indolence 43 indiscretion 132

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages infidelity 122 insatiable 14, 59, 76 intelligence inferior 50, 127, 217 irreverence 141, 163 jealousy 126 Jewish collusion 15 lack of reason see intelligence inferior lechery see lust lies 131, 149, 152, 172 lust 5, 7, 13-15, 27, 50, 52, 5455, 72, 74, 80, 83, 91, 133, 139, 148, 177, 180, 186, 210, 223-224 Matter see Aristotle see also Form/Matter mischiefs 80, 154 mothers bad influence 176 mutability see inconstancy muttering 54 Nature see defect outrage 25, 35, 48 pecuniary interest 125 pilgrimage 149, 161, 175 pleading 80 preaching 49 presumption 30, 54, 198 pride 12, 103, 130-131, 140141, 168 promises 100, 102, 121, 128, 153 quarrelsome 76, 181, 204 rare bird 81, 143 reason see intelligence inferior shame of Nature 43 seduction see lust semblance see apparel sick imagination 11

243

slander 4, 121, 125-127, 161, 175 snare see trap speech abrasive 35 crooked 125 erotic 49 loquacious 158 manipulative 161 ranting 189 uncontrolled 48 superstition 134 trap 53, 219 uncleanness see menstruation vanity see pride wandering 53, 112, 175 whore 7, 13, 139-140, 149, 221 witches 9, 15-16, 122, 131 witnessing 100 wives burden 47 distraction 45 evil 7 books incompatibility 79 complainer 79 bankruptcy 81 crying fake 81 destroyer 171 showing face 176 women defamed in literature: Ancient science and legacy: Anselm’s, St., Monologium 28-29 Aquinas’ St., Summa Theologiae. 30-32 Aristotle’s De generatione animalium (Generation of Animals) 19-22 Galen’s De usu partium corporis humani (On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body) 23-25

244 Isidore of Seville’s, St., Etymologies 25-28 Patristic literature: Augustine’s, St., De Genesi ad litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis) 87-91 Jerome’s, St., Adversus Jovinianum (Against Jovinian) 71-84 medieval legacy of Patristic literature: Ancrene Riwle (Rule for Anchoresses) 112-117 Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan 109-111 Gratian’s Decretum (Ordinance) 95-102 Peter Abelard’s Historia calamitatum (The History of His Misfortunes) 105-108 satirical tradition in Medieval Latin: Andreas Capellanus’ De amore (On Love) 120134 medieval vernacular adaptation: Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath Prologue 162-182 Jean de Meun’s Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) 138-160 women defended anointing Christ 198 Apostles of the Apostles 199 beauty natural 47, 146 body and honor 110 chastity 46, 54, 69, 72, 74, 7780, 84, 95, 111, 125, 147, 151, 164, 166, 170, 196, 211, 214, 218-219, 224-225 Christ’s mother 201 procreation 194

Index company 206 counselor 206 Day of Judgement 186 dialectical style 187, 197 divine grace 200-201 domestic resources 194 editorial 186 equilibrium Eve/Ave 2 nobler matter 209 gradus of women 200 helpers 206 honorable 32, 43, 143, 198, 203 head covered 107 humility 201, 217 identity preserved 188 kindness 194, 198, 213 loyalty Christ 199, 210 husband 213 mate 44 made in Paradise 201 masculine virtus 109, 117, 197 modesty 123 natural value of the things 194 neutralization of sexuality 112 nobler creation 209 (dis)obedience 2, 5. 32, 55, 85, 96, 98, 129, 130, 209 perfect weakness 200 obsession 112 softness 128 servitude of love 89 spinning 194 steadfastness see loyalty subjection see men’s values understanding 206 virginity 46, 56, 69, 71, 74-75, 77, 84, 111-112,161-162, 164-166, 186, 202, 225-226 women defended in medieval literature: Albertano of Brescia’s Liber consolationis et consilii (The Book of

Literary Misogyny and Praise of Women in the Middle Ages Consolation and Advise) 202-207 Dives and Pauper 215-225 John Gower’s A Lover’s Confession 214-215 Marbod of Rennes’ De matrona (The Good Woman) 192-196 Peter Abelard’s De auctoritate vel dignitate ordinis sanctimonialium (On the Origin of Nuns) 198-202 Response to Richard de Fournival’s Bestiary of Love 207-209

245

Southern Passion, The 209213 Thrush and the Nightingale, The 187-191 widows/widowhood 46, 57, 59, 63-64, 67, 70-73, 77-78, 92, 163, 165, 186, 199-200, 225 celibate widowhood 163 deaconesses 199 demonic 58 frailty 200 remarry 77, 164 widowhood chastity 77 Xanthippe 82, 107, 179 Zibaldone laurenziano 59