In medieval Europe, women experienced strong, enduring delight with men. Medieval men in turn ardently loved women, sometimes even to the extent of scandalous gyno-idolatry. Love’s passion, however, isn’t the same as an intentional, voluntary pledge to exclusivity and commitment. Medieval literature indicates that at least some women presumed exclusivity and commitment from beloved men. Such love presumptions can easily lead to heartbreak and grief.
The intensity with which women once loved men is scarcely conceivable today. That failure of imagination might be remedied with some appreciation for the great medieval woman scholar and abbess Heloise of the Paraclete. She ardently loved Peter Abelard. Within the oppressive history of penal punishment of men’s sexuality, Abelard was castrated for his love affair with Heloise. Heloise received no violent punishment. She, however, was deprived of sexual intimacy with him. At least fifteen years after they began their sexual affair, she recalled in a letter to him:
Those lovers’ pleasures that we equally enjoyed were truly so sweet to me that they cannot displease me, nor scarcely pass from my memory. In whatever place I turn, they always offer themselves before my eyes with their desires, nor even do they spare me, sleeping, their illusions. Even during the celebrations of the Mass, when prayer ought to be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures so completely take hold of my most wretched soul that I am given over to their vileness rather than to prayer. When I ought to groan over what I have done, I sigh rather over what I have lost. Not only what we did but equally the places and times in which we did them are so impressed upon my heart along with you, that in them I do with you all those things again. Not even sleeping can I have rest from them. … My youthful ardor and my experience of the most delightful pleasures inflame the longings of my body and the urgings of my desire, and their assaults on me are oppressive in such greater magnitude, since my nature is more vulnerable to assault. I am praised as chaste by those who do not perceive the hypocrisy.
{ In tantum vero ille quas pariter exercuimus amantium voluptates dulces michi fuerunt ut nec displicere michi nec vix a memoria labi possint. Quocumque loco me vertam, semper se oculis meis cum suis ingerunt desideriis, nec etiam dormienti suis illusionibus parcunt. Inter ipsa missarum sollempnia, ubi purior esse debet oratio, obscena earum voluptatum phantasmata ita sibi penitus miserrimam captivant animam ut turpitudinibus illis magis quam orationi vacem; que cum ingemiscere debeam de commissis, suspiro potius de amissis. Nec solum que egimus sed loca pariter et tempora in quibus hec egimus ita tecum nostro infixa sunt animo, ut in ipsis omnia tecum agam, nec dormiens etiam ab his quiescam. … Hoc autem in me stimulos carnis haec incentiva libidinis ipse iuvenilis fervor aetatis, et iucundissimarum experientia voluptatum plurimum accendunt, et tanto amplius sua me impugnatione opprimunt, quanto infirmior est natura quam impugnant. Castam me praedicant qui non deprehendunt hypocritam. }[1]
No more than a few years after receiving this letter from Heloise, Abelard included in a poem of wisdom for their son Astralabe a similar account:
Your sins will relinquish you more than you will relinquish your sins,
if you repent when you can no longer do harm with them.
There are those for whom sins they have committed delight so much
that they can never truly repent of them,
or rather the sweetness of the pleasure was such
that no penance for their sins can weigh them down.
Such is the frequent complaint of our Heloise about this,
which often she used to say to me as to herself:
“If I must repent of what I had earlier committed,
I cannot be saved. No hope remains for me.
So sweet are the joys of what we committed,
that, having pleased too much, they bring delight when remembered.”{ te pecata magis quam tu pecata relinquent
si cum non possis ledere peniteas.
sunt quos oblectant adeo pecata peracta
ut numquam vere peniteant super his,
immo voluptatis dulcedo tanta sit huius,
ne gravet ulla satisfacio propter eam
est nostre super hoc Eloyse crebra querela
que michi que secum dicere sepe solet:
“si ne peniteat me comississe priora
salvari nequeam, spes michi nulla manet:
dulcia sunt adeo comissi gaudia nostri
ut memorata iuvent que placuere nimis.” }[2]
Women today are frequently urged to repent of loving men, who allegedly bear toxic masculinity. Far too many women have done so. In contrast, Heloise, living and working as a revered nun-leader of Christian nuns early in the twelfth century, could not repent of the sexual joy she had with Abelard many years earlier. Even over core personal feelings of sexual desire, ideological control seems to have reached a totalitarian level today that was impossible in medieval Europe.
Some medieval women loved men possessively outside of marriage. In a poem from no later than the thirteenth century, a woman complains that her beloved man wants to have another beloved woman in addition to her:
When there are two whom a single love joins into one,
that one love does not allow them to be two.
In love is faithfulness. There should be two lovers. If a third be present,
nothing would be among the three, since scarcely anything would be among the two.
Love remains secret, calls to itself, and makes lovers one.
Love thus unites two lovers. With a third, love leaves.
Love is nothing other than the joining of two minds.
As long as the lover lives, let not love die.
If any love would be first dear and then debased,
that is not love, but fraud. Not fraud, but suffering.
Therefore let each be the other’s own. But he would never be mine —
this man who merely always begins to be mine!{ Cum duo sint quos unus amor conformat in unum,
Illos unus amor non sinit esse duos.
Est in amore fides: duo sint — si tercius assit,
Nulla tribus, nam vix ulla duobus erit.
Secreto stat amor, ad se vocat, et facit unum:
Ipse duos unit; tercius, exit amor.
Nil amor est aliud quam mens connexa duorum,
Sed dum vivat amans, non moriatur amor.
Si quis amor carus sit primo, denique vilis,
Non amor, immo dolus; non dolus, immo dolor.
Ergo suo sit uterque suus; sed erit meus ille
Nunquam qui semper incipit esse meus! }[3]
A woman might regard loving more than one man as improper or inauthentic. But her beloved man might have different beliefs or loving capabilities. A man who never promised that he would love only one woman shouldn’t be presumed to love only one. Accusing a man of fraud simply for loving two women simultaneously is unreasonable and unloving. The great medieval lover Ignaure loved twelve women simultaneously. He was murdered for loving women so much. Such injustice should never be repeated, especially against a man who has only one or two additional beloved women. More generally, a woman should not presume to have a man’s love exclusively without him explicitly promising that to her.
Moreover, women should not presume that beloved men are committed to them until death do them part, or alternatively, government authority formally approves their relationship break-up. In particular, a beloved man might not want to be a father. Before the development of extensive police forces and pervasive tracking and surveillance technologies, a man had minimal reproductive rights through the possibility of fleeing from a pregnancy attributed to him. Perhaps that’s more humane than begging, urging, and incentivizing the woman to abort a pregnancy.[4] In either case, a woman might lose a man’s love when she feels that she needs it most — when she’s pregnant. A poem apparently from twelfth-century France expresses such a woman’s grief:
All becomes shabby, and my limbs melt with sorrow.
No need to explain that they endure a tenant-farmer’s harsh labors.
Sensation withers. My voice wastes away, along with my body.
Therefore come back to me, so that you don’t deserve death.
Let death flee from you. As I beg you to return, let it be done.
Only your conversion would be acceptable and would restore my mind.
May the Lord grant this, so that my heart is not sick in laboring.
I pray to the living God that he would restore to me you as my lover.
…
You have been made harder than stone while you complain away from me.
I am not able to survive stony you, far away.
Come join with me. Let me not make you be with yourself.
I would want to speak about much with you, if I had a time
and place that would be suitable for our tears.{ Omnia vilescunt, artusque dolore liquescunt,
Non opus exponi, tolerent que dura coloni,
Sensus marcescit, corpus, vox, atque tabescit;
Ergo revertaris, ne mortem promerearis.
Mors a te fugiat, optata reversio fiat,
Que mentem reparet conversio sola placeret;
Hane dominus donet, ne mens egrota laboret.
Oro deum vivum, quod te mihi reddat amicum
…
Durior es lapide factus, dum quereris a me:
Non te saxosum valeo superare remotum.
Convenias mecum, faciam te non fore tecum;
Multa loqui vellem tecum, si tempus haberem
Et loca, que nostris congruerent lacrimis. }[5]
The man evidently has complaints about the woman and feels that he cannot be with her. She cannot understand that her beloved man wasn’t and isn’t committed to her:
Then I was a gem, then a flower, then a lily of the field,
then no other woman in the world was like me.
I’m the same as I was, except that now I’m not a virgin, nor can
I ever again be one. For that I weep without end.{ Tunc ego gemma fui, tunc flos, tunc lilia campi;
Tunc quoque nulla fuit orbe mei similis.
Illud idem, quod eram, modo sum, nisi virgo; nec umquam
Id fieri potero: quod sine fine fleo. }
Her beloved man almost surely didn’t leave her because she was no longer a virgin. He may have decided that he wasn’t happy with his relationship with her. That’s a common reason for divorces today. Perhaps he decided that he didn’t want to endure unplanned parenthood with her. Eliminating unplanned parenthood is a common reason for abortion today. The woman regards the man’s lack of commitment in love as deceit:
To triumph by deceit is nothing except to lack praise.
Promising to me good, you often gave me much,
and for that good, I have obtained many evils.{ Fraude triumphare nichil est nisi laude carere.
Pollicitando mihi bona plurima sepe dedisti,
Proque bonis sumpta sunt mihi multa mala. }[6]
To encourage understanding in love, men might give women less, and require more from women. The poem ends with the woman’s grief:
What before gave delight, now gives me shedding of tears.
{ Quod dedit ante iocum, modo dat mihi fundere fletum. }
Misunderstandings in love are a common source of grief. Such grief is particularly prevalent when women and men love each other ardently, but not necessarily exclusively and with life-long commitment.
To avoid misunderstandings in love, men must be encouraged to speak about their feelings and concerns. Men are human beings, not merely tools for getting jobs done and providing money and material goods to women and children. Create silence and opportunities for men to speak and be heard. Of course men occasionally utter outrageous and offensive words. Men also fart. But as meninist literary criticism emphasizes, listening to men is necessary to love men truly.
* * * * *
Read more:
- Heloise wholly innocent of disastrous marriage with Abelard
- Sidonius’s myth and philosophy in marriage of Araneola & Polemius
- mother-daughter domestic violence in medieval Europe
Notes:
[1] Heloise of the Paraclete to Peter Abelard, Letter {Epistola} 4, section 12, Latin text from Luscombe & Radice (2013), English translation (modified) from Ruys (2008), p. 3, and McLaughlin & Wheeler (2009) via Epistolae: Medieval Women’s Latin Letters.
Peter Abelard began teaching at Notre Dame in Paris about 1115. There he began his affair with Heloise. In 1117 or 1118, Abelard received a letter from Fulk, Prior of Deuil, taunting him about his castration. Abelard thus was castrated between 1115 and 1118. Heloise’s Epistola 4 is dated 1130-1134.
Ruys interpreted Heloise’s sexual passion and imagination according to the teaching of a leading twenty-first-century authority and associated academic discourse:
We need here to understand the distinction articulated by Caroline Walker Bynum between the “discovery of the individual,” which was not a medieval concern, and the “discovery of the self,” which was an important aspect of twelfth-century spirituality and thought. … Heloise’s Ep. IV thus participates in what Caroline Walker Bynum has described as the twelfth-century search for the consonance of the self with a chosen monastic model. Heloise’s “confession” does not constitute a strikingly modern autobiographical moment in which she “lays bare her soul,” seeking to tell the truth of who she fundamentally is through sexual admissions; rather it marks an effort by a medieval woman to articulate an ideal of the female embodied monastic self through the contemporary twelfth-century discourses of ethics, memory, and sexuality.
Ruys (2008) pp. 2, 22. Heloise words to Abelard about her enduring delight in having sex with him surely don’t constitute a “strikingly modern autobiographical moment.” Medieval women generally delighted in having sex with men and told men of their delight. Men themselves have largely not yet experienced the “discoverty of the self” beyond the human-generic “man.”
[2] Peter Abelard, Poem for Astralabe {Carmen ad Astralabium} vv. 373-84, Latin text and English translation (modified slightly) from Ruys (2014). For an earlier edition of these verses with English translation, Dronke (1976) pp. 14-5, 43-5.
Men aren’t inferior to women in sexual vitality and imagination. Saint Augustine himself confessed to God:
Certainly you command me to restrain myself from desires of the flesh, and desires of the eyes, and worldly ambition. You ordered me to give up illicit sex, and as for marriage itself, you promised something better than your concession to us. Because you granted this, it was accomplished, even before I became a minister of your sacrament. But still in my memory there abide the impressions of those carnal experiences of which I have spoken at length. Force of habit fixed them there, and they besiege me in my waking hours — lacking any real force, it is true. In my sleep, though, the act is almost real enough not only to cause pleasure but even to evoke my consent.
{ Iubes certe ut contineam a concupiscentia carnis et concupiscentia oculorum et ambitione saeculi. iussisti a concubitu et de ipso coniugio melius aliquid quam concessisti monuisti. et quoniam dedisti, factum est, et antequam dispensator sacramenti tui fierem. sed adhuc vivunt in memoria mea, de qua multa locutus sum, talium rerum imagines, quas ibi consuetudo mea fixit, et occursantur mihi vigilanti quidem carentes viribus, in somnis autem non solum usque ad delectationem sed etiam usque ad consensionem factumque simillimum. }
Augustine, Confessions 10.30, Latin text and English translation from Hammond (2016). Ruys (2008) provides additional historical examples of men’s sexual imagination.
[3] This anonymous poem is known only from Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 17212, folio 25v, copied in the thirteenth century. This manuscript is a poetic miscellany from Schäftlarn Abbey (Munich, Germany).
[4] Under current, typical paternity law in the U.S., a woman can have large, monthly “child support” payments imposed on a man who involuntarily, unintentionally becomes a biological father. But no court can effectively compel a man to continue to love a woman or lovingly support a child as the child’s willing father.
[5] To the fugitive {Ad fugitivum}, incipit “All becomes shabby, and my limbs melt with sorrow {Omnia vilescunt, artusque dolore liquescunt},” vv. 1-8, 15-19, Latin text from Werner (1904) pp. 45-6 (poem 116), my English translation, benefiting from those of Newman (2016) pp. 280-1 and Mews & Chiavaroli (2001) p. 106.
This poem survives only in Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, C 58, folio 11v, which apparently was written at the end the twelfth century (after 1173). A German cleric probably wrote this manuscript at the Benedictine Imperial Abbey of All Saints {Reichskloster Allerheiligen} in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. That cleric apparently studied at Orléans and Paris. Werner (1904) p. 1.
The context of this poem’s composition isn’t clear. Dronke, who extensively celebrated men’s “love worship” for women, observed:
The lack of circumstantial detail, the exclamations and repetitions throughout, suggest verses written passionately, hastily, compulsively, quite the opposite of a literary exercise.
Dronke (1965) vol. 1, p. 253. Without citing Dronke, Newman stated in contrast:
While this poem could have been written by either a man or a woman, it is an exercise in ethopoeia or impersonation; there is no reason to think it autobiographical. Modeled on Ovid’s Heroïdes, the epistle voices the lament of a seduced, abandoned, and pregnant woman. It is a powerful dissuasio for any girl tempted by a clerical seducer.
Newman (2016) p. 279. Like her translation of this poem, Newman’s description of it is colored with entrenched, dominant ideology. The woman in the poem is not necessarily a “girl.” She could well be an adult nun. The terms “seduced” and “abandoned” are language of criminalizing men. The woman and man in the poem had a sexual relationship. At some point the man broke off his relationship with the woman. He apparently didn’t want to resume that relationship. She laments to him that she is pregnant with his child and attempts to coerce him into resuming their relationship. The poem is a powerful dissuasio for any man or woman tempted to have heterosexual intercourse outside of a serious marital commitment.
Mews’s comments on this poem underscore common prejudice amid interpretative contrasts. Mews declared:
The directness of her complaint makes this poem difficult to imagine as a male invention. Heloise was not the only educated woman in the twelfth century to rebel against the injustice of the way she was treated by the man she loved. Most women who suffer violence do not have their voices heard.
Mews & Chiavaroli (2001) pp. 106-7. Heloise rebelled against the grotesque injustice of Abelard being castrated. Medieval women like Heloise resisted castration culture more than do academics today. Epic literature is filled with massive violence against men. The vast majority of the men killed never have their voices heard. Today about four times more men than women suffer violent death, yet violence against men is much less of a public concern than is violence against women.
Two love poems in Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, C 58 appear to be associated with Peter Abelard. Wollin (2010). Those poems are “Your lover’s muse greets you with happy omen {Omine felici te Musa salutat amici},” Werner (1904) p. 22 (poem 48), Latin text and English translation at Dronke (1965) vol. 1, p. 260; and “My sweet beloved, you are more beautiful than Galatea {Dulcis amica mea, speciosior es Galatea},” Werner (1904) p. 23 (poem 49). Wollin (2010), pp. 369-76, provides an edition and commentary for both poems. Given its manuscript context, Ad fugitivum may have been a poem projected onto Heloise. Its emotional tone is consistent with the reception of Dido’s love for Aeneas.
Subsequent quotes from Ad fugitivum are similarly sourced. Those above are vv. 32-5 (Then I was a gem…), 38-40 (To triumph by deceit…), 45 (What gave before delight…).
[6] The woman complains:
Because of you, I am often given many beatings
and my soft limbs can scarcely endure them.
The reputation of shame hurts more than the beatings of my limbs.
To suffer beatings is lighter for me than the words are.{ Sepe tui causa mihi sunt data verbera plura
Mollibus et membris vix pacienda meis.
Verbera quam membris nocuit plus fama pudoris,
Verbera sunt levius quam mihi verba pati. }
Ad fugitivum, vv. 41-4. The person beating the woman was most likely her mother or her mother-superior. Blaming her beloved man for those beatings is grotesquely unjust. Some persons might prefer harsh physical beatings to harsh words. Nonetheless, formal governance of common life is much better suited to preventing the objective harm of physical beatings (or castration) than the subjective harm of words and moral judgments.
[images] (1) “At Eternity’s Gate”: sorrowing old man. Painted by Vincent van Gogh at the Saint-Rémy Asylum in May, 1890. Van Gogh committed suicide on July 29, 1890. Painting preserved as accession # KM 111.041 at the Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo, Netherlands). Via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Dejected old man lying on a street in Varanasi, India, in 2005. Source image thanks to Jorge Royan via Wikimedia Commons.
References:
Dronke, Peter. 1965. Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric. 2 vols. Vol. 1, Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dronke, Peter. 1976. Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies: the twenty-sixth W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture delivered in the University of Glasgow 29th October, 1976. Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press. Reprinted as Chapter 9 (pp. 247-294) in Dronke, Peter. 1992. Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.
Hammond, Carolyn J. B., ed. and trans. 2016. Augustine. Confessions. Volume II: Books 9–13. Loeb Classical Library 27. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Luscombe, David, and Betty Radice, ed. and trans. 2013. The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise. Clarendon Press: Oxford.
McLaughlin, Mary, and Bonnie Wheeler, trans. 2009. The Letters of Heloise and Abelard. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mews, C. J., with Neville Chiavaroli, trans. 2001. The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: perceptions of dialogue in twelfth-century France. 2nd editions (1st edition 1999). New York: Palgrave. Review by Barbara Newman.
Newman, Barbara. 2016. Making Love in the Twelfth Century: Letters of two lovers in context. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Reviews by Constant Mews and by Alex J Novikoff.
Ruys, Juanita Feros. 2008. “Heloise, Monastic Temptation, and Memoria: Rethinking Autobiography, Sexual Experience, and Ethics.” Pp. 383-404 in Classen, Albrecht, ed. Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: New Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropological Theme. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Ruys, Juanita Feros. 2014. The Repentant Abelard: family, gender and ethics in Peter Abelard’s Carmen ad Astralabium and Planctus. New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmsillan.
Werner, Jakob. 1904. Über zwei Handschriften der Stadtbibliothek in Zürich [Handschrift C. 58/275 und C. 101/467], Beiträge zur Kunde der lat. Literatur des Mittelalters. Aarau: Druck von H.R. Sauerländer.
Wollin, Carsten. 2010. “Zwei Metrische Liebesepisteln Aus Dem Kreis Des Petrus Abaelardus.” Sacris Erudiri. 49: 339–377.