rescued Lancelot hinted at men’s resistance to love servitude

bog pony

In twelfth-century Europe, did men unquestioningly accept love servitude to women? Today, many men don’t protest men being deprived of all reproductive rights whatsoever. Men say little about acute anti-men gender discrimination in family courts and child custody decisions. Men maintain stoic indifference to being smeared as rapists and being targeted on college campuses for absurd sex regulations. Perhaps men enjoy love servitude to women, relish working as slaves, and cherish being imprisoned. Yet Chrétien de Troyes’s late-twelfth-century Arthurian romance Lancelot hints at a different answer. Men apparently resisted love servitude to women with the same tactics subordinate workers resist orders around the world today.

In Lancelot, a girl rescued the knight Lancelot from his imprisonment atop a tall tower. In popular romance, usually the white knight in shining armor rescues the damsel in distress from imprisonment atop a tall tower. The white knight Lancelot, however, was a manlet. He needed a damsel to rescue him from distress.

The manlet Lancelot passively resisted the girl. After she rescued him from the tower, she took him to her favorite retreat, a country house, safe, secluded, and well stocked with provisions. There servants removed Lancelot’s cloths, which were filthy from his languishing in prison. Then:

the girl put him to sleep
In a tall, magnificent bed,
And later gave him a bath
And such wonderful care that I couldn’t
Tell you half if I tried:
She treated him as sweetly
As if he’d been her father.
She brought him back to life,
Completely renewed and restored. [1]

An earlier Latin romance, Apollonius King of Tyre, presented a much different account of a young man-doctor reviving a beautiful young woman. If the girl in Lancelot was receptive and not ugly, a manly knight might have expressed his gratitude to her in a more exciting way. Perhaps she noticed something lacking extension. That would explain why she gave him a bath and treated him as if he were her father.

Urging the girl to rescue him, the manlet Lancelot swore to be her obedient servant. He implicitly promised to be not like other men in servitude to women. Lancelot declared:

I swear I’ll be yours to command
For all the rest of my life
…
there’ll never be a day
When I won’t do what you ask.
Whatever you ask, if it’s in
My power, will be done — and done
as quickly as I can do it. [2]

Most women who order their man-servant (husband, boyfriend, etc.) to do something resent the response “not today.” Lancelot swore that there would never be such a day. Another standard man-servant response is “later.” Lancelot swore that he would obey the woman’s orders “as quickly as I can.” Lancelot, of course, hedged and qualified with words about his potency. Those reservations about potency probably were relevant when the girl gave him a bath.

From the commanding heights of culture, influential institutions and voices teach men to be subordinate to women. But boys aren’t stupid, and men aren’t stupid, either. Overpowered in social communication, men resort to passive resistance. Such passive resistance, however, isn’t sufficient to advance men’s liberation.

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Notes:

[1] Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot ll. 6670-8, from Old French trans. Raffel (1997) p. 210.

[2] Lancelot ll. 6597-8, 6001-5. The ideal of men’s love servitude to women has come to be widely celebrated as courtly love (amour courtois).

[image] Kerry bog pony stallion. 6 September 2008. Thanks to Heather Moreton and Wikimedia Commons.

Reference:

Raffel, Burton, trans. 1997. Chrétien de Troyes. Lancelot, the knight of the cart. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Henrich on cultural success, silence on cultural failure

Cleopatra and Caesar

Culture has made human beings who they are. Leading human evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich compellingly makes that point in his recent book, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Henrich declares:

The answer to why humans are different is that we crossed the Rubicon. Cultural evolution became cumulative, and then both this accumulating body of information and its cultural products, like fire and food-sharing norms, developed as the central driving forces in human genetic evolution. … Having crossed the Rubicon, we can’t go back. The impact of this transition is underlined by the fact that, despite our long evolutionary history as foragers, we generally can’t survive by hunting and gathering when we have been stripped of that relevant culturally acquired knowledge. … So, yes, we are smart, but not because we stand on the shoulders of giants or are giants ourselves. We stand on the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits. The hobbits do get a bit taller as the pyramid ascends, but it’s still the number of hobbits, not the height of particular hobbits, that’s allowing us to see farther. [1]

Henrich’s explanation draws upon an ancient Roman rhetorical figure involving Julius Caesar, J. R. R. Tolkien’s influential fictional creation of hobbits, a reference from a twelfth-century Latin text of Bernard of Chartres, and perhaps an allusion to the Great Pyramid of Giza, a monument of bureaucracy. No other organism creates such linguistic figures. Yet that reality differs subtly from the claim that culture is domesticating us and making us smarter. Human cultural evolution doesn’t support a master narrative of inevitable progressive enlightenment. Cultural evolution can make humans more brutal and more stupid.

In Henrich’s view, humans get smart in evolutionary and development time through social learning. Human toddlers outperform chimpanzees and orangutans not in cognitive tests concerning space, quantities, and causality, but only in social learning.[2] Social learning depends on making sense of presence of another like oneself. Long duration, broad bandwidth, synchronous, ephemeral communication, e.g. in-person communication among associates, supports sense of presence and social learning more than does short, narrow bandwidth, asynchronous, stored communication, e.g. short text messaging. Cultural evolution in which communication time shifts to the latter makes persons dumber.

Henrich associates greater population size and greater interconnectedness of individuals with greater cultural development. Those mechanisms suggest the importance of concentrating persons in factories and in cities in spurring the industrial revolutions of the past two centuries. However, England and Wales (and probably other European countries as well) over the past two centuries has experienced a significant cultural change: a massive flattening of the given name distribution. In contrast, symbolic markets in which a larger number of individuals can communicate with each other more cheaply and more quickly tend to promote blockbuster economics. Blockbuster economics involves social success that undermines objective justification for status and exacerbates wealth inequalities. Blockbuster economics also favors cultural homogenization and concentration of symbolic power. Masses who are more easily manipulated are less likely to advance collective intelligence. If the secret to our success is acting like sheep, crossing the Rubicon points to how charismatic leaders like Julius Caesar or Hitler can greatly change human societies.

A good case study of cultural evolution is twelfth-century Europe. That century experienced elite promotion of men’s subservience to women in love (“courtly love”). Some scholars have even interpreted knights brutalizing other knights in service to idealized women as a means of civilizing and domesticating men. That cultural development remains influential in competition for prestige. Thus a best-selling author recently credited feminization of civilization for contributing to the long-run historical decline in violence. That author approvingly proclaimed an astonishing cultural development:

At the top, a consensus has formed within the international {elite} community that violence against women is the most pressing human rights problem remaining in the world. [3]

In the U.S. today, four times more men than women die from violence. Around the world, violence overwhelmingly occurs against men. Elite consensus that violence against women is the most pressing human rights problem in the world today shows that social learning can powerfully promote stupidity.

For social learning to develop a humane, rational collective mind, human societies need intellectual counterbalances to gynocentrism. Henrich promotes ideals of elite intellectual culture:

It’s the willingness and ability of large numbers of individuals at the knowledge frontier to freely interact, exchange views, disagree, learn from each other, build collaborations, trust strangers, and be wrong. [4]

As the recent persecution of Nobel-prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt has made clear, any deviation from the narrow path of social propriety in speaking about women can today cause anyone enormous harm. Men’s biological inferiority to women in social communication has been well-established in scholarly literature. Cultural cognition and the structure of current academic prestige competition has produce comically tendentious experiments, mind-numbing academic “scientific” rhetoric, and wide-spread dissemination of grotesque, highly damaging falsehoods about men.

Preventing the collective mind from going insane requires supporting recalcitrant masculine voices like those in medieval Latin literature. In medieval Europe, men writing in Latin freely expressed outrageous views about wives, the church, and women in general. Latin provided a language for views that couldn’t be expressed in commonly spoken languages. Medieval Latin literature addressed violence against men in ways far more intelligent than currently fashionable anti-men bigotry (talk of “toxic masculinity”). Medieval Latin literature played a crucial role in limiting the damage to the collective mind from vernacular gynocentrism.

With U.S. universities leading efforts, within existing conditions of mass incarceration, to criminalize men for ordinary sexual interactions, the future of the collective mind looks grim. But the die is not cast. Joseph Henrich’s new book The Secret of Our Success underscores the importance of culture. From an economic and political perspective, the most important cultural issue today is collective understanding of women and men in relation to each other.[5] Under particular human biological predispositions, the twelfth-century European cultural inheritance, imperatives of collegiality in academic competition for prestige, overwhelming mass media patronage of women, and particular national-political circumstances, cultural evolution is making us humans less humane and less intelligent. To become more humane and more intelligent, today’s human culture must embrace medieval Latin literature of men’s sexed protest and similar recalcitrant masculine voices.

*  *  *  *  *

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Notes:

[1] Henrich (2015) pp. 317, 323.

[2] Id. pp. 13-5.

[3] Pinker (2011) p. 414. For related claims, see note [2] in my post on violence and enlightenment.

[4] Henrich (2015) p. 325. Underscoring his emphasis on techno-elite culture, Henrich further states:

It bears emphasizing that once the body of know-how becomes sufficiently complex, cultural evolution will often favor an increasingly complex division of labor (really, a division of information). In this new world, the size of the collective brain will be influenced by the size and interconnectedness of people at the knowledge frontier {emphasis in the original}, the place at which individuals know enough to have any chance of making improvements on existing forms.

Id. Persons in their teens have written highly successful mobile phone apps. Persons who dropped out of college have founded and led enormously powerful, high-tech corporations. The most important and most difficult aspects of culture concern human relations. Life experience and broad literary study contribute greatly to thinking about the most important aspects of culture.

Henrich briefly recognizes that cultural poetic sophistication is more important than factual knowledge:

The framing of the message and the messenger are crucial, but the mini causal models (the “facts”) are merely secondary — only necessary to support any acquired practices or social norms.

Id. p. 328.

[5] Marsupials, once a gregarious species, are now solitary mammals. The significance of that development shouldn’t be minimized. Human pair bonding is being challenged by social promotion of female promiscuity (celebrating slut walks) and men’s opportunistic response to that development. In addition, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) is one of the most significant social movements of our time.

[image] Cleopatra and Caesar. Painting, detail. By Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1866. Thanks to Mezzo-Mondo and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Henrich, Joseph. 2015. The secret of our success: how culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pinker, Steven. 2011. The better angels of our nature: why violence has declined. New York: Viking.

De amore & Gesta Romanorum revised Seneca’s Controversiae

Seneca

Seneca the Elder’s Controversies {Controversiae} documents ancient Roman orators developing attention-grabbing stories like those of the Greek and Roman novels. One of the most important of these stories tells of a strong, independent woman rescuing a man from incarceration. Since Rome’s founding men married Sabine wives, Rome and subsequent civilizations have suffered under the disproportionate criminalization and incarceration of men characteristic of gynocentric society. Andreas Capellanus’s late-twelfth-century About Love {De amore} incorporated only the sophistic form of Seneca’s Controversiae. The mid-thirteenth-century sermon story-collection Deeds of the Romans {Gesta Romanorum} directly incorporated Seneca’s story of the woman freeing a man from incarceration. Gesta Romanorum depicted the woman’s keen intelligence, celebrated her compassion for the man, and interpreted her as representing Christ.

Seneca’s Controversiae presents stories for orators simply as factual narratives. The story about the woman rescuing the man from incarceration lacks any moral consciousness of the social devaluation of men’s lives:

A man captured by pirates wrote to his father about a ransom. He was not ransomed. The daughter of the pirate chief forced him to swear to marry her if he were let go. He swore. She left her father and followed the young man. He returned to his father, and married the girl. An orphan appeared on the scene; the father ordered his son to divorce the daughter of the pirate chief and marry the orphan. He refused. His father disinherited him.

{ Captus a piratis scripsit patri de redemptione; non redimebatur. Archipiratae filia iurare eum coegit ut duceret se uxorem si dimissus esset; iuravit. Relicto patre secuta est adulescentem. Redit ad patrem, duxit illam. Orba incidit. Pater imperat ut archipiratae filiam dimittat et orbam ducat. Nolentem abdicat. }[1]

The story begins with reference to a backstory of violence against men. Being captured rather than killed commonly characterizes female privilege. Yet as a captive, the man apparently had the socially disposable status of men in general (his father didn’t ransom him). The man traded freedom from imprisonment for the prison of marriage. In Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale, a woman’s oath has great social importance. In this case, the father without concern ordered his son to break a sworn oath and marry a different woman. When the son refused to break his oath to the woman who rescued him from impersonal incarceration, his father disinherited him.

Seneca records orators speaking on behalf of different parties in the story. One orator cruelly ridiculed the woman as a daughter of a pirate:

She should be banned from dry land.

{ Prohibeo domo terra prohibendam. }[2]

He also ironically suggested that she hated her father, a bad omen for a wife’s relationship with her husband and with her father-in-law:

Here is a promising wife, a promising daughter-in-law — she can love even a prisoner, hate even her father.

{ Bonae spei uxor, bonae spei nurus, quae amare potest vel captivum, odisse vel patrem. }

Defending the daughter, another orator speculated that her mother was a victim of the pirate father. The orator praised her mother and declared the daughter was nothing like her father:

She is called the daughter of a pirate chief, but her mother, I think, was some captive. Certainly her character set her apart from her father. She showed compassion, she made intercession, she wept, and she was moved by everyone’s perils. There was nothing of the pirate detectable in her.

{ Archipiratae filia vocatur, puto ex aliqua nata captiva; certe animum eius natura a patre abduxerat: misericors erat, deprecabatur, flebat, movebatur periculis omnium; nihil in illa deprehendi poterat piraticum. }

Pirates weren’t regarded as being noble. The orator, however, pointed out that if you look far enough back in the family of any noble person, the family was once not recognized to be noble. Moreover, if a man shrewdly marries a rich woman (the orphan was assumed to be rich from money she inherited from her father), she may leave him and take her wealth away from him (divorce courts catered to women even in ancient Rome). This is all typical sophistic word play. The orators showed no deep compassion for imprisoned men.

Andreas Capellanus’s twelfth-century work De amore reflects the spirit of Seneca’s Controversiae and similar texts of the Second Sophistic. It explicitly includes sophistical cases:

A certain lady had a lover who stayed away on an expedition overseas. She had no expectation of his early return — in fact everyone despaired of his return — and she sought another lover. Now a confidential aide of her first lover was quite indignant at the women’s changed loyalty, and opposed her new love. The woman was reluctant to accede to his advice, and put forward the following defense of her conduct. She said that if a woman widowed by the death of a lover can seek a fresh lover after a period of two years, this concession ought to be granted all the more to a woman bereft of a living lover, a woman who had not been given the pleasure of the arrival of a messenger or a letter sent by her lover since he departed — especially as there was no shortage of messengers.

{ Quaedam domina, quum suus in ultramarina coamans expeditione maneret, nec de propinqua ipsius reditione confideret, immo quasi ab omnibus eius desperaretur adventus, alium sibi quaerit amantem. Quidam vero secretarius prioris amantis nimium condolens de mulieris fide mutata novum sibi contradicit amorem. Cuius mulier nolens assentire consilio tali se defensione tuetur. Ait enim si feminae, quae morte viduatur amantis, licet post biennii metas alium sibi amatorem appetere, multo magis ei debet mulieri licere, quae vivo [et ultra] viduatur amante et quae nullius nuntii vel litterae ab amante transmissae potuit a praefato tempore visitatione gaudere, maxime ubi non deerat copia nuntiorum. }[3]

The lover who fails to return timely from a long voyage is a conventional topos of romance. The case moves from serious issues of mourning norms to the common complaint about a distant friend, “Why haven’t you written me?” The trailing note about “no shortage of messengers” is a wry, rhetorical flourish. Another case:

A certain young man adorned with no honesty of character and a mature knight pleasantly endowed with every moral attribute sought the love of the same woman. The young man’s counter-argument was that he should be preferred to the mature man, because if he obtained the love he sought he could thereby gain worthy manners, and the woman would win outstanding praise if through her his wickedness was transformed into sterling worth.

{ Iuvenis quidam nulla probitate decorus et miles adultus omni probitate iucundus amorem ab eadem muliere deposcunt. Contradicit quidem iuvenis se praeferendum adulto quia, si postulatum fuerit consecutus amorem, ex tali posset igitur morum probitatem assumere, et si per eam ad morum probitatem improbitas reducatur, laus esset mulieri non modica. }

This case contrasts personal, passionate love with more abstract ideas of virtuous love and love as seeking the other’s good. Women’s typical passionate preference for a young man over a “mature” man and a jerk boy over a nice guy adds emotional color to the case. While Seneca’s cases invoke agonistic oratory among men, Andreas Capellanus connected the cases directly to gynocentrism by having one woman-judge render the decision for each case. In this case, the woman judge concluded with an epigram alluding to sexual intercourse and raising children:

the mere casting of seed does not always harvest breed

{ non semper iactata producunt semina fructum }

That sort of epigram has been updated into wisdom for ambitious career woman today: have sex with the bad boys, but marry the dull beta man who will support you by vacuuming and dusting.

The mid-thirteenth-century Latin sermon story-collection Gesta Romanorum re-interpreted Seneca’s case in accordance with the medieval idealization of women. As in the story in Seneca’s Controversiae, pirates captured a man. The man’s father refused to ransom his son. But the ideal woman intervened:

Now, the pirate chief who detained him in chains had a daughter of great beauty and virtue. She was at this time in her twentieth year, and frequently visited the young man with the hope of alleviating his grief.

{ Ille, qui eum in vinculis habebat, quandam pulchram filiam ac oculis hominum gratiosam genuerat, que nutrita in domo erat quousque viginti annos in etate sua compleverat, quae sepius incarceratum visitatum ivit ac consolabatur. }[4]

The captured man refused consolation from the woman. He instead asked her to set him free. She promised to do so if he would marry her. He agreed. She then freed him, and they both fled back to the man’s country.

Back in his home country, the man introduced his woman-savior, his betrothed, to his father. The father told his son that if he went through with the marriage, he would lose his inheritance. That threat echoes the outcome of Seneca’s case. The father also warned that the woman had deceived her father, and that she sought marriage only to gratify her lust. Those are claims brought up in the discussion of the case in Seneca. Hearing those claims, the woman argued against them with impeccable medieval scholastic reasoning:

To your first objection, that I deceived my own parent, I reply that it is not true. He deceives who takes away or diminishes a certain good. But my father is so rich that he doesn’t need any addition. When, therefore, I had maturely weighed this matter, I procured the young man’s freedom. And if my father had received a ransom from him he would have been only a little richer, while you would have been utterly impoverished. Now, in acting thus, I have served you, who refused the ransom, and have not injured my parent. As for your last objection that an unworthy passion urged me to do this, I assert that is false. Feelings of such nature arise either from great personal beauty, or from wealth or honors; or finally, from robust appearance. None of these qualities your son possessed. For imprisonment had destroyed his beauty, and he wasn’t sufficiently wealthy even to liberate himself. Moreover, much anxiety had worn away his strength and left him emaciated and sickly. Therefore compassion was what persuaded me to free him.

{ Ad primam respondeo, quando dicis, quod ego decepi patrem meum proprium, quod non est verum. Ille decipitur, qui in aliquo bono diminuitur. Sed pater meus tam locuples est, quod alicujus auxilio non indiget. Cum hoc perpendi, juvenem istum a carcere liberavi, et si pater meus pro eo redempcionem accepisset, non multum propter hoc dicior fuisset, et tu per redempcionem depauperatus esses. Ergo in isto actu te salvavi, quod redempcionem non dedisti, et patri meo nullam injuriam feci. Ad aliam racionem, quando dicis, quod ego ex libidine hoc feci, respondeo: hoc nullo modo potest fieri, quia libido aut est propter pulchritudinem aut propter divicias aut propter fortitudinem. Sed filius tuus nullum istorum habuit, quia pulchritudo ejus per carcerem erat annichilata; nec dives fuit, quia non habuit unde se ipsum redimeret; nec fortis, quia fortitudinem perdidit per carceris maceracionem. Ergo sola pietas me movebat, quod ipsum liberavi. }

The father yielded to the woman’s well-reasoned argument. She and his son had a fancy wedding and lived the rest of their lives peacefully together.

The moralization of the story in Gesta Romanorum identifies the woman with Christ. It explains:

The daughter who visited him in prison is the divinity united to the soul, who sympathized with the human species. After His passion, He descended into Hell and freed us from the chains of the devil. … Christ, moved with compassion, came down from Heaven to visit us, and took upon Himself our form, and required no more for our redemption than to be united in the closest bonds with humanity.

{ Filia, que eum in carcere visitavit, est divinitas anime conjuncta, que humano generi compaciebatur, que post passionem suam ad infernum descendit et hominem a vinculis diaboli liberavit. … Ideo Christus motus pietate ad nos de celis descendit, nos visitavit, quando carnem nostram assumpsit, et tamen nichil aliud peciit pro nostra redempcione, nisi quod sit homini desponsatus }

The moral with the woman as Christ sympathizing with the man has continuing relevance today. Men are now vastly disproportionately incarcerated. In a major effort to exacerbate further that fundamental social injustice, colleges and universities are now spearheading efforts to criminalize men for ordinary sexual behavior. Women today should act in the person of Christ as the medieval woman did to liberate the man from incarceration.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

Notes:

[1] Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 1.6, “The Pirate Chief’s Daughter {Archipiratae Filia},” from Latin text and English translation from Winterbottom (1974). I’ve changed some verbs in the historical present tense to the past tense for consistency in modern English. Latin text is available online.

Seneca the Elder (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) was a Spaniard from Cordoba. He lived from about 55 BGC to 40 GC. His son, Seneca the Younger, was a well-known philosopher and playwright. Laird (2008), pp. 212-3, notes the close thematic connections between the Controversiae and ancient romance.

[2] Seneca, Controversiae 1.6, similarly from Winterbottom (1974), as are the subsequent two quotes from Controversiae 1.6 above.

[3] Andreas Capellanus, De amore 2.7.14, Latin text and English translation from Walsh (1982) pp. 262-3. The subsequent two quotes are from De amore 2.7.6, trans. id. pp. 255, 257. The second of those quotes is an epigram probably adapted from Ovid’s Art of Love {Ars Amatoria} 2.513.

[4] Gesta Romanorum, Moralized Story {Exemplum} 5 (“About pursuing with faithfulness {De sectanda fidelitate}”), Latin text from Oesterley (1872), Latin translation from Swan & Hooper (1876) p. 8, with my changes to follow the Latin more closely and to be more easily readable. The subsequent two quotes are from id, pp. 9-11. A new English translation is forthcoming in Stace (2016). In the Anglo-Latin Gesta Romanorum of Bright (2019), this is Exemplum 87 (“Pirate’s Daughter”). See also Additional Exempla, Exemplum 10 (“Pirate’s Daughter (Variant Version)”) in id.

An English Franciscan probably compiled Gesta Romanorum shortly before 1274. Harris (1995), p. 169. Some scholars regard it as from the early fourteenth century. Gesta Romanorum was a highly popular and influential medieval work.

Gesta Romanorum includes eleven exempla apparently taken from Seneca’s Controversiae. Cited as Controversiae citation -> Gesta Romanorum exeplum number, these are  1.1 -> 2; 1.3 -> 3; 1.4 -> 100; 1.5 -> 4; 1.6 -> 5; 2.2 -> 6; 2.4 -> 7; 3.1 -> 73; 4.4 -> 134; 6.3 -> 90; 7.4 -> 14.  Friedlaender (1909) p. 297 (I’ve corrected one mis-citation). In addition, Gesta Romanorum story 266 (in printed Latin edition) is apparently from Seneca, De ira 3.39. Herrtage (1879) p. 539.

Other than his Epistles, Seneca the Younger’s works attracted substantial attention in medieval Europe only from the early-twelfth century. In the Middle Ages, the Controversiae were known as a work of Seneca the Younger. Mayer (2015) pp. 277-8.

[image] Bust of Seneca the Younger. Anonymous, 17th century. Item Cat. E144 in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Thanks to Jean-Pol Grandmont and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Bright, Philippa, ed. and trans. 2019. The Anglo-Latin Gesta Romanorum: from Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce MS 310. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Friedlaender, Ludwig, trans. by Alfred Bradly Gough. 1909. “Appendix LV: Borrowing from the Controversiae of the Elder Seneca in the Gesta Romanorum.” Roman life and manners under the early empire. London: Routledge.

Harris, Nigel. 1995. “Review of Brigitte Weiske, Gesta Romanorum, 2 vols, Fortuna Vitrea 3-4 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1992).” Medium Aevum. 64 (1): 168.

Herrtage, Sidney J. H. 1879. The early English versions of the Gesta Romanorum. London: Pub. for the Early English Text Society, by N. Trübner & Co.

Laird, Andrew. 2008. “Approaching Style and rhetoric.” Ch. 12 (pp. 201-17) in Whitmarsh, Tim, ed. The Cambridge companion to the Greek and Roman novel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Mayer, Roland. 2015. “Seneca Redivivus: Seneca in the Medieval and Renaissance World.” Ch. 21 (pp. 277-88) in Bartsch, Shadi, and Alessandro Schiesaro, eds. 2015. The Cambridge companion to Seneca. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Oesterley, Hermann, ed. 1872. Gesta Romanorum. Berlin: Weidmann. Alternate textual presentation.

Stace, Christopher, trans. and Harris, Nigel, intro. 2016. Gesta Romanorum. Manchester Univ Press: Manchester.

Swan, Charles, and Wynnard Hooper, trans. 1876. Gesta romanorum: entertaining moral stories. New York: Dover Publications Inc. (reprint edition of 1969).

Walsh, P.G., trans. 1982. Andreas Capellanus on love {De amore}. London: Duckworth.

Winterbottom, Michael, trans. 1974. Seneca the Elder. Declamations, Volume I: Controversiae, Books 1-6. Loeb Classical Library 463. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

crapping crows, laying eggs & medieval masculine difference

medieval Viking excrement

Excrement and sex are fundamental aspects of human bodies. The recent, acclaimed scholarly book Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics explains:

There is one thing that all medieval bodies have in common — the male body, the female body, the transgendered body, the eunuch body, the bisexual body, the feminized body, the masculinized body, the sodomized body, the sodomizing body, the chaste body, the celibate body, the married body, the lecherous body, the heretical body, the devout body, the Christian body, the Jewish body, the Saracen body, the visionary body, the lay body: they all defecate. This is not to say that these bodies may not defecate in different socially constructed ways. … Defecation as a ritual is a process of relations that constructs a series of tensions. If, every time we defecate, what we produce is utilized on a dunghill, our excrement is validated; if it is hidden in a cesspit and regarded as the source of filth, pollution, and horror, our bodies disgust and alienate us. [1]

Like humans and human work generally, excrement is produced in a particular time, place, and culture. A medieval Latin story of men’s sexed protest invoked crapping crows. A later, closely related medieval French story replaced the masculine figure of crapping crows with a more feminine one of laying eggs. As that literary development suggests, cultural space for recalcitrant masculine voices is tenuous within the development of gynocentric human society.

The medieval Latin story of crapping crows expresses concern about wives betraying their husbands’ secrets. The social process of evaluating offenses is gender-biased toward punishing men. That makes men particularly concerned about keeping secrets.[2] The Latin story comes from a mid-thirteenth-century collection of stories apparently designed to provide material for sermons. According to the story, a husband resolved to test experimentally the maxim that wives divulge their husbands’ secrets. The husband said one night to his wife:

My dear wife, I have a secret to communicate to you, if I were certain that you wouldn’t reveal it to anyone. If you should divulge it, that would cause me the greatest uneasiness and vexation. [3]

The wife responded:

My lord, fear not; we are one body, and your advantage is mine. In like manner, your injury must deeply affect me.

Accepting his wife’s assurance, the husband then told her:

Well, then, know that my bowels being oppressed to an extraordinary degree, I fell very sick. Having gone to the privy to perform a call of nature, I defecated a crow. It flew away and left me in the greatest trepidation and confusion of mind.

A crow has coloring like feces and the size of an impressive pile. To the husband’s outrageous story of his bowel movement, the wife responded:

Is it possible? But, husband, why should this trouble you? You ought rather to rejoice that you are freed from such a pestilent tenant.

The next morning the wife hurried off to talk with a neighboring woman. She secured a promise of secrecy from her and then told her:

a marvelous thing has happened to my poor husband. Being last night extremely sick, he voided two prodigious crows, feathers and all, which immediately flew away. I am much concerned.

That neighboring woman then told another neighbor that the man had set three crows to flight from his posterior. That neighbor told another that it was four. The story spread “until it was very credibly reported that sixty crows had been evacuated by one unfortunate young man.” The husband gathered his neighbors He explained that he hadn’t actually crapped crows, but had merely validated wisdom about husbands revealing secrets to their wives.

A treatise compiled in French about a century after the Latin collection included a rewritten version of the story about crapping crows. The French story, like the earlier Latin one, addressed wives betraying their husbands’ secrets.[4] But for the empirical test of wisdom about telling wives secrets, the French version has the husband tell his wife that he laid two eggs. The wife then tells that secret to a neighbor, who tells another neighbor, and so on. In the French version, what the whole country came to know was the husband laid five eggs.

Gender apparently shaped the evolution of these stories of wives disclosing husbands’ secrets. Laying eggs is distinctly feminine action. Masculine stories favor crudeness, singularity (“lone ranger”), and extremes. That’s reflected in crapping a crow, a single crow, that is then gossiped into a massive pile of sixty crows. Feminine story-telling tends to be more social and more respectful of conventional behavior. That’s reflected in the husband claiming to have laid two eggs, and the two eggs becoming only five. In short, a masculine story of men’s sexed protest became more feminine in its vernacular translation. Not surprisingly, women’s social dominance shaped Latin culture less strongly than it did vernacular culture.

Cultural development has largely determined the collective intelligence of human societies. Men being imprisoned without the benefit of counsel merely for having sex of reproductive type and being too poor to pay the subsequent state-imposed financial extractions is a gynocentric culture development. Within the context of existing mass incarceration, strong efforts to punish and criminalize men for a wide range of ordinary human sexual interactions is a gynocentric cultural development. So too is elite prioritization of violence against women in the context of much more frequent and harmful violence against men. Historically, medieval Latin literature of men’s sexed protest has been one of the most vibrant intellectual currents contrary to gynocentric culture. Even with respect to fundamental aspects of human bodies such as excrement and sex, recalcitrant masculine voices are crucial for questioning social-intellectual idiocy and promoting collective intelligence.[5]

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Read more:

Notes:

[1] Morrison (2008) pp. 2, 7. Morrison explains:

Fecal discourse can be read as a culturally coded and determined event. We might say we are exploring the ideology or metaphysics of excrement.

Id. p. 7. The rest of Morrison’s paragraph quotes Andrew Shail, Gillian Howie, Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, and Jonathan Dollimore. A subsequent section of her book invokes Bataille, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva and Mary Douglas among academic cult figures, as well as quoting many others with more obscure positions in academic status citation networks. Morrison is Professor of English, Texas State University-San Marcos. She authored Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance.

Among blurb statements for Morrison’s book:

  • “In this fine and comprehensive study of that which we mark off as different from us, excrement become the necessary stuff for understanding identity, desire, and history.” Michael Uebell, author of Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages and co-editor of The Middle Ages at Work.
  • “In a truly fearless and foundational work, wide-ranging and adventurous in scope, Morrison draws from new and pertinent critical approaches (ecocriticsm, waste studies, green studies) and some of their source disciplines (psychology, anthropology, sociology) to invent, define, illustrate and examine the practice of fecopoetics – the ‘cultural poetics of excrement.'” Jeff Persels, French Department and Director of European Studies, University of South Carolina and co-editor of Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art.
  • “Morrison schools us in the nuanced meaning of medieval excrement, whose position in medieval culture was in fact ambivalent and various.” Kathy Lavezzo, English Department, University of Iowa.
  • “Susan Signe Morrison makes the case that we cheat both the authors and ourselves if we fail to look at the full range of medieval poetic expression. After this rigorous, astute, and insightful book, no one should doubt her. Using both theory and close textual analysis, Morrison has produced a persuasive argument for the fact that we should take these matters as seriously as Chaucer did. This book will turn thought about medieval vulgarity on its end.” Martha Bayless, English Department, University of Oregon and author of Parody in the Middle Ages.

Morrison’s book is part of The New Middle Ages book series. That series has “particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses.” The New Middle Ages book series “has become notorious for offering little copyediting or proofreading.” Bildhauer (2010) p. 389.

[2] Stories of men’s concern about women betraying men’s secrets existed in ancient Roman. In a story attributed to Cato the Elder, Papirius Praetextatus revealed to his mother that the Roman Senate was considering allowing one man to have two wives or one woman to have two husbands. Papirius’s mother told that secret to many other women and caused an uproar. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 1.23. That story was widely disseminated in medieval Europe as Tale 126 of Gesta Romanorum, from Latin trans. Swan & Hooper (1876) pp. 227-8.

Men’s concern about women betraying secrets is expressed three times in Book 3 of Andreas Capellanus, De amore (written c. 1180): para. 70, 87-8, 102-3. The final instance states:

no woman can keep a secret. The more she is bidden to keep something in confidence, the more eagerly she strains to tell it to everybody. No woman to this day has been found to keep any secret undivulged, no matter how important or even likely to cause someone’s death. Any secret confided to a woman’s trust seems to burn her up inside if she does not first expose the confidences so disastrously reposed in her. You could not prevent women acting like this by bidding them to do the opposite, the rule of thumb which I stated earlier, because all women take the greatest pleasure in gossiping about something new. So be sure to keep your secret from every woman.

De amore 3.102-3, from Latin trans. Walsh (1982) pp. 317, 319. Book 3 of De amore is a subtle dialogical manipulation of men’s sexed protest.

Men’s protest of  women divulging men’s secrets exists in many subsequent medieval works of men’s sexed protest. Leading works are Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose and Liber lamentationum Matheoluli. See notes [3] and [5] in my post on Marie de France’s Bisclavret. Marie de France’s Bisclavret is itself an poignant and powerful work underscoring the importance of respecting men’s secrets. In Chaucer, Wife of Bath’s Prologue, the wife states about her close friend:

To her I revealed all my secrets.
For had my husband pissed on a wall,
Or done a thing that should have cost his life,
To her, and to another worthy wife,
And to my niece, whom I loved well,
I would have told every one of his secrets.
And so I did very often, God knows it,
That made his face often red and hot
For true shame, and blamed himself because he
Had told to me so great a secret.

ll. 533-42, modernized by Larry Benson at his Harvard Geoffrey Chaucer site. See also the Wife of Bath’s retelling of Ovid’s tale of Midas and his donkey ears, id. ll. 945-82.

Sexual betrayal has particular significance to men and is commonly addressed in medieval literature of men’s sexed protest.

[3] Gesta Romanorum, Tale 125, from Latin trans. Swan & Hooper (1876) pp. 226-7. I’ve made some minor modernization to the translation. Id. translated paraphrastically the Latin text:

Cum ad privata accessissem ut opus naturae facerem, corvus ingerrimus a parte posterorii evolabat.

I’ve included above a more direct translation of that Latin text. All the subsequent quotes above are from id.

[4] The French version of the crapping crows story is from Livre pour l’enseignement de ses filles du Chevalier de La Tour (Book of the Knight of Tour Landry) Ch. 74. Geoffroy IV de la Tour Landry, a knight, compiled that book about 1372. An English translation of that text, written in the mid-fifteenth century, is available online in Wright (1868), pp. 96-7. A modernized English version of the translation that Caxton printed is available in Gregg (1997) p. 119 (W9). The story is no. 1359 in Tubach (1969).

[5] On the importance of culture to humans’ capabilities, Henrich (2015).

[image] The Lloyds Bank coprolite: a nine-inch (23 cm) long stool that a Viking defecated at Jorvik (present-day York, England) early in the tenth century. Image thanks to Linda Spashett and Wikimedia Commons. Here’s more information about Vikings living in tenth-century Jorvik. Most men are much stronger than almost all women:

In terms of upper body muscle mass there’s less than a 10% overlap between the two distributions. The vast majority of men have more muscle mass than all women. 99.9% of females have less upper body muscle mass than the average male. The 61% greater average muscle mass in male upper bodies translates into 90% greater average strength (the respective values for the lower body are 50% and 61%).

However, Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti insightfully reported the nickname of a Penobscot Indian women in colonial America:

Mali me’sadwədjan, “Mary big-faeces” (identity omitted), derived from advertising her ability to surpass the tribal cannon {an old iron cannon that the Penobscot Indians acquired} in capacity of discharge.

Despite men generally being much stronger than women, one should not assume that a man produced the massive Lloyds Bank coprolite.

References:

Bildhauer, Bettina. 2010. “On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages, and: Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics (review).” Studies in the Age of Chaucer. 32 (1): 386-389.

Gregg, Joan Young. 1997. Devils, women, and Jews: reflections of the other in medieval sermon stories. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Henrich, Joseph Patrick. 2015. The secret of our success: how culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Morrison, Susan Signe. 2008. Excrement in the late Middle Ages: sacred filth and Chaucer’s fecopoetics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Swan, Charles, and Wynnard Hooper, trans. 1876. Gesta romanorum: entertaining moral stories. New York: Dover Publications Inc. (reprint edition of 1969).

Tubach, Frederic C. 1969. Index exemplorum; a handbook of medieval religious tales. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.

Walsh, P.G., trans. 1982. Andreas Capellanus on love {De amore}. London: Duckworth.

Wright, Thomas. 1868. Geoffroy de La Tour Landry. The book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, compiled for the instruction of his daughters. London: Pub. for the Early English Text Society, by N. Trübner & Co.