internal monologues of Chrétien de Troyes and Walter Map

Medieval romance flourished in the twelfth century through elite interests in propagating ideology of men being ennobled through brutal suffering in servitude to women (“courtly love”).[1] The most widely read source of Arthurian romance in the twelfth century was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin tale of British kings. However, to reach a broad readership and audience, romances were most frequently written in the natively spoken languages of medieval Europe.[2] Latin, in contrast, was the learned, pan-European language that generated the most subversive, satirical, irreverent, bawdy, and funny literature.

Chrétien de Troyes and Walter Map wrote romances in Old French and Latin, respectively. Both were brilliant twelfth-century European authors learned in Latin and familiar with tales of ladies and knights in local languages. The subversive potential of Chrétien de Troyes’s Old French work is concealed beneath a smooth surface. Walter Map, in contrast, wrote an obviously raucous and disorderly Latin text. Close comparison of internal monologues in Chrétien’s Lancelot and Walter’s tale of Sadius and Galo shows knightly romance in Latin outrageously capping knightly romance in Old French.

Arthurian monologues upon Latin romance

Although Chrétien de Troyes knew well subversive Latin literature, he chose to serve elite power. Chrétien translated from Latin into Old French Ovid’s Art of Love and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.[3] Ovid, the great teacher of love, was regarded as so threatening that he was exiled, castrated, and called a misogynist for defying the goddess Cybele. Chrétien sensibly turned his literary skills to less dangerous work. He superficially presented in French romances the subjects and interpretations that gynocentrism desired. For example, Chrétien took up an assignment from Countess Marie de Champagne, the oldest daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and nominal King Louis VII. In the prologue to Chrétien’s Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart, Chrétien explained:

Because my lady of Champagne
Wants me to start a new
Romance, I’ll gladly begin one,
For I’m completely her servant
In whatever she wants me to do [4]

Chrétien then signaled his sophistication by flattering Marie de Champagne with the rhetorical figure of apophasis. He added:

What I have to say is that this
Story has been better polished
By her work and wisdom than by mine.

Chrétien understood gynocentric values (“All my success is due to my wife“). Like a good bureaucrat, he fulfilled his job assignments with modesty and cheerfulness. He could have written a Latin romance about a new civilization overcoming the disastrous destruction of men’s lives in a foolish war over Helen. He could have written a Latin romance of men’s friendship and solidarity in the face of oppressive control by the church and women. But such subjects are risky and dangerous to address, in medieval times and even more so in our day, especially in common language that unsophisticated persons think they understand.

In Chrétien’s time, monologues were a well-established literary practice particularly associated with women. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Colchian princess Medea discussed with herself leaving her father and her father’s kingdom to elope with the Greek foreigner Jason:

Will I betray the kingdom of my father,
only to have the stranger whom I save
set sail without me for another’s bed,
leaving Medea to her punishment?
If he could do that, leave me for another,
let the ingrate die!
But no: that isn’t in him,
not in his face, not in his noble spirit,
not in a man as beautiful as he,
that I should fear duplicity from him,
or his neglecting what I am deserved.
Besides, he’ll give his word to me beforehand,
and I will call the gods as witnesses
of our compact. Why fear, when all is safe?
Prepare for action now, without delay;
you will have Jason’s gratitude forever,
he’ll join himself to you with solemn vows,
and you’ll be praised as his deliverer
by throngs of women throughout all of Greece!
So shall I then sail off, abandoning
my sister, brother, father, gods, and homeland?
My father is cruel and my homeland crude;
my brother is no more than a mere child,
and my sister sides with me in this affair.
Within my breast the greatest of all gods
has found his residence! I do not leave
greatness, but elope with him to seek it! [5]

The Old French Roman d’Enéas, written about 1160, includes twenty-two monologues, twelve of which are about feelings of love. Women speak almost all the monologues about love. Chrétien followed the use of monologues in the Roman d’Enéas, but turned them inward. In Chrétien first romance Erec and Enide, written about 1170, all eight of the monologues the woman Enide speaks to herself.[6]

Chrétien’s subsequent romance Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart thoroughly developed the courtly ideal of men’s subordination to women, while subtly, too subtly, ridiculing the manlet Lancelot. Consider one of Lancelot’s internal monologues:

I should have killed myself
The moment my lady the queen
Showed how deeply she hates me.
There’s got to be some reason;
She wouldn’t have done it for nothing —
And yet I can’t understand.
For had I known what was wrong
I’d have moved heaven and earth
To amend it, however she liked [7]

In medieval Christian understanding, killing oneself is wrong. Suicide was a mortal sin. Today, husbands contemplate suicide and wonder what they did wrong when their wives unilaterally file for divorce. Even the loss of custody of a father’s children and his financial devastation in deeply gender-biased family courts wouldn’t justify a man’s suicide in medieval Christian understanding. Yet men’s suicides generate relatively little social concern. Despite its medieval Christian context, Lancelot has been interpreted as an admirable hero of courtly love.

Lancelot’s beloved Queen Guinevere similarly has a subtle, too subtle, internal monologue. After Lancelot had suffered brutal bodily wounds in successfully rescuing Guinevere, she walked away from him without a word of thanks. Speaking to herself later, she lamented her appalling behavior:

To deny him every attention
Was absolutely mad!
Mad? Better, by God,
To call me cruel, and a traitress.
It was only a joke, a whim,
But he took it deeply to heart
And never forgave me. I know it,
It was I who killed him, who gave him
The mortal blow: I know it!
…
Could I have dealt him a blow
More mortal? Denying him even
A word was like cutting out
His heart and killing him, then
and there. And so I killed him:
Why hunt for other assassins?
Oh God! Can I ever redeem
This murder, this mortal sin? [8]

Anything is possible with God. Yet if the gynocentric cultural complex didn’t rule medieval Christian society, Guinevere would be remembered only among non-believers and tax collectors. Displaying women’s freedom and license within medieval Christianity, Guinevere, who was married to King Arthur, then relished thoughts of adultery with Lancelot and rationalized not committing suicide:

Lord,
How good it would be, once —
Just once — before I die,
Were he wrapped in my arms again!
How? Why, both of us naked;
That’s when I’d be the happiest.
But since he’s dead, to go on
Living would simply be wicked.
And why? To be alive
After he’s dead: would that
Injure my beloved — nothing
To delight in except my sorrow?
And yet how sweet that sorrow
Would be, had he been able
To see it when he was alive.
Would it not be wicked
To prefer death to such suffering?
Living as long as I can,
And enduring this pain, will be pleasure
Enough: I should live and suffer,
Not die and be at peace. [9]

Chrétien lacked the freedom to write like Juvenal and retain his commission in the court of Marie de Champagne. He had a job to do for the dominant ideology. Yet he was no mere literary apparatchik-scholar. The wit and subtlety of Chrétien’s monologues can’t be fully appreciated within the elite purpose for the new, vernacular Arthurian romances, nor within the associated dominant ideology of men’s subservience to women.

The long-established, subversive Latin tradition of romance provides necessary context for appreciating Chrétien’s monologues. The story of Apollonius of Tyre, known in Latin probably from no later than the sixth century, included a young man doctor resurrecting a beautiful young woman through erotic treatment. In the middle of the eleventh century, a Germanic poet writing in Latin created Ruodlieb. That courageous, transgressive, and entertaining work explicitly described the workings of gynocentrism and strongly challenged the well-established Greek novel’s sexual symmetry. Close to the time and place of Chrétien de Troyes, Andreas Capellanus writing in Latin outrageously described natural dread game as superior to supernatural dread game and questioned the new understanding of chivalric love in framing a mock-Arthurian romance. Andreas Capellanus also daringly challenged suppression of men’s sexed protest, as did in different ways leading women writers of the Middle Ages. Much of the most outrageous Latin story-telling from the early Middle Ages undoubtedly has been lost. But the diversity and creativity of medieval Latin literature should not be doubted.[10]

Walter Map provides an important, under-appreciated Latin internal monologue for literary comparison with Chrétien de Troyes’s monologues. Walter visited Marie de Champagne’s court at Troyes about the time that Chrétien is thought to have written Lancelot. Walter, who apparently lived on the border of England and Wales, probably knew Celtic legends that went into Arthurian tales. Two poems in the French Lancelot prose cycle were attributed to Walter. He may have written further popular French verse. In any case, several stories in the Latin De nugis curialum, which is securely attributed to Walter, are thematically in the mainstream of Arthurian legends.[11]

Walter’s Arthurian Latin romance of Sadius and Galo includes an internal monologue that outrageously caps Queen Guinevere’s internal monologue on her relationship with Lancelot. In Walter’s story, the queen fell madly in love with the foreign knight Galo. From her position of authority, she pressured him for sex. Galo suffered at length from the queen’s sexual harassment. Desperately seeking to be free from the queen’s sexual harassment of him, Galo conspired that his friend Sadius try to convince the queen that Galo was impotent. The queen resolved to put the matter to a sexual test with a beautiful court girl. After ordering the court girl to pursue the affair, the queen was tormented with jealousy and conflicting thoughts. She threw herself on a bed and said to herself:

Sadius is faithful and truthful: he lost his genitals. The more fool is he, to conceal his disgrace from me, that he cannot be touched, to spurn me that I might not spurn him in return! Truly if he had favored me, I would have been his most closely joined and clinging friend, and if there were a delay in discovering him, a hand could stray that certainly would be able to detect whether he is female or male or neuter.

O, it is not as I believed! Sadius lies, he is a man, the signs are certain that he is a man, intact, without defect. O what a wretch and fool I am to have sent the cleverest of girls on my own errand! … I do not believe, I do not think, I am sure and without doubt, that already she is where I should have been, but for the consecration of my head, but for my being a spouse: but there was his loyalty to keep him back. With her, where is the obstacle? What of this concerns her? Nothing. The damage is done. …

But can Sadius have spoken the truth? No, no! There is nothing in it. It’s obvious that he is potent, or she would have returned long ago. All the good signs are clear: that charming downy growth upon his cheeks, no flabbiness of limb, no jaundiced eye or coward heart. Could an effeminate man have pierced through so many armed phalanxes, outshined the glories of all men, raised his own repute to such a pinnacle of praise? I am sure that Sadius lies. [13]

Compared to Chrétien’s French monologue of the queen, Walter’s Latin monologue of the queen has greater psychological depth and more personal specificity. Chrétien’s monologues generally are closer to a figured conflict between abstract ideas. Walter’s monologue is more realistic and novelistic, more bawdy and transgressive. Given that Chrétien figured Lancelot as a manlet, Walter’s theme of impotence can fairly be interpreted as a wicked Latin capping of Chrétien’s monologue in the French Lancelot.

Vernacular Arthurian romance widely disseminated in late twelfth-century Europe contributed significantly to institutionalizing and naturalizing men’s servitude to women in love. Vernacular Arthurian romance built upon a rich, diverse inheritance of medieval Latin romance. But vernacular literature was more closely tied to socially dominant gynocentric interests. Vernacular literature lacked the diversity and freedom of expression possible in Latin. Emancipating men and women from gynocentrism requires bringing into vernacular romance marginalized medieval Latin literature. Welcoming into vernacular literature scintillating medieval Latin work such as Solomon and Marcolf and Lamentationes Matheoluli is a path to social, cultural, and sexual renewal.

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Notes:

[1] C. Stephen Jaeger has thoroughly developed this terrible idea. See, e.g. Jaeger (1985) and Jaeger (1999). Here’s a critique of Jaeger’s thinking with respect to Marbod of Rennes’s Liber Decem Capitulorum.

[2] Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his Historia regum Britannie (History of the Kings of Britain) about 1138. Its prologue declared that it was a historia (history) based on a book in a British tongue. The prologue also warned about other, non-bookish tales of British kings. Latin, the language in which Geoffrey wrote, was the language of learned books. Echard (2011) pp. 1-2. Geoffrey’s Latin Arthurian tale “was an immediate best-seller; it survives in over 250 copies, and was translated and adapted throughout the Middle Ages.” Archibald (2011) p. 132.

Chrétien de Troyes made a similar assertion in the prologue to his Old French Arthurian romance Cliges:

The story I wish to recount to you, we find written down in one of the books in the library of Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Beauvais. The fact that the tale was taken from there is evidence of the truth of the account. Hence its greater credibility.

From French trans. Staines (1990) p. 87. A book from the library of Saint Peter’s Cathedral suggests a book written in Latin, the language of church bureaucrats (clerics). While Chrétien claimed Latin authority, he actually wrote in the commonly spoken language French. Writing in French better served the interests of his royal patrons in broad dissemination.

[3] Chrétien de Troyes stated these facts in his preface to Cliges. He probably translated both Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) and Ovid’s Remedia Amoris (Remedies for Love), as well as several stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Transformations). Staines (1990), Introduction, p. xii.

[4] Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot, the knight of the cart ll. 1-5, from Old French trans. Raffel (1997) p. 1. The subsequent quote is from id. Countess Marie de Champagne apparently had difficult reading even the Bible in Latin:

Unlike her husband, Marie apparently did not read Latin well and preferred texts in the vernacular. Her requests for biblical translations are among the earliest in French.

McCash (2005) p. 16.

[5] Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk. 7, ll. 1-73 (Medea’s monologue), excerpt from Latin trans. Martin (2004) p. 225. Tony Kline has generously made his translation freely available online.

[6] Duggan (2001) pp. 140-50.

[7] Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot ll. 4343-53, from Old French trans. Raffel (1997) p. 137.

[8] Chrétien, Lancelot ll. 4208-16, 4221-28, trans. id. p. 133. The subsequent quote is from ll. 4231-51, trans. id. p. 133-4.

[9] The queen instructed the courtly girl to embrace nakedly Galo. Andreas Capellanus, De amore 1.6.471, advocated chaste contact of that sort. For discussion, see note [3] in my post on Sadius and Galo.

[10] Brooke (2004) and McCash (2005) pp. 20-1 discuss Walter Map’s activities. McCash states:

Walter’s name has long been associated with the prose cycle of the Lancelot, which claims to be ‘translations of a Latin original preserved at the abbey of Salisbury, made “by Walter Map at the request of King Henry his lord”’. Some scholars argue that Walter had little interest in these matters and that it was merely customary for authors to claim such sources. However, given the persistence with which Walter’s name was associated with these materials from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries, coupled with the known interest of the Plantagenet court in Arthurian legends, it is logical that Walter may indeed have collected such tales for the court. Whether he ever wrote them down is another matter, but, as a well-known teller of tales, he may have been partly responsible for their dissemination.

Id. p. 20. See also Webster (1940). Archibald, however, states:

It seems particularly ironic that Map was named as the author of parts of the French Vulgate Cycle, an early thirteenth-century compilation that tells the story of the Arthurian world in a way that does not suggest parody or the need for deep interpretation. No modern critic accepts this attribution, which recurs at the end of the Queste del Saint Graal and the beginning and end of the Mort Artu.

Archibald (2015) p. 185. Walter is more plausible as the author of the prose Lancelot cycle than Mary Shelley is as the author of Frankenstein. Walter’s securely attributed Arthurian tales from De nugis curialum are, in addition to the story of Sadius and Galo, the story of Resus and the story of Raso.

[11] Archibald (2011) and Archibald (2015) discuss the literary history of Latin romance and its contribution to Arthurian romance. Archibald’s useful studies, however, work within the dominant gynocentric ideology that has devalued and suppressed men’s literature of sexed protest under the disparaging label “misogyny.” Field insightfully queried:

Why are we so dismissive of clerical culture? … by comparison with the interest lavished on audiences, patrons and women, the clerical writers as a group seem to suffer from the Victorian disapproval of ‘monkish writers’.

Field (2011) pp. 187-8. If the dominant gynocentric ideology weren’t so dismissive of clerical culture (“monkish misogyny”), it would have to recognize scintillating medieval Latin clerical literature of men’s sexed protest.

[12] Walter Map, De nugis curialium 3.2, trans James (1983) pp. 217, 219. I’ve made some changes to the translation to make it more literal and explicit.

[image] Illumination on folio 40v, Yale Beinecke MS.229 Arthurian Romances. Made in France, 1275-1300. Thanks to Manuscript Miniatures (Yale manuscript viewer defunct / useless).

References:

Archibald, Elizabeth. 2011.  “Arthurian Latin Romance.” Ch. 7 (pp. 132-45) in Echard (2011).

Archibald, Elizabeth. 2015. “Ruodlieb and Romance in Latin: Audience and Authorship.” Ch. 12 (pp. 171-86) in Duys, Kathryn A., Elizabeth Emery, and Laurie Postlewate. 2015. Telling the story in the Middle Ages: essays in honor of Evelyn Birge Vitz. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

Brooke, C. N. L. 2004. “Map, Walter (d. 1209/10).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.

Duggan, Joseph J. 2001. The romances of Chrétien de Troyes. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Echard, Siân. 2011. “Introduction: The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature.” Pp. 1-5 in Echard (2011).

Echard, Siân, ed. 2011. The Arthur of medieval Latin literature: the development and dissemination of the Arthurian legend in medieval Latin. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Field, Rosalind. 2011. “‘Pur les francs homes amender’: Clerical Authors and the Thirteenth Century.” Ch. 13 (pp. 175-88) in Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon, eds. Medieval romance, medieval contexts. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

Jaeger, C. Stephen. 1985. The origins of courtliness: civilizing trends and the formation of courtly ideals, 939-1210. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jaeger, C. Stephen. 1999. Ennobling love: in search of a lost sensibility. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

James, M. R. trans., C. N. L. Brooke, and R. A. B. Mynors, eds. 1983. Walter Map. De nugis curialium {Courtiers’ trifles}. Oxford, Oxfordshire: Clarendon Press.

Martin, Charles, trans. 2004. Ovid. Metamorphoses. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

McCash, June Hall. 2005. “Chrétien’s Patrons.” Ch. 2 (pp. 15-25) in Lacy, Norris J., and Joan T. Grimbert, eds. 2005. A companion to Chrétien de Troyes. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

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

Staines, David, trans. 1990. The complete romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Webster, K. G. T. 1940. “Walter Map’s French Things” Speculum. 15 (3): 272-279.

Andreas Capellanus depicted shifting meaning of chivalric love

chivalric love, manlet tests

In twelfth-century Europe, understanding of chivalric love shifted from sexual readiness to manlet tests. Andreas Capellanus, writing about 1180, depicted this shift in an Latin Arthurian romance occurring in his work now sometimes ironically called On the Art of loving with dignity {De arte honeste amandi}. The new understanding of chivalric love placed men in abject love servitude to women. Andreas’s Latin Arthurian romance reveals his contempt for the new understanding of chivalric love.

The new understanding of chivalric love required men to follow rules of love. Andreas’s Arthurian Latin romance explains how thirty-one rules of love were established. Rules for love function as manlet tests, more popularly known as shit tests. The original understanding of chivalric love required only sexual readiness. That’s natural to manly horsemen, just as farmers must plow to plant seeds.

The beginning of Andreas’s Arthurian Latin romance immediately associates King Arthur with a peculiar womanly action. Consider that unusual element in the context of typical Arthurian motifs:

A certain British knight was roaming alone through the royal forest hoping to see Arthur. When he had been drawn to the interior of the forest, a girl endowed with wondrous beauty, seated on a caparisoned horse and binding up her hair, suddenly met him.

{ Nam quidam Britanniae miles dum solus causa videndi Arturum silvam regiam peragraret et ad eiusdem [domini] silvae fuisset interiora deductus, iuvencula quaedam mira pulchritudine decorata, ornato residens in equo in capillorum ligatura inopinate sibi occurrit }

Why was the woman binding up her hair? In the original understanding of chivalric love, a woman binding up her hair indicates she no longer feels passionate sexual desire.

The beautiful girl who no longer felt passionate sexual desire administered manlet tests to the British knight. She explained to the knight:

When you were seeking the love of a certain British lady, she told you that you could never win it unless you first brought her the victorious sparrowhawk which is said to sit on a golden perch in Arthur’s court.

{ Cuiusdam Britanniae dominae dum postulares amorem, ipsa dixit tibi quod eius nunquam posses amorem lucrari, nisi ei primitus victoriosum reportares accipitrem, qui in Arturi curia super aurea dicitur pertica residere. }

The knight confirmed her assertion. When his beloved lady said she wanted the victorious sparrowhawk sitting on a golden perch in Arthur’s court, the knight went in search of Arthur and his court. He should have offered her the medieval version of skittles.

The beautiful girl then piled on the manlet tests. She declared:

You could not take the sparrowhawk you seek without first proving by combat in Arthur’s palace that you rejoice in the love of a lady more beautiful than any possessed by those who dwell at Arthur’s court. Moreover, you could not enter the palace without first showing to the guards the gauntlet for the sparrowhawk. That guantlet you cannot get without winning it by engaging two of the bravest knights in a double contest.

{ Accipitrem quem quaeris habere non posses, nisi primitus in Arturi palatio proeliando convincas quod dominae gaudes pulchrioris amore quam eorum aliquis qui in curia demorantur Arturi; palatium vero intrare non posses, nisi primo custodibus chirothecam demonstrares accipitris. Sed chirothecam non est habere possibile, nisi contra duos milites pugnando fortissimos in duplicis pugnae agone obtineas. }

Those are tasks of violence. Such tasks explain why medieval men had much shorter life expectancy than did medieval women. The gendered pattern of violence continues to be ignorantly misunderstood: violence kills more than four times more men than women. Keep repeating that fact until the violence stops, or at least until the vagina monologues stop.

As a benighted knight, the man put himself under the direction of the girl. The knight declared to the girl:

I realize that I cannot succeed in this hard task if you do not offer me the help of your hand.

{ Cognosco me in hoc labore non posse proficere, nisi mihi vestrae manus auxilia porrigatis. }

Only obtuse readers don’t perceive witty mocking in the knight seeking the help of the girl’s hand in succeeding in tasks of violence. The knight earnestly expressed his desire for the girl’s direction:

I wish to subject myself to your direction, and ask you humbly to give me your help in this task. Grant me your consent, that under your directing eye, I may boldly claim for myself the love of a lady more beautiful than all others.

{ Ideoque me vestro dominatui volo subiicere, supplici a vobis orationis affatu deposcens ut vestra in hoc facto mihi iuvamina porrigatis, et ut de vestro mihi concedatis assensu, quatenus vestrae dominationis intuitu licenter valeam amorem mihi dominae pulchrioris adscribere. }

Most men are easily made subordinate to a beautiful girl. Men, of course, naturally seek sex with beautiful young women. But the behavior of a manlet drys up a girl’s sexual desire. The beautiful girl gave the knight the kiss of love. That, like the kiss of peace, was meant to be purely without lust. She then gave him her horse to lead him. Only a man who’s a poor rider would literally ride such a horse, instead of the girl herself.

The knight then rode off and accomplished his woman-directed manlet tasks of violence against men and acquisition. Just as in the story of the manlet Lancelot, a bridge-keeper sought to keep the knight from crossing a bridge. They then fought. The knight seriously injured the bridge-keeper, suffered a serious bodily wound himself, but managed to cross the bridge. On the other side of the bridge, the knight killed a man who had attempted to drown him. Seeking food, the knight fought a palace guard, of course also a man. The knight suffered huge blows while the guard lost his hand. To get the sparrowhawk, the knight engaged in a brutal fight with another man. As a result of all this violence against men, the knight secured the sparrowhawk that his beloved lady desired. With the sparrowhawk came a scroll containing rules of love. Men fighting men is inevitably a losing activity for men.

The knight missed an opportunity for love with a beautiful girl because he failed to understand the game. When the beautiful girl gave the knight his manlet tests, she said:

If your heart proves so bold that you don’t fear to seek out the things I mentioned, you could obtain from me what you propose.

{ Si tanta tibi esset cordis audacia ut ea, quae diximus, non timeas perscrutari, posses a nobis quod postulas impetrare. }

The knight returned to the girl to show that he had done what she required. She responded joyfully. She flirtingly said to him:

You have my permission to depart, dearest one, because sweet Britain demands you. But I beg you not to accept your departure reluctantly, because whenever you wish to approach this region alone, you will always find me here.

{ De licentia mea recede, carissime, quia dulcis te Britannia quaerit. Rogo tamen ne gravis tibi videatur abscessus, quia quandocunque ad haec volueris solus accedere loca, me semper poteris habere praesentem. }

Societies have long demanded men’s bodies. Men, in contrast, have been reluctant to demand their entitlement to love. The beautiful girl said that she would be there for the knight. She right then was there for the knight. He happily left to fulfill the demands of sweet Britain and help to instruct all men in the rules of love. Benighted, sexually deprived men have been following oppressive, brutalizing rules of love ever since.

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Notes:

The quotes above are from Andreas Capellanus, De amore / De arte honeste amandi, Book 2, Chapter 8, Latin text and English translation from Walsh (1982) pp. 271-85. That chapter, entitled “The Rules for Love {De regulis amoris},” begins with the Latin Arthurian romance above, commonly called the Sparrowhawk episode.

I’ve made some minor changes to Walsh’s translation, mainly to track the Latin more closely. For in capillorum ligatura inopinate sibi occurrit, Walsh has “binding her hair, suddenly confronted him.” Recognizing the context of this gesture and the non-confrontational context, I translated the Latin as “binding up her hair, suddenly met him.” The sparrowhawk (accipiter) Walsh translates as “hawk.”

In her reading of the Sparrowhawk episode, Echard perceives two competing systems of conduct: courtly behavior and fairy romance. Echard also recognizes the importance of Book 3 of De amore for interpreting the Sparrowhawk episode, which comprises most of the last chapter of Book 2. Echard (1998), pp. 112-21. Book 3 of De amore develops men’s sexed protest dialogically. The purgatory of cruel beauties in De amore similarly exists in relation to an alternate presentation of natural dread game. Andreas commonly developed themes with thematic contrasts.

[image] Knights (men) engaged in violence against each other. Illumination on folio 339r, Yale Beinecke MS.229 Arthurian Romances. Made in France, 1275-1300. Thanks to Manuscript Miniatures.

References:

Echard, Siân. 1998. Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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

Saint Æthelthryth exorcised devil-possessed monk through diarrhea

outhouse in the sky

Do you know someone who seems to be possessed by the devil? Of course you do; those sort of people are everywhere today. You might suggest to one of your devil-possessed family members or friends that she pray for relief to Saint Æthelthryth, a sixth-century Anglo-Saxon saint. According to a chronicle written in England in the 1170s, a devil-possessed monk prayed to Saint Æthelthryth for relief. He subsequently had extreme, foul-smelling diarrhea that purged the devil from his body.

According to the chronicle, the monk had left early from his brother monks’ normal evening prayer service in their monastery. That left the monk vulnerable to the devil’s attack. Being attacked by the devil can also happen to persons who don’t participate in family holidays and family meals. The monk’s situation got very ugly:

When the service was over, the abbot and the community, as they went out to the first entrance to the cloister, saw the demoniac youth. He was raving against everyone, making wild threats, and flailing around with abuse. By kicking with his feet and biting with his teeth, he was trying to hurt some of the men who were constraining him within their arms, .

{ Nec mora finita synaxi, abbas et conventus exeuntes ad primum claustri ingressum, vident juvenem daemoniacum contra omnes tumultuantem, saeva minantem, convitiis insultantem, et inter brachia se constringentium ictibus pedum et morsibus dentium aliquos laedere conantem. }[1]

The community brought the young monk to the tomb of Saint Æthelthryth. There throughout the night they prayed to her for help. By morning the young young monk had returned to his senses. However, “the internal looseness of his stomach was torturing him, and he was in need of evacuation in a privy {ventris resolutio intestina torqueret, et secreto exitu indigeret}”:

After being taken, therefore, to the necessary place, he experienced as great an efflux as if all his bowels were being poured out. After the raving of his mind, such a stink of the stomach was ejected that the air throughout the nearest domestic buildings was scarcely bearable. As the polluted exhalation spread itself through every nook and cranny, scarcely anyone escaped its vapor. And this uncleanliness was no less extreme than the former madness, but rather both attacks turned out equal, one to the other. One was horrible because of his going out of his mind. The other was astonishing, because of the effluvium of his stomach. It was as if the most evil spirit was either totally being changed into excrement or, on being ejected, was taking the latrines themselves with him.

{ Ductus ergo ad locum necessarium, tantam illico passus est effusionem, ac si omnia viscera funderentur: et post ejectum furorem mentis, tantus ejicitur foetor ventris, ut per omnes proximas officinas vix esset aer tolerabilis, corrupto flatu per omnes angulos se spargente, fumum ejus vix aliquo evadente. Nec minor erat illa immunditia, quam ante fuerat illa vesania; sed par sibi factus est uterque impetus, alter in excessu mentis horribilis, alter in fluxu ventris mirabilis: quasi nequissimus ille spiritus aut totus verteretur in stercus, aut ipsas latrinas secum ferret ejectus. }[2]

Evidently a person’s soul can be cleansed through prayer to a saint and extreme diarrhea.[3] If you’re having personal difficulties with a family member or friend, be intellectually courageous and suggest this historically attested cure. The foul smell will be only temporary. Peace and joy spending time together with beloved others is an eternal blessing.

crude wooden toilet

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Notes:

[1] Liber Eliensis Bk. II, Ch. 129, “About a certain brother who had gone out of his mind but was cured by the merits of saint Æthelthryth {De quodam fratre qui mentem excesserat sed meritis sanctae Ætheldrethae sanato},” Latin text from Stewart (1848) pp. 262-3 (there chapter 128), English translation (modified insubstantially) from Fairweather (2005) p. 247. Subsequent quotes above are similarly sourced. The monk’s name was Edwin and the religious service he skipped out on was Compline. Liber Eliensis was compiled at a monastery on the Isle of Ely (England) in the 1170s.

Marie de France translated into Old French the story of Saint Æthelthryth exorcising the monk through diarrhea. Marie de France included it in her Life of Saint Audrey (Æthelthryth) ll. 2953-2994. For that text and a translation, McCash & Barban (2006) pp. 167-9.

[2] Marie de France’s account of this incident adds:

Since this occasion,
there has been no devil so bold
as to dare assail the wall
of the monastery  or come in
lest he, too, be ejected
the same way his companion had been.

{ Puis cele heure ke ge vos di
N’i out diable si hardi
Ki le mur osast assaillier
De cel covent ou enz venir
Ke autresi ne fust geté
Com sis compains ki i out esté. }

Life of Saint Audrey ll. 2989-2994, from Old French text and English translation (modified slightly) from McCash & Barban (2006) pp. 168-9.

[3] Saint Æthelthryth is not the only saint reported to have exorcised a demon through prompting extreme diarrhea. Sulpicius Severus’s fifth-century Life of Saint Martin records:

When the demon was compelled by punishments and tortures to flee out of the possessed body, while he had no power of escaping by the mouth, he was cast out by means of the belly’s defluxion, leaving disgusting traces behind him.

{ cum fugere de obsesso corpore poenis et cruciatibus cogeretur nec tamen exire ei per os liceret, foeda relinquens vestigia fluxu ventris egestus est. }

Ch. 17, Latin text from Francese (c2015), English translation from Roberts (1894). In the first half of the twelfth century, Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, reported a monk expelling a demon in the latrine. De Miraculis, Bk. 1, Ch. 13 (PL 189, col. 877), cited in Bayless (2012) pp. 2, 183.

Demons and devils were associated with latrines and bowel movements in a variety of ways. In the Life of Saint Gengulph, written in Latin about 900 GC, the clerk who cuckolded Gengulph suffered disembowlment while using the latrine. Other sinful men reportedly defecated out their souls, died in latrines, or lost control of their bowels and continually soiled themselves. Bayless (2012) pp. 130-5.

Bayless, the leading scholar of medieval excrement, makes a highly pungent claim about that subject:

excrement was not merely used as a figure of speech but was central to the popular medieval metaphysics. It was not a symbol of sin or a consequence of sin: it embodied sin {emphasis in original}. It was an alternate manifestation of sin, as ice is an alternate manifestation of water. Excrement was sin made material. In the modern period, filth and excrement are deplorable but otherwise meaningless material realities, most useful as metaphors. In the Middle Ages, filth and excrement were the foundation of the understanding of human history. They were as important as sin because they were sin {emphasis in the original}. This a radical and crucial difference from modern attitudes.

Id. p. xviii. That scholarly claim is less credible than less abstract Christian belief in transubstantiation. Medieval literature such as the Latin fabliau One-Ox (Ziolkowski (2007) Ch. 4 & App. 3), the French epic De Audigier (Brians (1973) pp. 57-69), and the Latin prose work Solomon and Marcolf used excrement in creative ways. Medieval mooning doesn’t bear a totalizing interpretation. The French fabliaux Bérengier au Lonc Cul and La gagure, ou L’esquier e la chaunbrere used ass-kissing to address fundamental political issues not directly related to excrement.

[images] (1) Outhouse for the fire lookout at Goat Peak, Washington State, USA, 28 Aug. 2010. Thanks to Curt Smith and Wikimedia Commons. (2) Outhouse (detail) from 1880 Town (South Dakota, USA), 26 Sept. 2000. Thanks to Patrick Bolduan and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Bayless, Martha. 2012. Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: the devil in the latrine. New York: Routledge.

Brians, Paul, trans. 1973. Bawdy Tales from the Courts of Medieval France. New York: Harper & Row.

Fairweather, Janet, trans. 2005. Liber Eliensis: a history of the Isle of Ely from the seventh century to the twelfth. Woodbridge: Boydell.

Francese, Christopher, ed. c2015. Sulpicius Severus. The Life of Saint Martin of Tours. Dickinson College Commentaries. Online.

McCash, June Hall and Judith Clark Barban, ed. and trans. 2006. The Life of Saint Audrey: A Text by Marie de France. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland.

Roberts, Alexander, trans. 1894. “Sulpitius Severus on the Life of St. Martin.” In A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, Volume 11. New York.

Stewart, David James, ed. 1848. Thomas & Richard of Ely. Liber Eliensis, ad fidem codicum variorum. Londini: Impensis Societatis.

Ziolkowski, Jan M. 2007. Fairy Tales from before Fairy Tales: the medieval Latin past of wonderful lies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Sabine women win Pyrrhic peace for Roman men

Sabine women generated gynocentrism

In ancient warfare, armies sought to kill men and to capture women. With the progress of civilization, armies now seek only to kill men. The vast majority of persons today forcefully abducted from their ordinary lives are men incarcerated within their own societies. Women captives in the ancient world might marry their captors, be intimately integrated into their captors’ lives, gain co-ownership of their captors’ property, and acquire significant new political rights. Men captives in prisons and jails today receive no such benefits. In Western civilization, the harsh anti-men gender inequality in both killing and capturing can be trace back about 2750 years to Roman men abducting Sabine women to be their wives.

At the founding of Rome, after being captured by the Roman men and becoming their wives, the Sabine women received considerable benefits. The Roman leader Romulus promised the Sabine women co-ownership of their husbands’ properties, civil rights, and free-born status for their children.  Romulus pledged that their husbands would be kind and affectionate to them and would do their utmost to console them. The Roman men wooed their Sabine women-captives. To excuse their capturing the Sabine women, the Roman men pleaded their passion and love for them, “the most moving of pleas to a woman’s heart {maxime ad muliebre ingenium efficaces preces sunt}.”[1]

Many men labor strenuously to acquire property and struggle desperately to gain passionate love. The Sabine women gained both through being captured. In a wide variety of cultures and times, women actively promote and encourage their bridal capture by favored men. Nonetheless, in accordance with a fundamental principle of communicative economics, the capture of the Sabine women has to this day been widely called the “rape of the Sabine women.”[2]

In literary history and life, deaths of many men attract much less attention than capture of many fewer women. Roman soldiers captured 30, or 527, or 683 Sabine women (reports vary).[3] In response, an army of Sabine men attacked Rome. With the help of a strong, independent woman who betrayed Rome, the Sabine army seized the Roman citadel.[4] The Sabine army numbered twenty-five thousand men on foot and about a thousand men on horses. The Roman army that fought against the Sabine men numbered about twenty thousand men on foot and about eight hundred on horses.[5] The battle between the Sabine men and the Roman men was brutal and intense. Surely many thousands of men were killed, probably more than when Greek and Trojan men fought at Troy over Helen. Accounts of the “rape of the Sabine women” almost wholly ignore the many Sabine and Roman men killed within that story.[6]

Nearly everyone has failed to appreciation the wisdom of the Sabine women. Like leading women writers of the Middle Ages, the Sabine women loved their husbands and fathers and cared for men generally. The Sabine women, seeking to halt the killing of Sabine and Roman men, declared:

We are the cause of war, the cause of wounds, and even death to both our husbands and our parents. It would be better for us to perish than to live as widows or orphans, lacking either of you.

{ nos causa belli, nos volnerum ac caedium viris ac parentibus sumus; melius peribimus quam sine alteris vestrum viduae aut orbae vivemus. }[7]

The Sabine women’s statement is consistent with insights from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry to events of the twenty-first century. But the Sabine and Roman men, along with subsequent classical scholarship, has ignored the Sabine women’s wisdom. International elites today have even formed a preposterous consensus that “violence against women is the most pressing human rights problem remaining in the world.” The Roman and Sabine men at least understood that the Sabine women wanted them to stop killing each other. Seeking to do what women want, the men stopped killing each other.

Apparently reasoning that they owed their lives to the Sabine women that they had captured, the Roman men established institutions of female privilege. Many men today act like servants opening doors for women and like inferiors cowering in the back of elevators waiting for women to exit first. Roman men following their capture of the Sabine women created such social institutions of female privilege. Among those that the Roman men created:

  1. Sabine women when walking had right of way over Roman men.
  2. Roman men were forbidden to utter “any indecent word” in the presence of Sabine women.
  3. Roman men were forbidden to allow themselves to be seen naked by the Sabine women. Violators of this law, which set the model for current U.S. sexual assault regulations, were liable to prosecution before judges of homicide.[8]

Men upholding such institutions contribute to the prevalence of sexless marriages. They also perpetuate the social subordination of men to women. In terms of economic privilege, Roman men exempted Sabine women from all labor and drudgery except spinning thread. That exemption provided the foundation for an enduring gendered division of earning and spending: husbands labor to earn money that wives spend, or alternatively, men work under familial and legal obligation, while women work for personal fulfillment.

Roman men capturing the Sabine women generated gynocentric society. Juvenal in his Satire 6 would raise a vehement and courageous voice of men’s sexed protest. Roman men became reluctant to marry women. None of these acts could change the founding order of Rome. The foundational problem was men’s sexual deprivation and desperation.[9] That’s what drove the Roman men to capture the Sabine women. Like the misery of sexless and married men, the misery of sexless and unmarried men must be addressed to establish a humane and enduring civilization.

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Notes:

[1] Livy, History of Rome 1.9, Latin text and English trans. Foster (1919) pp. 38-9. The translation of Canon Roberts (1905), readily available online, is similar.

In modern academic scholarship, men wooing women tends to be associated with harm to women:

we must recognize that men {Roman men wooing their Sabine women captives} are compounding their original act of violence by an act of bad faith — they are, in fact, increasing the distance between themselves and their captives even as they seem to be bridging it

Miles (1992) p. 185. In the title to his article, Miles uses the word “theft” to describe the abduction of the Sabine women. That diction highlights prevalent misunderstanding about women, men, and property. See note [2] in my post on violence and gender.

[2] Bridal capture has been a prevalent, socially complex institution:

There is a thin line between an abduction in which the girl, though she was not aware beforehand of plans for her kidnapping, anticipates some sort of action and is willing to be ‘stolen’, and an actual elopement planned by the two young people together. The disguising as an abduction of what is in fact a mutual agreement serves two useful purposes: it obscures any indication of sexual initiative on the girl’s part, which would be regarded with horror by her parents and by the rest of the community, and it preserves the male’s honour and demonstrates convincingly his courage and manliness. … there appear to be no geographical or religious boundaries within which the phenomenon of marriage by abduction occurs — it is found among Christians (Greece), Moslems (Turkey, Bosnia), and others (Tzeltal Indians in Mexico), in endogamous societies (Turkey) and those which place restrictions on the marriages of close kin (Greece, Tzeltal), and throughout the world, from Mexico to India.

Evans-Grubbs (1989) pp. 62-4. Modern criminal justice systems tend to broadly criminalize men seducing women and men eloping with women.

The Latin texts refer to the raptus of the Sabine women. Raptus means seizure; in this context, capture of the Sabine women to be wives. Dionysius of Halicarnassus stated that Romulus ordered the Sabine women to be captured “without violating their chastity.” He explained to the Sabine women the likely truth that bridal capture was an ancient Greek custom commonly favorable to women. For review of such customs, Evans-Grubbs (1989), esp. p. 62. In addition, Dionysius reported:

Romulus united them {Sabine women and Roman men} according to the customs of each woman’s country, basing the marriages on a communion of fire and water, in the same manner as marriages are performed even down to our times.

{ ἐκ τῶν ἀγάμων ἄνδρας ἰσαρίθμους, οἷς αὐτὰς συνήρμοττε κατὰ τοὺς πατρίους ἑκάστης ἐθισμούς, ἐπὶ κοινωνίᾳ πυρὸς καὶ ὕδατος ἐγγυῶν τοὺς γάμους, ὡς καὶ μέχρι τῶν καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς ἐπιτελοῦνται χρόνων. }

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 2.30.4-6.

[3] Plutarch, Parallel Lives, Romulus 14.6 discusses the various counts of Sabine women.

[4] The Roman woman Tarpeia secretly admitted the Sabine king Tatius and his troops into the Capitol. This aspect of the story has many variations, including a variation exculpating Tarpeia. Men tend to be reluctant to acknowledge the possibility of women’s betrayal:

The failure of any single version {of Tarpeia’s betrayal of Rome} may attest to the discomfort felt by the Romans — and Greeks — in coping with the topic of betrayal, especially betrayal by a woman.

Brown (1995) p. 304. Such discomfort is evident in the convoluted claim that accounts of Tarpeia’s betrayal indicate that men regard women as inherently suspect and difficult to predict. Miles (1992) p. 184. Such disparagement of men is highly predictable.

[5] Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 2.37.4-5 provides the soldier counts.

[6] The abduction of the Sabine women also generated wars between the Romans and the Caeninensians and the Romans and the Antemnates. Both those wars also involved killing many men.

By the second half of the fourth century, the abduction of the Sabine women had become a play performed frequently in the Circus Maximus of Rome. The performances were “lewd, vulgar, and well-attended.” Holden (2008) p. 138.

Augustine, City of God 2.18, condemned the abduction of the Sabine women. Augustine’s concern was for the women abducted, not men’s sexual deprivation or men being killed. For discussion of Christian responses in late antiquity to the abduction of the Sabine women, Holden (2008) pp. 131-5.

Holden speculates that fear of violence may have stimulated performances of the abduction of the Sabine women:

The story of the abduction of the Sabine women may have been on peoples’ minds in the later fourth and fifth centuries because of the increased danger to Rome and the city’s women posed by tyrants, heretics, pagans, and, especially, barbarians as the city and the empire declined

Id. p. 139. Danger to Roman men apparently mattered little. Violence against men has always been vastly greater than violence against women. Moreover, violence against men has attracted much less social concern, even in societies formally dedicated to ideals of gender equality.

For modern gynocentric accounts of the abduction of the Sabine women, Miles (1992) and Brown (1995). Both refer to the Sabine women being raped. Both ignore the many Sabine, Roman, and other men killed.

[7] Livy, History of Rome 1.9, Latin text and English trans. Foster (1919) pp. 48-9, translation adapted non-substantially. Flattening Livy with conventional modern misandry, Brown declares:

they {men} are unable to find a peaceful way out of the mess created by their pride and violence. … It is the women who break the cycle of violence, suited to this role by their unwarlike sex and relational social function as wives and mothers.

Brown (1995) p. 314. Medieval literature such as the Tale of Melibee shows much more sophisticated literary understanding of women, men, and violence.

[8] These female privileges are listed in Plutarch, Parallel Lives, Romulus 20.3. The exemption of women from labor is from id. 19.7. Men classical scholars in recent decades have defined themselves in ways that does not allow them to perceive women’s socially constructed superiority to men:

As perceived inferiors, the Sabine women can never exercise enough influence to outweigh the public concerns by which men in this world define themselves.

Miles (1992) p. 189.

[9] With his characteristically sophisticated irony, Ovid heightened the Roman men’s brutality in abducting the Sabine women. He concluded his account of the abduction with an outrageous claim:

Old Romulus the prize for soldiers knew,
For such a prize I’d be a soldier too!
Thus was the fashion started, and the fair
Still find the play a peril and a snare.

{ Romule, militibus scisti dare commoda solus.
Haec mihi si dederis commoda, miles ero.
Scilicet ex illo sollemnia more theatra
Nunc quoque formosis insidiosa manent. }

Ovid, Art of Love {Ars amatoria} 1.131-4, from Latin trans. Melville (2008) p. 90. Ovid mocked the Roman elegiac soldier of love. He taught men how to seduce verbally attractive women at theaters like that from which the Sabine women were abducted. Moreover, Ovid respected women’s strong, independent sexuality. He recognized that seeking men was a continuing reason that women went to the theater:

So to the play the well-dressed bevies throng,
Such wealth of choice as keeps one doubting long.
They come to look and to be looked at too.
Ah! Virtue, it’s a fatal spot for you.

{ Sic ruit ad celebres cultissima femina ludos:
Copia iudicium saepe morata meum est.
Spectatum veniunt, veniunt spectentur ut ipsae:
Ille locus casti damna pudoris habet. }

Ovid, Art of Love {Ars amatoria} 1.97-100, trans. id. p. 89. Long regarded as an eminent teacher of love, Ovid continues to offer useful instruction to men on how to avoid sexual deprivation and desperation.

[image] The gynocentric foundation of Rome.  The Intervention of the Sabine Women. Jacques-Louis David. Oil on canvas painting, 1799. Held in the Louvre Museum. Thanks to the Web Gallery of Art and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Brown, Robert. 1995. “Livy’s Sabine Women and the Ideal of Concordia.” Transactions of the American Philological Association. 125: 291-319.

Evans-Grubbs, Judith. 1989. “Abduction Marriage in Antiquity: A Law of Constantine (CTh IX 24.1) and its Social Context.” Journal of Roman Studies. 79: 59-83.

Foster, B. O., trans. 1919. Livy. History of Rome. Vol. 1 (Books I-II).  Loeb Classical Library 114. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Holden, Antonia. 2008. “The Abduction of the Sabine Women in Context: The Iconography on Late Antique Contorniate Medallions.” American Journal of Archaeology. 112 (1): 121-142.

Melville, A.D., trans. 2008. Ovid. The love poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Miles, Gary B. 1992. “The First Roman Marriage and the Theft of the Sabine Women.” Ch. 6 (pp. 161-201) in Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden, eds., Innovations in Antiquity. Routledge: London.