Nazhun's muwashshah & successful heterosexual seduction

two gazelles on vase from Alhambra

Nazhun, a twelfth-century woman poet from Granada, wrote a muwashshah that illustrates key points of heterosexual seduction. A muwashshah is a love poem written in classical Arabic, except for the colloquial or vernacular concluding stanza.[1] The rise of chivalry of medieval Europe promoted oppressive, burdensome, and ineffective practices for men seeking women’s love. Nazhun’s muwashshah, in contrast, shows love tactics that the modern empirical science of seduction has validated.

All the major teachings of the modern empirical science are represented in Nazhun’s muwashshah. One such teaching is push-pull, also known as hot-cold. Nazhun’s muwashshah describes successful application of this tactic:

A tender young thing, she would have refused the advances
of anyone else.
But he loves her then gives her the cold shoulder [2]

Another teaching, contrasting strongly with the servile masculine abasement of chivalric behavior, is the man behaving as if he were dominant:

But the more I longed for his submission in passion,
the more he grew haughty and aloof.

Strong, imperturbable eye contact helps to communicate dominance:

what has made my body ill is
his fixed gaze

Dread game and freeze-outs stimulate women’s desire through raising the salience of a man’s sexual options and creating fear of separation:

He turns my heart over the live embers of the tamarisk
while he’s preoccupied.
May God preserve a beloved who has gone away,
fearing separation.
Good news of him arrived
so my chest opened up
And my heart burst out, rejoicing,
but I could not tell…

In a muwashshah, the poem’s lover tends to be a man. The beloved can be either a man or a woman. Sometimes grammatically masculine pronouns are used for a female beloved. Determining the sex structure of a muwashshah can be difficult. However, read with appreciation for the modern empirical science of seduction, Nazhun’s muwashshah clearly represents a woman yearning for a shrewd, elusive man, her beloved.

A master of seduction encourages a woman to construct him imaginatively. Women tend to imagine beloved men as women and with women’s wants. In Nazhun’s muwashshah, the woman poet imagines her beloved man with images of feminine beauty. He is a fawn, an houri, a gazelle:

By God, who shaped him out of beauty’s essence,
one of a kind.

She imagines him to be what she wishes she were.

The concluding stanza in Nazhun’s muwashshah is a triumph of poetic seduction. Modern psychology has identified desire to be desired as central to women’s sexual psychology. The concluding stanza (kharja) depicts the lover’s imagined desire in the context of her beloved’s hot-cold seduction tactic:

He desires me so long as he does not see me,
he desires me.
But when he sees me he turns his back
as if he doesn’t see me. [3]

Interpreting a more figuratively complex stanza of Nazhun’s muwashshah, a scholar insightfully observed that the beloved is “a bit of a cad.”[4] Men who act like cads more effectively stimulate women’s desire than do pliant nice guys. That truth can barely be acknowledged publicly today. But in twelfth-century Andalusia, Nazhun’s muwashshah exquisitely presented a man’s successful seduction of a woman.[5]

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Notes:

[1] A muwashshah’s concluding stanza, known as the kharja, is either in colloquial Arabic or a Romance vernacular. The muwashshah form also exists in medieval Hebrew literature. The term muwashshah has variant transliterations  muwashshaha and muwashshahah. Hammond (2010) uses muwashshaha. I use muwashshah because that is by far the most popular transliteration on the Internet. Popularity isn’t the same as correctness, but popularity is relevant to effective conventions in communication.

[2] Nazhun, “He Desires Me,” printed in Ibn Bishri, ‘Uddat al-jalis, no. 239, 360-1, from Arabic trans. Hammond (2010) p. 160.  All the subsequent quotes from Nazhun’s muwashshah are from id. pp. 158-60. Nazhun, properly written as Nazhūn, is more fully named Nazhūn bint al-Qilā’ī or Nazhun al-Garnatiya bint al-Qulai’iya. Nazhun’s muwashshah is the only explicitly woman-authored muwashshah to survive to the present. At least two other women writers of muwashshah are identified in surviving literature from the Islamic west. Id. pp. 153-5, including n. 22.

[3] The kharja is set up  with explicit reference to an anonymous maiden’s voice. In the muwashshah immediately following Nazhun’s muwashshah in the collection ‘Uddat al-jalis, the exact same kharja is presented as the words of the poet (“So I sang…”). The poet is anonymous. Whether the poet of that muwashshah is a woman or a man isn’t clear. Id. pp. 163-64.

[4] Id. p. 165. In another elaborate reading, Hammond interprets an oblique use of the root penis (dh-k-r) in a verb taking as its object a woman as masculinizing her. But the verbal form also refers to pollination. The verb seems more sensibly interpreted as cherishing her sexually as a woman. Id. p. 167.

[5] In her interpretation of Nazhun’s muwashshah, Hammond concludes, “the aesthetic tradition in which its author was engaged was not man’s.” Id p. 168. The emphasis on man’s is Hammond’s. Studying women’s poetry (my emphasis) has generated continuous struggle to polarize gender within an ideological commitment to make that polarization unnatural. That seems to me not the most fruitful way to read poetry that women have written, or that men have written.

[image] Two gazelles on a vase at the Alhambra. Jarrón de las Gacelas, c. 1400. Thanks to Holycharly and Wikimedia Commons.

Reference:

Hammond, Marlé. 2010. Beyond elegy: classical Arabic women’s poetry in context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

unbearable servility in Alain Chartier’s Belle dame sans mercy

Margaret of Scotland kissing Alain Chartier

Alain Chartier’s Belle dame sans mercy shows men’s servility to women ending disastrously. Alain Chartier was a man renowned for oratory and literary excellence in fifteenth-century France. He also served as a royal official. He probably wrote Belle dame sans mercy about 1424. In that poem, a man, seeking love, addresses a woman. He immediately identifies himself as a prospect for the Omega Male Hall of Shame by declaring to her:

I suffer from a pain that burns and enflames me
and is killing me, for want of you.
And yet you do not seem to care,
refusing even to notice it,
and are indifferent
when I speak to you about it,
and yet your reputation will not suffer;
neither will you lose honor or incur any shame.

Alas! How can it cause you pain, my lady,
if the heart of a sincere man so desires you,
and if, with honor and beyond reproach,
I declare and consider myself yours?
As is right, I ask for nothing in return,
for my will is submitted
to your pleasure, not to my own,
and my freedom enslaved to you.

Although I do not deserve
your grace for my service,
at least permit me to serve you
without incurring your displeasure.
I will serve though I am not worthy,
keeping true to my troth,
for this is the service Love requires:
that I be your humble servant. [1]

The woman wasn’t interested. The man pleaded and begged. That makes men repulsive to women. So it was in this poem. After an unbearably lengthy display of beta male behavior from the man, the woman ended the conversation:

Once and for all, try to understand
that you have been refused without respite.
You annoy me with your repetitions,
for I have already said enough to you. [2]

The man left with tears in his eyes. He prayed for his death to come quickly. It did. After tearing out all his hair, he died in misery. This was a medieval man who did not understand medieval women’s love poetry. He had none of the seductive allure of Reservoir Tip.

Depicting a pathetic omega male who died in lonely misery outraged the champions of women. In response to Chartier’s Belle dame sans mercy, some courtiers sent to three ladies of the court a request:

May it please you by your grace to turn your eyes from reading such unreasonable words and to give them neither credence nor attention, and to tear them up and crush them wherever they might be found and also to order punishment for the writers of such words so that this might serve as example to others. [3]

The three ladies in turn proposed to punish harshly Alain Chartier for depicting a lady without mercy:

You can write whatever you wish to write
for no matter what you might know how to compose
you will not impede a right judgment
on your misdeed that damages our reputation.
And so choose the least of these two courses
without seeking to defend or debate:
either you die, or you must take back your words
because it is not fitting that a woman combat you. [4]

In response to their attack on him, Alain prayed that God would grant the ladies joy. He asked that they grant him “by your grace, advice, comfort, aid, and succor.” He abjectly explained:

My book, of little importance or value,
is written to no other end
than to simply record the account
of a sad and unhappy lover
who cries and moans that he has been waiting too long
and that Refusal rebuffs him.
He who understands anything different,
either is looking too hard or is not looking at all. [5]

Alain remanded himself to the ladies’ court and pledged to obey them.

Alain Chartier’s Belle dame sans mercy represents oppressive medieval servility and ignorance that remains with us still. The best hope for a renaissance is to recover classics such as the Life of Aesop, Juvenal’s Satire 6, and Jerome’s Golden Book of Theophrastus.

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Notes:

[1] Alain Chartier, Belle dame sans mercy, l. 193-216 (stanzas 25-27), from French trans. McRae (2004) p. 57. Chartier’s work was highly admired and widely disseminated. About two hundred manuscripts of his works have survived. Id. p. 2. Richard Ros translated Belle dame sans mercy into English roughly half a century after Alain Chartier wrote it. Ros’s translation is available online. John Keats in 1819 wrote a poem now conventionally titled La Belle Dame sans Merci. It is similarly gynocentric.

[2] Belle dame sans mercy, l. 765-8, trans. id. p. 91.

[3] The Request Sent to the Ladies against Master Alain, excerpt, from French trans. id. p. 99.

[4] The Response of the Ladies to Master Alain, l. 81-88 (stanza 11), from French trans. id. p. 107.

[5] The Excuse of the Master Alain, l. 193-200 (stanza 25), from French trans. id. p. 123.

[image] Margaret of Scotland kissing the sleeping Alain Chartier. Painting by Edmund Blair Leighton, 1903. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons. Under proposed changes to the U.S. Model Penal Code, Margaret of Scotland by her action would be guilty of sexually assaulting Alain Chartier.

Reference:

McRae, Joan E., ed. and trans. 2004. Alain Chartier: the quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy. New York, NY: Routledge.

immovable mountains in al-Khansa & the Gospels

immovable mountains

Lamenting her two brothers killed in inter-tribal violence, the early Arabic poet al-Khansa declared:

I will cry for them, by God, as long as the lovesick pine
and as long as God keeps in place the immovable mountains [1]

The simile “as long as the lovesick pine” refers to ancient belief that lovesickness causes enduring physical illness and sometimes even death. The reference to immovable mountains could be merely a physical metaphor: immovable mountains are prominent physical features of the world.[2] But just as lovesickness is a very literary idea, the figure of crying as long as God keeps in place the immovable mountains may have considerable literary range.

The Christian Gospels contain a strange figure of immovable mountains. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says to his disciples:

Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, “Be taken up and thrown into the sea,” and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. [3]

Closely related figures exist in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The first letter to the Corinthians refers to “faith that can move mountains.”[4] The impossibility supposed possible is an ancient, widely used rhetorical figure. The impossibility of casting mountains into the sea assumes understanding of mountains as immovable. Literary elaboration upon that understanding apparently goes back at least to the time of the Christian Gospels.

Al-Khansa’s lament may have refigured the Gospel figure of moving immovable mountains. Both concern God’s power. In the Gospels, faith in God gives a person of faith the power to move mountains. In al-Khansa’s lament, God keeps in place the immovable mountains.

The water of al-Khansa’s tears connects to the sea. Just as immovable mountains are obvious macroscopically, erosion of land from streams of water is obvious microscopically. One can imagine small streams of water over a long time wearing away mountains.[5] In the Gospels, faith in God would allow al-Khansa to cast mountains into the sea. In al-Khansa’s lament, only God keeping in place mountains stops her stream of tears from washing the mountains away. Even if she were to live long enough to fill a sea with her tears, without God’s will, the mountains remain.

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Notes:

[1] Al-Khansa, Diwan ed. Abd al-Salam al-Hufi (Beirut: Dar al-Katub al-Ilmiyaa, 1985) p. 99, from Arabic trans. Hammond (2010) p. 169. Al-Khansa is one of the most celebrated women poets in classical Arabic literature. Id, n. 3, remarks that this poem does not exist in many editions of al-Khansa’s Diwan.

[2] Psalm 125:1-2 uses immovable mountains in a straight-forward metaphor:

Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion,
which cannot be moved, but abides forever.
As the mountains surround Jerusalem,
so the Lord surrounds his people,
from this time on and forevermore.

[3] Mark 11:22-3. See also Matthew 17:20, 21:21; Luke 17:6.

[4] 1 Corinthians 13:2.

[5] The mu’allaqa of Labīd provides such imagery:

And the torrent beds of Rayyán naked tracings,
worn thin, like inscriptions carved in flattened stones,
…
Replenished by the rain stars of spring, and struck
by thunderclap downpour, or steady, fine-dropped, silken rains.

From Arabic trans. Sells (1989) p. 35. For related discussion, Hammond (2010) pp. 124-7.

[image] Photo thanks to Cathy Edelman.

References:

Hammond, Marlé. 2010. Beyond elegy: classical Arabic women’s poetry in context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sells, Michael Anthony. 1989. Desert tracings: six classic Arabian odes. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press.

Romance of the Rose: vital dream of sexual fulfillment

Pygmalion embracing woman in Romance of the Rose

Women and men, by the very dignity of their human nature, are entitled to sexual fulfillment. In the European Middle Ages, Christians venerated lavishly dressed, bejeweled images of the Virgin Mary. Medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary buttressed oppressive ideals of courtly love and men’s subordination in non-sexual service to women. Today, U.S. universities target men’s sexuality for harsh repression, while studiously maintaining ignorance about the reality of rape. The Romance of the Rose, a highly popular, thirteenth-century French work, presented a man’s struggle for sexual fulfillment.[1] His struggle succeeded, but only in his dream. Making the Romance of the Rose’s dream real is a vital and continuing challenge.

The Romance of the Rose retells the story of Pygmalion to connect veneration of the Virgin Mary to sexual fulfillment. Pygmalion sought pleasure in testing his artistic skill and in winning fame — in medieval understanding, shallow secular pleasures compared to the deep joy of holy adoration and sex. He crafted an ivory image of a woman:

it was as lovely and beautiful and apparently as alive as the fairest creature living. Helen and Lavinia were beautifully fashioned, but they were not born with such fine complexions or such shapely forms, nor had they one-tenth of her beauty. [2]

Pygmalion fell in love with the ivory woman that he created. So too medieval men and women, pilgrims who traveled great distances, loved sculpted images of the Virgin Mary.

Pygmalion perceived the ridiculousness of the situation. He noted:

I love an image that is deaf and dumb, that cannot move or stir, and will never have pity on me. How could I have been wounded by such a love? … there are many countries where many men have loved many ladies and served them as well as they could without receiving a single kiss in spite of all their toil.

Those men are impious fools — Suero de Cuinones, Ulrich von Lichtenstein, R. Howard Bloch, and many modern male-gendered cis-feminists. Pygmalion addressed his virgin ivory woman:

Sweet friend, I ask for mercy and beg you to accept these amends, for if you would only deign to look gently and smile upon me, I believe that that would suffice me, for sweet looks and gracious smiles give great delight to lovers.

Then Pygmalion venerated the virgin:

Pygmalion fell on his knees, and his face was wet with tears. He made his offering in reparation, but she cared nothing for these amends. She neither heard nor felt anything about him or his gift

Pygmalion’s veneration of his virgin ivory went beyond prayers and songs of adoration:

he would embrace her once again and take her in his arms as he lay in his bed, kissing and caressing her. But it is not very pleasant for two people to kiss each other when they are not both enjoying it. [3]

Men’s pleasure in love depends on sense of mutual enjoyment. A flesh-and-blood women can provide that sense in a way that no virgin ivory can.

Divine intercession brought Pygmalion sexual fulfillment. Pygmalion held a vigil at a temple of Venus. He prayed to the goddess:

blessed Venus, the lady of this temple, fill me with your grace, for you are greatly angered when Chastity finds favor, and I have  deserved severe punishment for having served her so long. I repent of it now, without further delay, and I beg you to pardon me. Be merciful to me, be tender and kind and grant, on the understanding that I will flee into exile if I do not shun Chastity from now on, that the fair one who has stolen away my heart and who is so like ivory, may become my true sweetheart, with the body, soul, and life of a woman. If you make haste to do this and I am ever again found to be chaste, may I be hanged or hewn in two with great hatchets, or may Cerberus, the doorkeeper of hell, swallow me alive and crush me in his triple jaws, or bind me with ropes or chains.

After this petitioning prayer, Pygmalion was “ready to perform his penance naked in the arms of his sweetheart.”[4] To make that penance possible, Venus animated the virgin ivory with a soul. It became a beautiful, flesh-and-blood woman.

Pygmalion was overjoyed that his prayer was answered. He marveled at the woman:

He saw that she was living flesh; he caressed the naked flesh, he saw the lovely blond locks shining, and rippling together like the waves, he felt the bones and the veins all full of blood, and the throbbing movement of the pulse.

Pygmalion doubted reality as if it were merely a construct of human minds. But the maiden spoke warm, reassuring words to him:

Sweet friend, it is neither a demon nor phantom. I am your sweetheart, ready to receive your companionship, and I offer you my love if you will be pleased to accept it.

After Pygmalion provided affirmative consent, words made flesh became real beyond doubt to him:

she refused him nothing that he wanted. If he raised objections, she yielded, overcome by his arguments; if she commanded, he obeyed; under no circumstances would he refuse to gratify her every desire. He could lie with his sweetheart, and she would neither resist nor make complaint.

This confusion of command and argument indicates the mutuality of love. It wasn’t just a rhetorical exercise. She became pregnant and had their child.

Realizing adoration of the virgin as Pygmalion did requires the lover to establish an intimate personal relationship. Gazing upon the reliquary and aperture above his virgin’s legs, the lover imagined the furrow for him to plough. With the help of Venus, fire began to burn within the sanctuary, that place of the rose. The lover moved forward:

I promptly made my way, like the good pilgrim I was, with heart as ardent, fervent, and loyal as any true lover, towards the aperture, there to fulfill my pilgrimage. I had laboriously brought with me my sack, and my staff that was so stiff and strong that it needed no iron foresheath when going on journeys. The sack was well made of a supple, seamless skin, but I assure you it was not empty. At the time she made the sack, Nature, who gave it to me, had forged two hammers for it with great skill and care … I know how to forge. I assure you that my two hammers and my sack are dearer to me than my lute or my harp.

Transcending the sordid history of disparaging men’s genitals, the lover appreciated that his staff was wonderfully made:

I have taken it into many places, and it has often brought me comfort. It is very useful to me, and do you know how? When I am traveling in some out of the way place, I stick it into those ditches in which I cannot make anything out, and I also use it to try out the fords. Thus I can boast that I need have no fear of drowning, for I am very good at testing the fords, and at striking the bed and banks with my staff. Sometimes I encounter streams that are so deep and whose banks are so far apart that I would find it less painful and wearisome to swim two leagues along the sea-shore than to attempt so perilous a passage.

Despite these hazards, the lover recognized the attractions of loving older women. He also recognized the scientific virtue of empiricism:

you do well to try everything, the better to enjoy the things that are good. Whenever he can get into the kitchen, the epicurean connoisseur of delicious morsels tries meats of various kinds, whether boiled in a pot or roasted, marinaded or in a pastry crust, fried or in a galantine. Having tasted many in this way, he knows which to praise and which to condemn, which are sweet and which are bitter.

The lover wasn’t merely interested in a piece of meat. He sought the rose.

The lover’s pilgrimage to venerating the holy virgin, the rose, drew near to consummation. He partially raised the curtain that screened the holy relic and devoutly kissed the sanctuary. The lover explained:

I wanted to sheath my staff by putting it into the aperture while the sack hung outside. I tried to thrust it in at one go, but it came out and I tried again, to no avail because it sprang out every time and nothing I did could make it go in. There was a barrier within, which I could feel but could not see. When the aperture was first constructed, it had been placed there, close to the edge to fortify it and make it stronger and more secure.

Flesh-and-blood life is full of difficulties for men. Men must work to overcome these difficulties:

I noticed a narrow passage through which I thought I could pass, but first I had to break down the barrier. This tiny, narrow pathway that I have mentioned and through which I sought to pass, allowed me to break down the barrier with my staff and introduce myself into the aperture, but I could not even get halfway in. … Nothing, however, could have prevented me from sliding my staff all the way in. I did so without delay, but the sack with its pounding hammers stayed dangling outside.

The lover shook the rose tree. He proceeded gently, “for I did not want to cause any injury”:

at last, when I had shaken the bud, I scattered a little seed there. This was when I had touched the inside of the rose-bud and explored all its little leaves, for I longed, and it seemed good to me, to probe its very depths.

To many today, such action doesn’t seem good. It is good. Thinking otherwise is a misconception.

The Romance of the Rose’s completion has been misunderstood as idolatry.  Interpreting the story of Pygmalion and the lover’s quest to penetrate the rose, an influential medieval scholar declared:

a man, diligently seeking out and considering in his thought the beauty of women so that he makes idols for himself, necessarily prepares for his own fall. … An “idol” is thus not always a tangible image of wood or stone; it may be an image in the mind. And such mental images are typically those formed on the basis of feminine beauty. [5]

Men don’t imagine “the beauty of women”; a man imagines the body of a specific woman. In the Middle Ages, many men imagined the body of the Virgin Mary, who was represented in tangible images of wood and stone. The audacious genius of the Romance of the Rose was to unite adoration of the Virgin Mary with the lover’s genital connection to a specific, flesh-and-blood woman.[6] The completion of the Romance of the Rose rejected the mental malady of disembodied courtly love:

the felicitous conclusion of the love story begins when it abandons the path of cerebral and artificial gameplaying and enters onto that of straight genital copulation, in accordance with the intentions of God the creator [7]

Incarnation among humans proceeds from the holy wonderful act of straight genital copulation.

The Romance of the Rose, a medieval best-seller, united adoration of a virgin image and the goodness of a penis penetrating a vagina. Neither sort of act is well-appreciated today. May our repressive Dark Age receive enlightenment!

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Notes:

[1] Between 1225 and 1230, Guillaume de Lorris wrote the first 4,058 lines of the Romance of the Rose. Between 1269 and 1278, Jean de Meun wrote an additional 17,724 lines. The Romance of the Rose was one of the most popular medieval texts. More than 200 medieval manuscripts of it have survived. For comparison, only 84 manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are extant. Horgan (1994) Introduction, p. ix.

[2] Romance of the Rose (Roman de la Rose), from French trans. Horgan (1994) p. 321. Pygmalion is a figure in ancient Greek myth. Helen refers to Helen of Troy; Lavinia, to the wife of Aeneas. All subsequent quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from l. 20653-21712, trans. id. pp. 319-335 (Chapter 12, “The Conquest of the Rose”). I’ve made some minor changes to the translations for clarity.

Ovid, Metamorphosis, 10.271-463, influentially told the story of Pygmalion creating an ivory image of a beautiful woman. In Ovid, prior to creating his image, Pygmalion had resolved to remain unmarried in response to women’s shameful behavior and personal flaws. Jean de Meun’s Pygmalion doesn’t express any dissatisfaction with flesh-and-blood women. On differences between Ovid’s and Jean de Meun’s treatment of Pygmalion, McCaffrey (1999).

[3] Philostephanus of Cyrene, writing in Greek in the third century BGC, recounted the story of Pygmalion. While the relevant work (Philostephanus’s Cypriaca) is lost, Arnobius (c. 300) summarized its treatment of Pygmalion:

he would lift up the divinity to the couch, and enter into union with her; embracing and kissing her and carrying out acts that, born of lust’s vain imaginings, could only be frustrated by reality.

From Latin trans. Stoichita (2008) p. 8. In the Romance of the Rose, the lover shows more respect for the difference between an image and a flesh-and-blood woman. Nonetheless, Haines (2010), p. 37, opines that Pygmalion in the Romance of the Rose “visually raped” the ivory. Scholars would more usefully consider the facts of real rape. McCaffrey (1999), p. 440, describes the Romance of the Rose’s Pygmalion as “more eccentric than Ovid’s and more nearly delusional.” That judgment lacks appreciation for medieval practices of adoring and adorning images of the Virgin Mary.

[4] The Romance of the Rose re-interprets Christian religious practice of prayer, confession, and penance. The lover superficially replaces “concupiscence” with “chastity” for the sin he confesses. But that isn’t simply parody. The Romance of the Rose concerns the meaning of true love between a man and a woman in the world.

[5] Robertson (1962) p. 99.

[6] Jean de Meun wrote the story of Pygmalion and the lover’s union with the rose in the final chapter of the Romance of the Rose. In a motet that Haines (2010) attributes to Jean de Meun, the Virgin Mary is starkly distinguished from all other women:

For when God created woman,
he gave her a sweet form
to better cover her false soul.
But He exempted the holy
and mighty one of whom I sing.
I wish to serve my Lady with all my heart.

Id. p. 34. That’s thematically very different from the relation of the Virgin Mary to other women in the Romance of the Rose. Attributing the motet to Jean de Meun surely is questionable.

In The apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun of Honorat Bovet, written in 1398, Jean de Meun appears as a learned scholar staunchly committed to speaking truth to power. See Hanly (2005) l. 1-80. That’s consistent with the above interpretation of Jean de Meun’s completion of the Romance of the Rose.

[7] Nykrog (1998) p. 324. Id. observes that, within the Romance of the Rose, Reason, Nature, Genius, and Venus all support this view.  In ancient Greece, beauty (kállos) was associated with sexual desire. Konstan (2015). In academic scholarship today, cerebral gameplaying favors misandry:

it is my conviction that the poem’s unmasking of its own internal incoherences does not actually lead to textual hermaphroditism or semiotic and sexual indeterminacy. Rather it works to shore up men’s sexual, social, and political power under patriarchy and to confirm women’s status as mute, passive sexual objects, as the butt of a particularly vicious form of priapic humor.

Guynn (2004) p. 653.

[image] Embrace of Pygmalion and women vivified from his statue. Detail from illuminated page of Roman de la Rose. Manuscript from France, possibly Paris, ca. 1405. MS M.245 fol. 152r, Morgan Library (NY).

References:

Guynn, Noah D. 2004. “Authorship and Sexual/Allegorical Violence in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose.” Speculum. 79 (3): 628-659.

Haines, John. 2010. “An Antifeminist Motet by Jean de Meun (?): O bicornix / A touz jours / Virgo Dei genitrix.” Nottingham Medieval Studies. 53 (1): 21-38.

Hanly, Michael G. 2005. Honoré Bovet. Medieval Muslims, Christians, and Jews in dialogue: the apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun of Honorat Bovet : a critical edition with English translation. Tempe, Ariz: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Horgan, Frances, trans. 1994. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The Romance of the Rose. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Konstan, David. 2015. Beauty: the fortunes of an ancient Greek idea. New York: Oxford University Press.

McCaffrey, Phillip. 1999. “Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun: Narcissus and Pygmalion.” Romanic Review. 90: 435-450.

Nykrog, Per. 1998. “Obscene or Not Obscene: Lady Reason, Jean de Meun, and the Fisherman from Pont-sur-Seine.” Pp. 319- 31 in Ziolkowski, Jan M. 1998. Obscenity: social control and artistic creation in the European Middle Ages. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Robertson, Durant W. 1962. A preface to Chaucer: studies in medieval perspectives. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Stoichita, Victor Ieronim. 2008. The Pygmalion effect: from Ovid to Hitchcock. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.