violence against men in Boccaccio's Decameron

Since men have the social status of relatively disposable human beings, violence against men tends to be taken as natural in life and literature.  Violence against men is prevalent in Boccaccio’s Decameron.  Yet that imaginative masterpiece provides an inner, critical perspective on violence against men.  Readers fail to recognize the Decameron’s ethical critique of violence against men because they are complicit in their own culture of demeaning violence against men.

Violence against men tends to be associated with men’s natural sexual rivalry for women.  In Decameron IV.4, Gerbino attacked a Saracen ship to capture his beloved, the daughter of the King of Tunis.  She was being conveyed to marriage with the King of Granada.  Many of Gerbino’s men and many of the men in the other ship were killed.  After the Saracens’ killed the woman rather than be forced to give her up, Gerbino, acting the part of the courtly hero, climbed onto the enemy ship:

Just like a starving lion who falls upon a herd of bullocks, slashing this one with his teeth and that one with his claws, intent on satisfying his anger rather than his hunger, so Gerbino, sword in hand, cut down one Saracen and then another, slaughtering a host of them without mercy. [1]

Gerbino’s grandfather, the King of Sicily, subsequently had Gerbino beheaded for attacking the ship in violation of his promise of safe passage.  The “gallant” Gerbino had an “exalted reputation for courtesy and valor.”  He caused many men to be slaughtered.  The same literary pattern occurs in Decameron V.1 when Cimone is transformed into a courtly lover:

like a ferocious lion, he fell upon his enemies {men} in an amazing display of force, and sword in hand, struck them down one after the other, slaughtering them like so many sheep. [2]

Boccaccio justly had contempt for the idiocy of men acting the script of courtly lovers.  Decameron II.7, understood more than superficially as the story of Alatiel, makes clear Boccaccio’s concern for the reality of men’s deaths in sexual rivalry.  Sexual rivalry among men is natural.  But the extent of slaughter of men it produces depends on specific social conventions and circumstances.

blinding and castrating King William III of Sicily

Punishment of men for illicit sex is a specific social construct.  In the U.S. today, men are jailed for doing nothing more than having consensual sex of reproductive type and then becoming poor.  In Decameron IV.1, a father kills a man for having consensual sex with his daughter.  In Decameron IV.5, brothers kill a man for having consensual sex with their sister.  In Decameron IV.9, a husband kills a man for having consensual sex with his wife.  Men traditionally have been socially assigned the task of killing other men.  The effect of being dead, however, doesn’t depend on who does the killing.  In domestic relations and in supportive social circumstances, women can and do physically attack men.  In Decameron IX.5, Monna Tessa caught her husband Calandrino in flagrante delicto:

Before Calandrino could get up, Monna Tessa ran at him with her nails and clawed him all over this face.  Then she seized him by the hair and started dragging him up and down. “You damned filthy dog, you!” she said to him.  “So this is how you treat me?  You old fool ….”  {Calandrino} did not have the courage to do anything to defend himself against her.  But later, all scratched and scraped and disheveled, he gathered his cloak, got to his feet, and began humbly begging her not to shout, unless she wanted to see him all cut up into little pieces, because the woman who had been with him was the wife of the master of the house. [3]

Engaging in physical violence against other men as a heroic courtly lover was largely an elite ideal.  Like punishing men for consensual sex in the U.S. today, punishing men for illicit sex was in Boccaccio’s Florence much more significant in the lives of ordinary men.

Boccaccio makes clear that women are agents, both socially and individually, for violence against men.  In Decameron VII.4, Monna Ghita encouraged her husband Tofano’s abuse of alcohol in order to enable her to have an affair.  When Tofano caught on to his wife behavior and locked her out of the house, she trumped his trick and contrived to have her family beat him:

they grabbed Tofano and beat him until he was completely covered with bruises.  Then they went into the house, gathered up all the lady’s belongings, and took her back home with them, threatening Tofano with even worse to come. … Tofano, who was really very fond of his wife, got some friends to act as intermediaries, and thanks to them he managed to make peace and arranged for her to come back home.  And not only did he promise her that he would never be jealous again, but what is more, he gave her permission to do whatever she liked, as long as she was so discreet that he never found out anything about it. [4]

In Decameron VII.7, Madonna Beatrice encouraged her lover to give her husband Egano a beating:

“Sweet lips,” she said. “I want you to get yourself a stout stick and go down to the garden.  Then, pretending that you’d asked me to go there in order to test me, I want you to heap abuse on Egano just as if you thought you were talking to me, and after that, I want you to play a nice tune on him with your stick for me.  Just think of the amazing pleasure and delight we’ll get out of that!” [5]

Madonna Beatrice’s lover carried out her request and beat Egano “black and blue” with a stick.  Women’s dominance over men allows them to persuade men to carry out violence against other men.

Men’s social inferiority to women supports violence against men.  Women tend to suppress socially stories of women’s guile.  Men often don’t even understand their social position with respect to women.  In Decameron VII.9, Lidia yanked out one of her husband’s healthy teeth to demonstrate her loyalty to her lover.  Her husband never suspected that his wife might betray him.  Violence against women generates much more social concern than violence against men.  Many men and women don’t suspect that violence against men is much frequent and severe than violence against women.

Boccaccio challenges readers to reject trivialization of violence against men.  In Decameron VIII.9, Master Simone wanted to join Bruno and Buffalmacco’s company of privateers.  As part of a mock initiation ritual, they threw him into a ditch filled with feces.  Such light-hearted violence against men is now associated with fraternity hazing rituals.  Decameron II.1, however, indicates the broad social base for violence against men.  Martinello pretended to be crippled in order to mock popular veneration of a saint’s body.  An onlooker recognized the ruse and alerted the crowd:

the grabbed him {Martinello} and dragged him down from where he has standing.  Holding him by the hair, they tore all the clothes off his back and started punching and kicking him.  … although he did his best to defend himself, it was no use, and the crowd on top of him just kept getting bigger and bigger. [6]

In Decameron IX.8, Messer Filippo falsely believed that Biondello had made fun of him:

he smashed in Biondello’s face with his fists, which seemed to made out of iron, and did not leave a single hair on his head in place.  Then he rolled him over in the mud and ripped all the clothes he had on to shreds, applying himself to all these tasks with such zeal that after Biondello’s first utterance, he was unable to say another thing, let alone ask Messer Filippo why he was doing all this to him. [7]

Messer Filippo perceived an insult in nonsense words that he didn’t understand.  Ciacco had set Biondello up for this beating in revenge for Biondello setting him up for a disappointing dinner.  That incredible disproportion represents the trivialization of violence against men.

Violence against men in the Decameron has been unremarkable only because violence against men is so deeply embedded in human culture.  Boccaccio, with his keen ethical sense, provided a critical inner understanding of violence against men.  Readers of the Decameron have an ethical obligation to seek that understanding.

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Notes:

[1] Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, Day 4, Story 4, from Italian trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 342-3.  Saracen was the medieval European term for Muslims. Id. n. 4, p. 894, suggests that this epic simile comes from Virgil, e.g. Aeneid 9.339-42.

[2] Id., Day 5, Story 1, trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 394.  The lion simile here is connected to the slaughter of sheep.  The latter has anti-heroic biblical resonances.  Romans 8:36, Acts 8:32.

[3] Id., Day 9, Story 5, trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 723.

[4] Id., Day 7, Story 4, trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 541.

[5] Id., Day 7, Story 7, trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 561.

[6] Id., Day 2, Story 1, trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 79.

[7] Id. Day 9, Story 8, trans. Rebhorn (2013) p. 736.

[image] Blinding and castrating King William III of Siciliy, apparently from Boccaccio, trans. into French by Laurens de Premierfait, Des Cas des nobles hommes et femmes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Français 227.  Thanks to Wikipedia.

Reference:

Rebhorn, Wayne A., trans. 2013. Giovanni Boccaccio. The Decameron. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Galen engaged in anatomical displays and patient care

The second-century physician Galen wrote a massive corpus of scholarly works.  These texts shaped medicine in western Eurasia for more than a millennium.  Along with prodigious scholarly work, Galen was also a physician in bloody, strenuous, and difficult engagements with living bodies in anatomical displays and patient care.

As a young physician in his hometown of Pergamum, Galen performed anatomical displays.  Galen disemboweled a living monkey, emptied its intestines, and then challenged observing physicians to replace the intestines.  According to Galen, none stepped forward to do so.  Galen then surmounted the challenge himself.  Galen similarly would sever a monkey’s artery and challenge rival physicians to stop the bleeding.  Galen would demonstrate that, unlike other physicians, he knew how to stop the bleeding.[1]

At the age of twenty-seven, Galen in 157 was appointed physician to the gladiators in Pergamum.  Just like players in major-league team sports today, gladiators were valuable assets to their promoter-owners.  Galen made ointments and bandages for gladiators’ wounds.  He himself applied and monitored daily the wound treatments.  He sutured deep-tissue wounds and performed abdominal surgery on gladiators.  Galen’s care for the gladiators was much more successful than that of his predecessors.  He served five successive terms as physician to the Pergamum gladiators through the year 161.[2]  Galen subsequently left for Rome.  Rome offered a successful and ambitious physician much greater opportunity for achievement.

Galen gained famed in Rome through amazing anatomical displays.  Galen became friends with Flavius Boethus, a Roman senator and ex-consul who was an avid fan of anatomical displays.  Galen dissected pigs, goats, cattle, monkeys, cats, dogs, mice, snakes, fish, and birds.  He also dissected an elephant at least once.  Dissecting living pigs and goats in front of elite spectators, Galen demonstrated the function of the recurrent laryngeal nerve:

“the finest nerves, a pair of them like hairs,” as he writes, proud of his ability to locate minute anatomical structures.  They were his own discovery, unknown to his predecessors, and he also emphasizes the startling power of these delicate threads: for when they were cut, they would silence the animal without damaging it in any other way. [3]

By ligating the laryngeal nerve with needle and thread, Galen could silence and restore the animal’s voice at will.  In the ancient world, oratory was a primary source of public power.  Galen demonstrated that he could exert precise control over voice.

Galen performed many other types of difficult, bloody anatomical displays.  He vivisected pregnant goats and displayed the fetus breathing and moving.  He cut open living animals’ skulls and showed how pressing on different areas of the brain would change the animals’ physical capabilities, e.g. blind it.  He also cut open living animals to show their beating heart.  He would show that the animal could run, eat, and drink while having its beating heart exposed to view.[4]

Galen’s anatomical displays helped him to provide care for patients.  In one case, a slave boy of Maryllus the mime-writer suffered a wrestling injury.  An abscess formed in the boy’s sternum. After several months, the boy was in danger of death:

Maryllus called together several physicians, including Galen, to consult on the case.  They all agreed that the affected part of the sternum needed to be cut out; no one, however, dared to perform the operation, knowing that the slightest error would result in catastrophic perforation of the pleural membrane.  But Galen had vivisected hundreds of animals.  He had held their beating hearts in his fingers.

Galen attempted the operation:

The operation went well at first — the infection had spared the veins and arteries around the wound — but when Galen removed the affected bone, he saw, to his despair, that part of the pericardium beneath had putrefied and disintegrated, forcing him to excise it.  Then, “we saw the heart as clearly as we see it when we deliberately lay it bare during {animal} dissection.” [5]

The boy recovered and subsequently lived for many years. Galen probably performed the operation without the use of anesthesia.

surgical treatment of skull fracture

Galen’s strenuous, life-long project was not just knowledge-seeking.  A fine recent biography of Galen observed:

Despite the energy he devoted to dissecting, writing, and showing off, Galen never lost sight of the idea that medicine is about treating patients; and he treated all kinds of patients.  His anecdotes, although personal in tone, betray barely a hint of condescension toward any patient except for one silly rich man.  He would root around in a farmer’s yard for a suitable ingredient for a plaster.  He would wheedle information from a chambermaid if it helped him to make a better diagnosis.  He would perform insanely risky surgery on the slim chance of saving a slave boy’s life, with professional disgrace as the price of failure. [6]

Galen, like Paul of Tarsus, was both a highly learned thinker and a person passionately involved in ordinary life.

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Notes:

[1] Mattern (2013) pp. 83-4.  By today’s standards, Galen’s anatomical displays involved grotesque cruelty to animals.  But in the Roman Empire, watching gladiators grievously wound or kill each other was a popular activity.  Galen’s treatment of animals wasn’t much crueler than prevalent treatment of humans in his time and place.

[2] Id. Ch. 3.

[3] Id. p. 148.

[4] Id. pp. 142-4.  These anatomical displays involved flailing animals, cries of pain, and flows of blood.  They were sensually the elite equivalent of gladiator shows.

[5] Id. pp. 184-5 (including previous quote).

[6] Id. pp. 288-9.

[image] Medieval treatment of compound skull fracture. From Roger Frugard of Parma, Chirurgia. France, N. (Amiens); 1st quarter of the 14th century.  f. 2 of Sloane 1977, thanks to British Library.

Reference:

Mattern, Susan P. 2013. The prince of medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

oxytocin & testosterone underlie male disposability

Sex-differentiated physiological responses to stress favor male disposability.  Oxytocin, a neuroactive hormone linked to maternal behavior and enhanced by estrogen, facilitates approach behavior and more generally, social affiliation. Oxytocin has been found to increase trust in mammals.[1]  Oxytocin is more up-regulated in women’s stress response than in men’s.  In response to stress, women tend-and-befriend in-group members and rally social antagonism toward out-group individuals.  Men’s response to stress tends toward decreasing trust, indiscriminate avoidance, and isolation.  Men’s behavioral response to stress is associated with down-regulation of oxytocin.[2]

Compared to women, men have on average about a ten times higher level of serum testosterone.  Increases in testosterone suppress immune system functioning and are correlated with competing for dominance.[3]  The large difference in males’ and females’ basal testosterone levels is also correlated with greater male risk of predation, greater male susceptibility to infectious diseases, much higher male suicide rates, and increased male-female mortality protrusion under conditions of chronic stress.

Gender protrusion in male mortality is common across animals and is linked to stress.  Among 26 mammalian species for which data are available, the median male/female predation death ratio is about 1.7.[4]  Death from parasites (infectious disease) is also male-biased.[5]  In the U.S., the male/female suicide mortality ratio is 3.9, the highest sex ratio among enumerated causes of death.  Under conditions of chronic stress, male testosterone levels typically fall while female testosterone levels rise.  Russia from 1990 to 2000 provides a historical example of significant, sex-differentiated effects of chronic stress.  Across those years, the gender protrusion in mortality grew from 10 years shorter expected lifespan for males to 13 years shorter expected lifespan for males.[6]

A man’s physiological response to stress tends to separate him from others and increase his mortality risk.  A woman’s physiological response to stress tends to integrate her with others and socialize concern about risk to her.  Social effects of those biological mechanisms of male disposability are starkly evident in the sex-differentiated social response to interpersonal violent injury and to rape.

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Notes:

[1] Anacker & Beery (2013), Curley & Keverne (2005), Lieberwirth & Wang (2014).  As Lieberwirth & Wang (2014) p. 8 observes, sex differences in hormonal response have been relatively under-studied.

[2] Taylor et al. (2000), Tamres, Janicki & Helgeson (2002), De Dreu et al. (2011), Palgi, Klein & Shamay-Tsoory (2014).  Estrogen strongly increases oxytocin’s effects.  Taylor (2006) p. 276.

[3] Grant (2005) p. 2.  In males, testosterone is secreted primarily from the testes.  In females, testosterone originates in peripheral tissues.  On behavioral effects of sex differences in testosterone, Klein (2000), Grant (2005) pp. 3-11, Lamason et al. (2006), and Edwards (2006).  Grant convincingly argues that dominance, understood as “acting overtly to change the views or actions of another” is not the same as aggression.  She also documents that dominance is more closely correlated with testosterone differences than is aggression.  The hormone arginine vasopressin (AVP) also has sex-differentiated activity:

In men, AVP stimulates agonistic facial motor patterns in response to the faces of unfamiliar men and decreases the perceptions of the friendliness of those faces. In contrast, in women, AVP stimulates affiliative facial motor patterns in response to the faces of unfamiliar women and increases perceptions of the friendliness of those faces.

Thompson et al. (2006) p. 7889.  In males, AVP is associated with the formation of bonds with female mates, as well as territorial marking and aggression. Curley & Keverne (2005) p. 562.

[4] Christe, Keller & Roulin (2006).

[5] Lamason et al. (2006).

[6] See workbook Male-Female Gender Protrusion in Mortality in Russia (Excel version).  That data come from World DataBank Gender Statistics.  The WorldBank’s summary page for the Russian Federation reflects now-dominant anti-men gender bigotry.  Shkolnikov & Meslé (1996) Table 4.1 provides a century-long perspective.

References:

Anacker, Allison M. J., and Annaliese K. Beery. 2013. “Life in groups: the roles of oxytocin in mammalian sociality.” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. 7.

Christe, P., L. Keller and A. Roulin. 2006. “The predation cost of being a male: implications for sex-specific rates of ageing.” Oikos 114(2): 381-384.

Curley, James P. and Eric B. Keverne (2005). “Genes, brains and mammalian social bonds.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 20(10): 561-567.

De Dreu Carsten K.W., Lindred L. Greer, Gerben A. Van Kleef, Shaul Shalvi, and Michel J.J. Handgraaf. 2011. “Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 108 (4): 1262-6.

Edwards, David. 2006. “Competition and testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 50: 681-3.

Grant, Valerie J. 2005. “Dominance, Testosterone and Psychological Sex Differences.” Pp. 1-28 in Janice W. Lee, ed. Psychology of Gender Identity. New York, Nova Science Publishers: 1-28.

Klein, Sabra L. 2000. “Hormones and mating system affect sex and species differences in immune function among vertebrates.” Behavioural Processes 51(1-3): 149-166.

Lamason, Rebecca, Po Zhao, Rashmi Rawat, Adrian Davis, John C. Hall, Jae Jin Chae, Rajeev Agarwal, Phillip Cohen, Antony Rosen, Eric P. Hoffman and Kanneboyina Nagaraju. 2006. “Sexual dimorphism in immune response genes as a function of puberty.” BMC Immunology 7(2): 1-14.

Lieberwirth, Claudia, and Zuoxin Wang. 2014. “Social bonding: regulation by neuropeptides.” Frontiers in Neuroscience. 8 (4).

Palgi, Sharon, Ehud Klein, and Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory. 2014. “Intranasal administration of oxytocin increases compassion toward women.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. (5).

Shkolnikov, Vladimir M. and France Meslé. 1996. “The Russian Epidemiological Crisis as Mirrored by Mortality Trends.” In Julie DaVanzo and Gwen Farnsworth, eds. Russia’s Demographic “Crisis”. RAND Conference Proceedings CF-124-CRES.

Tamres, Lisa K., Denise Janicki, and Vicki S. Helgeson. 2002. “Sex Differences in Coping Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review and an Examination of Relative Coping.” Personality and Social Psychology Review. 6 (1): 2-30.

Taylor, Shelley E., Laura Cousino Klein, Brian P. Lewis, Tara L. Gruenewald, Regan A.R. Gurung and John A. Updegraff. 2000. “Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-Befriend, not Fight-or-Flight.” Psychological Review 107(3): 411-429.

Taylor, Shelley E. 2006. “Tend and Befriend: Biobehavioral Bases of Affiliation Under Stress.” Current Directions in Psychological Science. 15 (6): 273-277.

Thompson, R. R., K. George, J. C. Walton, S. P. Orr and J. Benson. 2006. “Sex-specific influences of vasopressin on human social communication.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 103(20): 7889-7894.