Il Corbaccio: our heartless, dark age of literary criticism

Corbaccio: big crow bearing unpleasant news

Leading Boccaccio scholars have produced the authoritative tome Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works.  The prestigious University of Chicago Press published it this year. This work could have been vitally important to compassionate women and men pondering Boccaccio’s complex masterpeice Il Corbaccio.  Today thinking, feeling persons are urgently seeking new ethical language and narratives to protest incarcerating men for doing nothing more than having consensual sex, to summon concern about raping men, and to denounce punishing men for being raped.  The Critical Guide, however, offers only a place to sit and sip scholarly status amid heartless ethical darkness.

In our desperate circumstances, the subversive literary genius of Il Corbaccio offers strong imaginative resources and a critical measure of literary culture.  Men, seeking directions, need good guides.  Here are the first two sentences of the Critical Guide on Il Corbaccio:

On its surface, Boccaccio’s Corbaccio reads as a misogynistic blast with insults added to injuries, scurrilous terminology, imagery descending to the pornographic, bad puns, and unrelenting lists of female vices far beyond the limits of decency or plausibility.  The two main characters in dialogue are sour aging men on whom no modern women in her right mind would wish to waste a word, let alone seek their company. [1]

Apparently the women who lived before the era of “modern women” were compassionate and sophisticated enough to talk with such men, to seek their company, and to try to understand their concerns.  In our heartless, dark age of literary criticism, many critics are incapable of sympathetically considering literature of men’s sexed protests.  They misandristically label it misogyny and dismiss it with superficial, contrived analysis.

For these critics, Boccaccio’s masterpiece Il Corbaccio is just another piece to be processed in tallying the literary wrongs done to women and men, respectively, since the invention of writing.  Criticizing women, or disciplinary rules forfend, making fun of women, is always wrong.  Since Il Corbaccio is superficially classified as invective, it thus adds many points to the tally of literary wrongs done to women.  Fortunately, hard-working literary scholars have dug up Lucrezia Marinella’s 1601 treatise entitled, with uncanny literary sophistication, The Nobility and Excellence of Woman and the Defects and Vices of Men.  The Critical Guide’s article on Il Corbaccio declares approvingly:

Lucrezia Marinella sized up Il Corbaccio’s repulsiveness with a meaty chapter titled “Boccaccio’s Opinion Adduced Here and Destroyed.”  She understood the rhetoric of invective perfectly and righted the imbalance by praising women’s virtues and condemning men’s far more numerous and serious faults. [2]

Of course Lucrezia Marinella didn’t “right the imbalance” in 1601.  Tally-keepers believe it’s necessary to continue to emphasize violence against women even though in the U.S. today four times as many men die from violence as do women.  Reading Boccaccio on the governance of friendship thus naturally means directing attention to violence against women.

Boccaccio’s trangressive Il Corbaccio cannot be adequately appreciated without deep appreciation for men’s position within a culture that produced Ulrich von Liechtenstein and Suero de Quinones.  Il Corbaccio combines comic realism with great literary sophistication:

Boccaccio, having destabilized the character of the guide through the conflating of specific Dantean intertextualities, warns the reader that the guide holds a less than authoritative position.  The misogynistic diatribe that spews forth from the guide serves as a further indication of the demented state of the guide’s intellect.  Boccaccio must have really enjoyed composing this section; rare indeed is the opportunity for an author to assume the voice of an almost comically deranged mind; such was also the case for Ovid in his Ibis. [3]

Ovid unquestionably was deeply hurt by his exile.  Men unquestionably suffer deep wounds from women.  Nether Ovid’s Ibis nor Boccaccio’s Corbaccio can be adequately read merely as playful invective.  In contrast to superficial readings of its preface, Boccaccio’s Decameron was written for men to instruct them in the comic reality of love for flesh-and-blood women.  With that same fundamental ethical concern Boccaccio also wrote Il Corbaccio.[4]  Il Corbaccio outrageously imagines the comic reality of love as a new Vita Nuova.  Our culture desperately needs that humane vision.

That humane vision doesn’t require great literature insightfully read.  One summer during my college years, I got a job in a large corporation focused on engineering and technology.  Most of the employees in my department were middle-aged career men.  One secretary was a young, beautiful, curvy woman who emphasized her sexual power with provocative dress.  A relatively old co-worker, perhaps noticing my vulnerability, said to me, “Yeah, but imagine how she looks bent over taking a shit.”  Scholars who dismiss Il Corbaccio as misogynistic would probably also dismiss that comment as misogynistic.  That comment highlights that the young, stunningly attractive woman was a flesh-and-blood human, just like us men.  That’s a much different view of a woman than Dante’s view of Beatrice in Dante’s Vita Nuova.

In the relatively illiberal and oppressive historical circumstances of our intellectual life, Boccaccio offers an inspiring monument of ethical concern and intellectual courage.  A scholar recently recognized Boccaccio’s under-appreciated contemporary importance:

My most sincere hope is that the reader will, when walking the streets of Florence with the tourist hordes, look at the many monuments to Dante and Petrarca in that once lovely city and remember one name: Giovanni Boccaccio. [5]

Remembering Boccaccio’s name isn’t enough.  We should also remember Boccaccio’s use of Jerome’s artful literary construction, Theophrastus’ Golden Book on Marriage.  To foster for men and women a more pleasurable life without trespassing the sign of reason in any way, we must adequately appreciate Boccaccio’s Corbaccio.

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Notes:

[1] Panizza (2014) p. 183. Id. goes on to declare that the Corbaccio “has its fascinations” for relatively unimportant reasons, ending with “it offers a therapy for dealing with immoderate sexual passions.”  That latter reason follows Solomon (1997)’s deeply misandristic analysis of Alonso Martínez de Toledo’s Archpriest of Talavera and Jaume Roig’s Spill.

[2] Id. p. 193.  The most well-known medieval author of this sort of work is Christine de Pizan.

[3] Houston (2010) p. 116.

[4] Within circumstances of narrow and strongly constrained male self-consciousness, academics continue to fail to appreciate the Corbaccio.  In a recent example, a literal reading of the Decameron’s Proem revealed that it was written for “gentle ladies of Florence’s salons.”  In addition:

The message in the Corbaccio could not be more opposed to the Decameron; so too Boccaccio aims these two works at different audiences, confirming his tendency to target specific audiences for his writings.

Houston (2010) p. 120.  Houston suggests that the Corbaccio “can be made to support any reading” and offers a highly contrived reading of the Corbaccio as “a satire against the critics of vernacular poetry with an embedded parody of the Dominican preachers {specifically Bartolomeo di San Concordio and Jacopo Passavanti}  and their limited view of literature.”  Id. p. 122, see in general pp. 100-23.

[5] Id. p. 11.

[image] American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos), Singing Sands, Bruce Peninsula National Park, Ontario, Canada.  June, 2007.  Thanks to Wikipedia.  Panizza (2014) p. 184 states:

The title itself, Il Corbaccio, offers a typical medieval play on Boccaccio’s name.  It inverts the first part, turning bocca, “mouth,” into corba, “crow” or “raven,” and keeps –accio as a suffix qualifying the noun, suggesting something huge, ugly, coarse, or unpleasant.  Boccaccio playfully inverts his name, transforming a “big, vulgar writer of novelle” into a “big, ugly, coarse crow/raven” bearing harsh news.

Crow as a verb can mean “to shout in exultation or defiance; to brag” and “to utter a sound expressive of joy or pleasure.”  Those additional verbal meanings provide insight into Il Corbaccio’s perspective on men’s courtly fantasies about women.

References:

Houston, Jason M. 2010. Building a monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dantista. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Panizza, Letizia. 2014. “Rhetoric and Invective in Love’s Labyrinth (Il Corbaccio).”  Pp. 183-93 in Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr, eds. 2014. Boccaccio: a critical guide to the complete works. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Solomon, Michael. 1997. The literature of misogyny in medieval Spain: the Arcipreste de Talavera and the Spill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

scholarly literature on sex differences in communication

Studying scholarly literature on sex differences in communication is insightful.  Popular books on sex differences usually lack solid scientific support but appeal to common sense.  They are easily understandable and occasionally amusing.  Reading excruciatingly detailed technical analysis of the scholarly weaknesses of these books indicates contrasting values in the scholarly marketplace.  For example, in an article entitled “‘You Just Don’t Have the Evidence’: An Analysis of Claims and Evidence in Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand,” two communication scholars noted:

there is widespread agreement that gender differences in communication are typically small. This pattern is evident in the foregoing review of research in various areas {of communication} and has also been noted by other authors who have conducted similar reviews. For example, Canary and Hause (1993) reviewed 15 meta-analyses on various communications topics, summarizing more than 1,200 studies of gender differences in communication. The average effect size is small (average weighted d = .24) and accounts for about 1% of the variance. [1]

Effect sizes and shares of variance depend strongly on experimental design.[2]  Effect sizes and shares of variance from unnatural, laboratory experiments are thus difficult to interpret in relation to the ordinary behavior of men and women in ordinary life.  The cited meta-analysis, Canary and Hause (1993), summarized the scholarly situation in 1993:

The problem is that fifty years of research on the topic of sex differences in communication have provided no clear findings. … Is there any reason to research sex differences in communication? On both empirical and conceptual levels the answer is “no,” assuming current practices continue. [3]

This scholarship carefully preserved the possibility of doing further academic work in this area:

We believe there are sex differences in communication, but they are eluding us. Perhaps a definitive answer to the question of sex differences in communication will arrive within the next fifty years. [4]

This scholarly work also lamented the influence of sexual stereotypes on scholarly work, the polarization of the sexes in scholarly deliberation, scholars’ failure to distinguish clearly between sex (nature) and gender (nurture), a dearth of theory about gender, and excessive scholarly enthusiasm for studying sex differences.  As the popular adage goes, if what you’re doing isn’t succeeding, keep doing it until it succeeds.

stack of scholarly papers on sex differences

Meta-analysis and moving to a higher level of abstraction is a common scholarly tactic.  A communication scholar subject to harsh criticism for her view that women and men communicate differently declared:

The pervasiveness of agonism, that is, ritualized adversativeness, in contemporary western academic discourse is the source of both obfuscation of knowledge and personal suffering in academia. Framing of academic discourse as a metaphorical battle leads to a variety of negative consequences, many of which have ethical as well as personal dimensions. [5]

Recent scholarship has emphasized sex differences in competitiveness.  With a striking mix of positive and normative phrases, an economics article published in 2007 was entitled, “Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?”[6]  Consider an alternative title of similar form: “Do Men Compete Vigorously? Are Women Too Averse to Competition?”  The latter title probably wouldn’t have been published, and almost surely wouldn’t have scored as many subsequent citations exploring the roots of gender inequality.  Another social scientist has queried:

What kind of motives are more likely to lead to good science: Competitive motives, like the motive J. D. Watson described in The Double Helix, to get the structure of DNA before Linus Pauling did? Or nurturant motives of the kind that Doug Melton has described recently to explain why he’s going into stem cell research: to find a cure for juvenile diabetes, which his children suffer from? [7]

Scholarly attempts to evaluate this question are likely to be less successful that past scholarly attempts to evaluate sex differences in communication.  Appealing to care for children, however, is a propitious social-rhetorical strategy.

Communication scholars need not step far from calculations of effect sizes in laboratory communication experiments to find more meaningful evidence of sex differences in communication.  From the 1970-1 to the 2010-11 academic years, the sex ratio of students receiving bachelor degrees in “communications, journalism, and related programs” in the U.S. rose from 0.55 women per man to 1.67 women per man.  Bachelor degrees awarded in communications, journalism, and related programs grew about seven times as rapidly as did bachelor degrees in all fields.  That rapid growth was relatively women-biased: the sex ratio in bachelor degrees conferred in communications, journalism, and related fields (1.67 in the 2010-11 school year) is much higher than the sex ratio for all bachelors degrees (1.34).[8]  In short, the academic discipline of communication has grown relatively strongly to serve predominately female students.  Communications scholars pondering sex differences in communication should consider those real-world facts.

In a jazz club the waitress recommended the crab cakes to me, and they turned out to be terrible. I was uncertain about whether or not to send them back. When the waitress came by and asked how the food was, I said that I didn’t really like the crab cakes. She asked, “What’s wrong with them?” While staring at the table, my husband answered, “They don’t taste fresh.” The waitress snapped, “They’re frozen! What do you expect?” I looked directly up at her and said, “We just don’t like them.” She said, “Well, if you don’t like them, I could take them back and bring you something else.” [9]

You should be able to enjoy the food you ordered in a restaurant.  You must be really upset.  You were so right to send those crab cakes back!

The evidence for sex differences in communication is voluminous, socially significant, and willfully disparaged.

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Notes:

[1] Goldsmith & Fulfs (1999) p. 26, footnote omitted.  Id., p. 2, noted that Tannen (1990) had achieved huge market success:

The cover of the 1990 paperback edition proudly proclaims that the book has appeared on the New York Times best-seller list for more than 4 years, generated more than 1.5 million copies, and received favorable reviews from the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and San Franscisco Chronicle. The book has been excerpted and cited for millions of readers in such popular magazines as Newsweek, Time, Redbook, Reader’s Digest, Working Woman, Ladies’ Home Journal, and People and in newspapers such as the Christian Science Monitor and USA Today.

Following the success of the book, Tannen has made numerous television appearances and has written articles and book reviews in a wide variety of publications with large circulation, including Reader’s Digest, the Washington Post, McCall, USA Today, and New York Times Magazine, to name only a few.

[2] The effect sizes calculated in meta-analyses of social-scientific experiments typically depend on variables that are defined conventionally and that have little ecological significance. The variance observed depends greatly on the specific variable description. Consider, for example, a study of sex differences in height. If the study includes women and men both standing and mounted on horseback, then the effect size of sex on height will be much less than if just height standing is measured. MacGeorge et al. (2004) p. 148, Fig. 1, demonstrates the significance of this issue.  If the message type “change the subject” was not included in the experiment, the variance of “likelihood of use” would be much smaller, and the effect size of sex in the experiment would be much larger.  Moreover, sex differences in variance can be significant. Walker et al. (2006) documents cross-cultural sex differences in height, weight, and in the variance in bodily growth trajectories.  Using the “average within-sex standard deviation” (e.g. Hydep (2005) p. 582) in calculating effect sizes makes effect sizes even less interpretable in relation to actual human behavior in ordinary circumstances.

[3] Canary & Hause (1993) pp. 129, 141.

[4] Id. p. 141.

[5] Tannen (2002) p. 1651. Cf. Goldsmith & Fulfs (1999).

[6] Niederle & Vesterlund (2007).

[7] Spelke in Pinker & Spelke (2005).

[8] U.S. Dept. of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics: 2012, Tables 348 and 310.  The sex ratio of female to male communications bachelor degree recipients peaked at 1.83 in the 2003-04 school year.  Across the seven years prior to that peak, communications degrees conferred grew much faster than all bachelor degrees conferred, with growth rates of 52% and 19%, respectively.  In the subsequent seven years, communications degrees conferred grew slightly slower than all bachelor degrees, with growth rates of 21% and 23%, respectively.  Thus the ratio of females to males receiving communications degrees has become less unequal as communications, journalism, and related fields have become much less attractive to students.  These data are gathered and summarized in the Communications Degrees Sex Bias Workbook (Excel version).

[9] Tannen (1990) p. 29.

[image] Douglas Galbi’s photograph.

References

Canary, Daniel J. and Kimberley S. Hause. 1993. “Is There Any Reason to Research Sex Differences in Communication?” Communication Quarterly 41(2): 129-144.

Goldsmith, Daena J. and Patricia A. Fulfs. 1999. “”You Just Don’t Have the Evidence”: An Analysis of Claims and Evidence in Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand.” Communication Yearbook 22: 1-49.

Hyde, Janet Shibley. 2005. “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis.” American Psychologist 60(6): 581-592.

MacGeorge, Erina L., Angela R. Graves, Bo Feng, Seth J. Gillihan and Brant R. Burleson. 2004. “The Myth of Gender Cultures: Similarities Outweigh Differences in Men’s and Women’s Provision of and Responses to Supportive Communication.” Sex Roles 50(3/4): 143-175.

Niederle, Muriel, and Lise Vesterlund. 2007. “Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?“. Quarterly Journal of Economics. 122 (3): 1067-1101.

Pinker, Steven, and Elizabeth Spelke. 2005. “The Science of Gender and Science: Pinker vs. Spelke.”  Edge The Third Culture.

Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You just don’t understand: women and men in conversation. New York, NY: Morrow.

Tannen, Deborah. 2002. “Agonism in academic discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 34: 1651-1669.

Walker, Robert, Michael Gurven, Kim Hill, Andrea Migliano, Napoleon Chagnon, Roberta De Souza, Gradimir Djurovic, Raymond Hames, A. Magdalen Hurtado, Richard Kaplan, Karen Kramer, William J. Oliver, Claudia Valeggia and Taro Yamauchi. 2006. “Growth Rates and Life Histories in Twenty-Two Small-Scale Societies.” American Journal of Human Biology 18: 295-311.

Secundus the Silent Philosopher on men’s troubles

Secundus Silent Philosopher

Secundus the Silent Philosopher (or the Life of Secundus) in an anonymous Greek text from about the second century GC.  Like the Genesis story of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the Secundus text describes disastrous consequences of seeking knowledge.  The Secundus text more specifically describes disastrous consequences of men seeking knowledge about women.  It documents men’s troubled sense of who they are in relation to women.

Secundus heard that all women would have sex for money.  Unrecognized as a Cynic philosopher, Secundus sought to verify that proposition by propositioning his own mother.  Secundus’ mother was then a widow.  She accepted Secundus’ proposition.

Now after the two had finished dinner, and when they had started to go to bed, she was expecting to have carnal intercourse with him; but he put his arms around her as he would around his own mother, and, fixing his eyes upon the breasts that had suckled him, he lay down and slept until early morning.  When the first light of dawn appeared Secundus rose up with the intention of going out, but she laid hands on him and said, “Did you do this only in order to convict me?” And he answered, “No, lady mother, I refrained because it is not right for me to defile that place from which I came forth at birth, God forbid.”  Then she asked him who he was, and he said to her, “I am Secundus, your son.” [1]

This isn’t just of a sensational story of proving your mother’s a whore.  Secundus’ mother was a widow.  In the ancient world, widows were expected to be sexually eager.  That a man would have to pay a widow for sex would be shocking within ancient understanding.  Moreover, this wasn’t a pay-for-the-act porni transaction.  The man and woman had dinner together and then spent the whole night sleeping together.  The woman indicated that, with respect to the social norms of her time, she did wrong apart from knowing Secundus’ actual identity.

Secundus seems troubled by the bodily reality of male sexuality and procreation.  Incest is a near universal taboo across cultures and throughout history.  Secundus stared at his mother’s breasts.  He figured his male sexuality as defiling the place of his birth.  Unlike the general taboo of incest, Secundus’ horror seems to arise from the physical connection between sites of male heterosexual desire and procreation.  Secundus conveys a troubled sense of male sexuality and male bodily origin.

Secundus seeking the truth about women had terrible results.  Although she had not done anything wrong knowingly from the perspective of most non-Christians in the ancient Greco-Roman world, Secundus’ mother was tormented with her own sense of guilt and shame.  She hung herself.  Secundus, believing himself to be culpable for his mother’s death, resolved to remain silent for the rest of his life.  None of this makes carefully reasoned philosophical sense.  Secundus’ silence is consistent with the more general theme of suppressing knowledge and reasoning.  That suppression serves to preserve women’s social dominance.

Secundus, however, left of written record of wisdom.  It consisted of questions that the Emperor Hadrian asked Secundus, and the answers that Secundus wrote.  Originally there seems to have been twenty questions and answers.  The questions and answers are ontological with cosmic scope.  Here are the first seven questions:

  1. What is the Universe?
  2. What is the Ocean?
  3. What is God?
  4. What is the Day?
  5. What is the Sun?
  6. What is the Moon?
  7. What is the Earth?

Then comes three more questions and answers.  These cast light on the story of Secundus’ propositional test:

  1. What is Human Being?  Mind clothed in flesh, vessel containing a spirit, receptacle for sense-perception, toil-ridden spirit, temporary dwelling-place, phantom in the mirror of time, organism fitted with bones, scout on the trail of life, Fortune’s plaything, good thing that does not last, one of life’s expenditures, exile from life, deserter of the light, something that earth will reclaim, corpse forever.
  2. What is Beauty?  Picture drawn by Nature, self-made blessing, short-lived piece of good fortune, possession that does not stay with us, pious man’s ruin, accident of the flesh, minister to pleasure, flower that withers, uncompounded product, human’s desire.
  3. What is Woman?  Man’s desire, wild beast that shares one’s board, worry with which one rises in the morning, intertwining lustfulness, lioness sharing one’s bed, viper in clothes, battle voluntarily chosen, incontinence in the form of bed-partner, daily loss, storm in the house, hindrance to serenity, wreck of an incontinent man, stock-in-trade of adulturers, sacking of one’s estate, expensive war, evil creature, too much of a burden, nine-wind tempest, venomous asp, means of procreating humans, necessary evil. [2]

The answers to “What is Human Being?” concerns dualism of mind/spirit and body.  In the story of his test of his mother, Secundus was troubled by the connection between his sexuality and his bodily origin.  Secundus’ dualistic understanding of human being similarly shows lack of integral sense of person.

The answers to “What is Beauty?” seem implicitly weighted toward a man’s appreciation of another person’s physical beauty.  Human physical beauty fleeting with age underlies understanding beauty as “short-lived piece of good fortune, possession that does not stay with us, … accident of the flesh, minister to pleasure, flower that withers.”  The last answer to “What is Beauty?”, “human’s desire,” is sexually unmarked.  But it connects to the first answer to “What is Woman?”, “man’s desire.”  For most men, beauty is closely linked to women.

The answers to “What is Woman?” are understandings of women in relation to men.  The answers suggest men’s vulnerability to women and men’s lack of power in relation to women within the home.  Domestic violence against men continues to generate almost no help for men, men continue to face huge anti-men gender discrimination in family law, and men continue to have much worse opportunities than women do to withdraw from the paid workforce and be supported for work within the home.  Secundus’ definition of woman tends to be misandristically dismissed as misogyny.  It should be understood within the context of the literature of men’s sexed protests.

Men’s understanding of women covered a wide range. The first answer to “What is Woman?” was not only “man’s desire” (ἀνδρός ἐπιθεμία).  Within the surviving Greek manuscript corpus of the Secundus text, other manuscripts have for that phrase “man’s despondency” (ἀνδρός αθυμια) and “man’s comforter” (ἀνδρός παραμυθιά).[3]  Working from a Greek text that had “man’s despondency,” Willelmus Medicus’ influential late-twelfth century Latin translation used the phrase “man’s confusion” (hominis confusio).[4]  A late-twentieth-century male academic translated hominis confusio as “man’s undoing.”[5]  That translation of the Latin seems to reflect the description of Pandora in Hesiod’s Greek Works and Days.[6]  Understood as a revision-mistranslation, “man’s undoing” lacks the wit and literary charm of Chauntecleer’s declaration in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale:

For as true as Genesis declares, “Mulier est hominis confusio” — Madame, the judgment of this Latin is, “Woman is man’s joy and all his bliss.”[7]

Throughout history, men have not consistently understood women.

Secundus’ text doesn’t include the question “What is Adult Male Human {Man}?” corresponding to the question “What is Woman?”  Man, meaning adult male human, historically has been a category of relatively little explicit public consideration.  The distinctiveness of men has been obscured within generic consideration of humans.  Progressive scholars need to bring more awareness of men’s being into literature and public life.

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Notes:

[1] Secundus the Silent Philosopher, from Greek trans. Ben E. Perry in Hansen (1998) pp. 68-9.

[2] I’ve modified Perry’s translation to better track the Greek text given in Perry (1964) pp. 82-4.  The answers in Greek are typically short phrases that do not include any definite articles.  Perry’s translation used a mix of definite and indefinite articles as the first words of the answer clauses.  I have eliminated those articles.  In addition, Perry translated both ἄνθρωπος (human being) and ἀνδρός (adult male) as “man”.  I have clarified the sexual distinction between those word-forms.

[3] Perry (1964) p. 84, textual notes.

[4] Id. p. 96.  Willelmus Medicus in 1167 brought from Constantinople a Greek manuscript of Secundus the Silent Philosopher.  That Greek manuscript has survived and is identified as R in Perry’s manuscript corpus analysis.  Id. pp. 23-38. Blamires in Blamires, Pratt & Marx (1992), p. 100, n. 4, declares, “Willelmus derived this notorious opening expression from a corruption in his Greek MS of a phrase meaning ‘the object of man’s desire’.”  The Greek R manuscript that Willelmus used had the variant Greek ἀνδρός αθυμια.  That Greek variant is better understood as a revision than a corruption.  Vincent of Beauvais (1190-1264) used Willelmus’ Latin translation (Vita Secundi Philosophi) in his Speculum historiale, an influential medieval European encyclopedia.  For additional discussion (and medieval manuscript texts) of the Latin translation hominis confusio, see Brown (1920).

[5] Blamires in Blamires, Pratt & Marx (1992), p. 100.

[6] Hesiod, Works and Days, ll. 58, 90-105.

[7] Chaucer, Nun’s Priest’s Tale, ll. 3163-6, my close translation into modern English.  Here’s an alternate translation that seems to me to dissipate some of the decisiveness of the original Old English.  The phrase mulier est hominis confusio doesn’t occur in most Latin Secundus texts.  The common form in Latin translation, following the original Greek, is the question, Quod est mulier? (“What is woman?”) followed by answer clauses.  The first answer clause is commonly hominis confusio.  Mulier est hominis confusio obscures the full range of men’s thinking about Quod est mulier?.

[image] Imaginary rendition of Secundus the Silent Philosopher.  Constructed from image of Luni marble portrait of Plato made by Silanion ca. 370 BGC for the Academia in Athens. Musei Capitolini MC1377.  Copy in the sacred area in Largo Argentina, 1925.  Source image thanks to Jastrow and Wikipedia.

References:

Blamires, Alcuin, Karen Pratt, and C. William Marx. 1992. Men Impugned, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: an anthology of Medieval texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Brown, Carleton. 1920. “Mulier est Hominis Confusio.” Modern Language Notes. 35 (8): 479-482.

Hansen, William F., ed. 1998. Anthology of ancient Greek popular literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Perry, Ben Edwin Perry. 1964. Secundus, the silent philosopher: Critically ed. and restored so far as possible together with transl. of the Greek and Oriental versions, the Latin and Oriental texts, and a study of the tradition. New York: The American Philological Association.

Boccaccio protested men’s subservience to women

woman holding child and grimacing

In his fourteenth-century Latin humanist work The Downfall of Illustrious Men {De Casibus Virorum Illustrium}, Boccaccio vehemently protested against men’s subservience to women.  Boccaccio counseled men:

If you will control the unrestrained passion which you have within you, then women will set their net and try their wiles in vain.  Even if they have the grace to want children (which is not often the case), it is not necessary to be their slaves. [1]

From Roman love elegy to all-powerful ancient caliphs to Dante’s dolce stil novo in his Vita Nuova, men have made themselves into slaves to women.  Men who make themselves subservient to women hope to be loved like children.  Men have mythically exaggerated women’s love for children.  Men don’t understand that women typically won’t love men who act like children.

Boccaccio’s reference to “unrestrained passion” is misunderstood simply as sexual passion.  In the European Middle Ages, women’s passion was commonly recognized to exceed that of men’s and be more difficult to restrain.  A key challenge for a husband was to be always ready to satisfy his wife’s sexual urges.  To Boccaccio, unrestrained passion meant men acting like children toward women.

Boccaccio’s figure of women setting their net was well-established in the literature of men’s sexed protests.  A Latin text of men’s sexed protests, probably from the eleventh century, concluded:

Woman overcame man living without pain.
Freedom lacks foul, tight reins.
Not entombed, not paying for their chains,
happy are they not caught in this net. [2]

Boccaccio did not favor men going their own way apart from women.  Boccaccio celebrated heterosexual relations.  He imagined men living freely and happily in love with women.

While he described men cast down by forces beyond their control, Boccaccio emphasized women’s skills in self-fashioning.  Boccaccio observed:

Women consult one another, and anything about their person which seems excessive, they reduce, and any defect they patch with marvelous skill.  A woman who is too thin will eat sweets and pastries, and a fat one get thin by fasting and exercise.  Women are busy keeping their curves from fading, lowering their shoulder line, bracing whatever has sagged, extending their necks, heightening themselves if short, and even correcting a limp. [3]

Women fashioning themselves into whom they want to be represents a humanistic ideal.  Women’s humanistic merit, however, doesn’t depend on classical scholarship.  Boccaccio noted that “without calling in the learned Hippocrates”:

Women obtain waters to make black hair golden, curling irons to make straight hair ringed and wavy; they make their forehead higher by pulling out their hairs; eyebrows that are too big and joined together they separate with pincers making the arc less thin.  Any teeth which by chance have fallen out, they replace with ivory.  What hair they cannot remove from their face with a razor, they remove with nitre, and they scrape away skin that is too thick.  By these techniques they remake themselves so that if you thought before they were unattractive and shapeless, now you think them Venus herself.

De Casibus Virorum Illustrium emphasizes the power of Fortune over men’s status.  Women dominate Fortune and determine their own status.  If a tooth falls out, a woman will replace it with a tooth of ivory.  She will make herself by force of her own will to look like Venus.

Women’s relatively good access to riches aids their self-fashioning.  With rhetorical sophistication, Boccaccio declared:

Need I mention the flowers, garlands, fillets, or coronets decked with gold and gems they decorate themselves with?  It is as if they took off their clothes and dressed themselves in a little of the thinnest gold.  How can I describe these clothes?  They are robes glittering with gold and precious stones fit only for a king.  This woman dresses herself like the Narbonnese, that one like one from the Cote d’Or, this one like the Cyprians, others like the Egyptians, Greeks, or even the Arabs.  It is no longer sufficient to be dressed like an Italian.

The unmentionable and indescribable is easily known.  Only one man is king.  Ordinary men in Bocaccio’s time and place dressed like Italians.  Women’s dress represented women’s privileged status relative to men.

Reason cannot free men from subservience to women.  Cultivating reason was central to the humanistic project.  But reason doesn’t enable men to live freely and happily in love with women:

The reason of man is blinded by feminine wiles, for women know just how to walk, just when to show a little of their alluring breasts or their legs, how they ought to use their eyes in looking at a man, what fleeting gesture will attract, what laugh is most appealing, and (this they know best) when it is the moment to show that they want what they really do not want.  But how can I attempt to list their secrets?  It would be easier to count the grains of sand by the seaside.

The grains of sand by the seaside figure in the biblical promise of being blessed with numerous descendants.[4]  Believing that one can know God completely and make God do one’s own bidding was at the core of the medieval understanding of hubris.  Within his rhetorical game of reticence and disclosure, Boccaccio had no illusions that men, even experts like him, could dominate women:

I think it is more courteous to keep undisclosed how well every woman knows those mysterious, honeyed words, those enticements, those seductions, those opportune tears which men find very moving.  It is by such tricks as these that the most expert observers of women are most often captured.

Men’s desire for women in necessary for the blessing of numerous descendants.  Men’s reason is no match for women’s ability to manipulate men’s desire.

To free men from subservience to women, Boccaccio emphasized the medieval virtue of self-mastery over the humanist expedient of self-fashioning.  The virtue of self-mastery differs from the humanist expedient of self-fashioning.  The virtue of self-mastery depends on a sense of true, best nature.  The humanist expedient of self-fashioning is merely instrumental.  It is directed to ends that Fortune whimsically chooses for societies under the ideological guise of subjectivity, boundlessly socially constructed.  With a sense for their own true, best nature as humans with equal dignity to women, men must master their passion for importuning women, supplicating to women, and slavishly serving women.[5]

Confronting artfully the question of men’s relation to women and protesting against men’s subservience, Boccaccio built a new synthesis of medieval virtue and humanistic reason.  Boccaccio’s protests against women tend to be misandristically dismissed as misogyny.  Using reason provides more fecund understanding.  Men excel in instrumental reason.  Men’s skillful use of tools has largely built the material structure of human civilization.  Men’s reason, however, is no match for women’s skill in self-fashioning and in controlling men’s desire.  Men remain subservient to women unless they achieve virtuous self-mastery within the everyday world.

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Notes:

[1] Giovanni Boccaccio, The Downfall of Illustrious Men {De Casibus Virorum Illustrium}, Bk. 1, penultimate section, “The tricks women use to capture the reason of men are many and varied.”  From Latin trans. Hall (1965) p. 45. De Casibus Virorum Illustrium is commonly translated as The Fates of Illustrious Men.  The Downfall of Illustrious Men is a more accurate translation.  The work, which consists of nine books, was composed about 1358 and revised in 1373.  Marchesi (2014) p. 245.  The work includes profiles of women, e.g. Jocasta, Queen of Thebes; Dido, Queen of Carthage; Olympiade, Queen of Macedonia.  In 1361, Boccaccio wrote a similar volume of exclusively female biographies, Famous Women {De mulieribus claris}.  Both works attracted in the subsequent two centuries much more attention than did Boccaccio’s Decameron.  In recent decades, Famous Women has attracted much more critical interest than The Downfall of Illustrious Men.

[2] From a manuscript (Gudianus 192) of a poem in Latin leonine hexameters, incipit Arbore sub quadam dictavit clericus Adam.  See post on medieval men protesting devaluation of masculine love.  The relevant Latin text and English translation is at the bottom of column 5 and 3, respectively, in the online version of Arbore sub quadam dictavit clericus Adam.

[3] Boccaccio, The Downfall of Illustrious Men, Bk. 1, penultimate section, trans. Hall (1965) p. 42.  The subsequent quotes above are from id. pp. 42-3.

[4] Genesis 22:17.

[5] In the subsequent section of The Downfall of Illustrious Men, Boccaccio wrote that he had written enough about “those who carry love to foolish extremes.”  Trans. Hall (1965) p. 46.  Dante’s relationship to Beatrice and Petrarch’s relationship to Laura fit that description.

[image] Woman holding child and grimacing, from the Helen Richey Collection of the San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives.

References:

Hall, Louis Brewer, trans. 1965. Giovanni Boccaccio. The fates of illustrious men. New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co.

Marchesi, Simone. 2014.  “Boccaccio on Fortune (De Casibus Virorum Illustrium).” Pp. 245-254 in Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr, eds. 2014. Boccaccio: a critical guide to the complete works. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.