Boccaccio’s inspiring ladies and Muses on Parnassus

Boccaccio’s Il Corbaccio is a masterpiece of rhetorical sophistication at the service of comic realism.  It shouldn’t be dismissed as merely an embarrassment, a literary joke, or Boccaccio’s last vernacular fiction.  The Corbaccio insists that poetic entertainment, instruction, and salvation work through realistic personal experience.  The Corbaccio presents the program of the Decameron and should be appreciated along with the Decameron.[1]

Boccaccio provides a key to understanding the Corbaccio and the Decameron in the relation of realistic ladies to the Muses on Mount Parnassus.  In the Corbaccio, the narrator’s dream-guide advises solitary study to increase fame with deeds:

Rather than visiting the multitudes gathered in churches and other public places, it is fitting for you, and I know you are aware of it, to frequent solitary places. There, by studying, working, and versifying, exercise your intellect and  make an effort to better yourself. As best you can, to increase your fame more with deeds than with words.

{ A te s’appartiene, e so che tu ‘l conosci, più d’usare i solitarii luoghi che le moltitudini, ne’ templi e negli altri publici luoghi raccolte, visitare; e quivi stando, operando, versificando, essercitare lo ‘ngegno e sforzarti di divenire migliore e d’ampliare a tuo podere, più con cose fatte che con parole, la fama tua; che, appresso quella salute ed etterno riposo il qual ciascuno che dirittamente desidera dee volere, è il fine della tua lunga sollecitudine. }[2]

That advice is contradictorily polarized.  Contradictory polarization rhetorically structures the dream-guide’s subsequent description of Castalian nymphs (nine Muses associated with Mount Parnassus).  The dream-guide first describes the Muses abstractly and vaguely:

While you are in the woods and remote places, the Castalian nymphs, with whom these wicked mortal women would compare themselves, will never abandon you.  Their beauty, as I have heard, is celestial.  Such beautiful ladies as these will neither shun you nor mock you. They will rather enjoy lingering and journeying in your company.

{ Mentre che tu sarai ne’ boschi e ne’ remoti luoghi, le Ninfe Castalide, alle quali queste malvagie femine si vogliono assomigliare, non t’abbandoneranno già mai; la belleza delle quali, sì come io ho inteso, è celestiale: dalle quali, così belle, tu non se’ schifato né schernito, ma è loro a grado il potere stare, andare e usare teco. }

The Muses’ celestial beauty, which the dream-guide hints that he has never seen, is distant from earthly experience.  The Muses’ character is defined first as a negative of realistic behavior:

They will not put you to discussing or disputing how many cinders are needed to boil a skein of coarse flax, or whether linen from Viterbo is finer than that of Romagna, or whether the baker’s wife has the oven too hot, or to see whether there are brooms to be had to sweep the house.  They will not tell you what madam so-and-so, and madam such-and-such did the night before, or how many paternosters they said at the sermon, or whether it is better to change the ornaments on some dress or other than to leave them as they are.  They will not ask money for cosmetics, powder boxes, and ointments.

{ elle non ti metteranno in disputare o discutere quanta cenere si voglia a cuocere una matassa d’accia, e se il lino viterbese è più sottile che ‘l romagnuolo; né che troppo abbia il forno la fornaia scaldato, e la fante lasciato meno il pane levitare; o che da provedere sia donde vegnano delle granate che la casa si spazi; non ti diranno quel ch’abbia fatto la notte passata monna cotale e monna altrettale, né quanti paternostri ell’abbia detti al predicare; né s’egli è il meglio alla cotale roba mutare le sale o lasciarle stare; non ti domanderanno danari né per liscio né per bossoli né per unguenti. }

The surface level of this text is factual detail.  Within its realistic style, the text plausibly contains bawdy figures (“the baker’s wife has the oven too hot”) and common references from the literature of men’s sexed protests (“ask money for cosmetics, powder boxes, and ointments”).[3]  Yet the importance of the surface realism is highlighted in contrast to the immediately subsequent positive description of the Muses’ behavior:

With angelic voice, they will narrate to you the things which have been from the beginning of the world down to this day; and sitting with you upon the grass and flowers in the delightful shadows beside that spring whose last ripples will never be seen, they will show you the causes of the variations of the weather, the toils of the sun and the moon, what hidden power nourishes the plants and also tames brute animals, and from what place rain down the souls onto men.  They will show you that Divine Goodness is eternal and infinite, by what steps one rises to it, and down what precipices one plunges to the opposite place.  After they have sung with you the verses of Homer, Virgil, and other worthy ancients, they will sing your own, if you wish.

{ Esse con angelica voce ti narranno le cose dal principio del mondo state infino a questo giorno; e sopra l’erba e sopra i fiori alle dilettevoli ombre teco sedendo, a lato a quel fonte le cui ultime onde non si videro già mai, ti mostrerranno le cagioni de’ variamenti de’ tempi e delle fatiche del sole e di quelle della luna; e qual nascosa virtù le piante nutrichi, e insieme faccia li bruti animali amichevoli; e d’onde piovano l’anime negli uomini; e l’essere la divina bontà etterna e infinita; e per quali scale ad essa si salga, e per quali balzi si traripi alle parti contrarie; e teco, poi ch’e’ versi d’Omero, di Virgilio e degli altri antichi valorosi aranno cantati, i tuoi medesimi, se tu vorrai, canteranno. }

The Muses represent epic poetry, cosmic understanding, and high aspiration.  The dream-guide complains that the narrator turns instead to flesh-and-blood, mortal women:

Ah, how just would it be for these most distinguished ladies to banish you as unworthy from their most beautiful chorus!  How often do your desires turn to women!  How often, on leaving them, fetid, corrupted, and unashamed of your bestiality do you go again to mingle with those who are most pure!  Certainly, if you do not stop this, it seems to me that it will happen to you that you are banished from the Muses’ chorus, and deservedly so.  …  And you can be quite sure how shameful it would be for you, if this were to occur, .

{ Ahi, quanto giustamente farebbono queste eloquentissime donne, se dal loro bellissimo coro te, sì come non degno, cacciassono, quante volte tu dietro alle femine l’appetito dirizi, quante volte, fetido e maculato da esse partendoti, tra loro, che purissime sono, ti vai a rimescolare, non vergognandoti della tua bestialità! E certo, se tu non te ne rimani, e’ mi pare avvedere che ti averrà e meritamente. … e chente e quale vergogna questo ti sia, dove questo avenga, tu medesimo e pensare e conoscere il puoi. }

From declaring that the Muses would never abandon the narrator, the dream-guide attempts to shame the narrator with the threat the Muses will banish him.  The dream-guide then immediately turns to a realistic description of his former wife.  The dream-guide is continually self-subverting.  The effect is to undermine epic yearning and cosmic abstraction.  The Corbaccio presents the comic reality of heterosexual love as a new Vita Nuova.

Boccaccio constructs the Decameron’s author as a man keen to serve women in realistic style.  The knight who fought in the lady’s chainse, Suero de Quinones, Ulrich von Liechtenstein, Captain De Falco, and the male authors of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gaps 2011 report exemplify men’s servitude to women in high style.  The Decameron, in contrast, is filled with earthy stories of sexual intrigues and escapades.  In the Decameron’s introduction to its fourth day, Boccaccio acknowledges criticism from “wise men {savi uomini}”:

Many, much concerned about my reputation, say that I would be wiser to remain with the Muses on Parnassus than to get myself involved with you moral ladies and busy myself with this nonsense.

{ E molti, molto teneri della mia fama mostrandosi, dicono che io farei piú saviamente a starmi con le Muse in Parnaso che con queste ciance mescolarmi tra voi. }[4]

Boccaccio responds:

I agree that remaining with the Muses on Parnassus is sound advice, but we cannot always dwell with the Muses any more than they can always dwell with us.

{ Che io con le Muse in Parnaso mi debbia stare, affermo che è buon consiglio, ma tuttavia né noi possiam dimorare con le Muse né esse con esso noi }

The Muses are represented as ladies.  Medieval literature recognized that one man could not satisfy nine ladies, or three, or even just one.  The mutual problem of exclusivity is a matter of realism:

If it sometimes happens that a man leaves the Muses, he should not be blamed if he delights in seeing something resembling them. The Muses are ladies, and although ladies are not as worthy as Muses, they do, nevertheless, look like them at first glance. So for this reason, if for no other, they should please me.

{ se quando avviene che l’uomo da lor si parte, dilettarsi di veder cosa che le somigli, questo non è cosa da biasimare. Le Muse son donne, e benché le donne quello che le Muse vagliono non vagliano, pure esse hanno nel primo aspetto simiglianza di quelle; sí che, quando per altro non mi piacessero, per quello mi dovrebber piacere. }

Boccaccio, like the dream-guide in the Corbaccio, surely hasn’t actually seen the Muses.  Their lady-like appearance is representational realism like the help that Boccaccio claims to have received from earthly ladies:

Ladies have already been the reason for my composing thousands of verses, while the Muses were in no way the cause of my writing them.  Muses have, of course, assisted me and shown me how to compose these thousands of verses, and it is quite possible that they have been with me on several occasions while I was writing these stories of mine, no matter how insignificant they may be. They came to me, it could be said, out of respect for the affinity between these mortal ladies and themselves.

{ Senza che le donne già mi fur cagione di comporre mille versi, dove le Muse mai non mi furon di farne alcun cagione. Aiutaronmi elle bene e mostraronmi comporre que’ mille; e forse a queste cose scrivere, quantunque sieno umilissime, si sono elle venute parecchie volte a starsi meco, in servigio forse e in onore della simiglianza che le donne hanno a esse }

Realism traces natural cause to ordinary effect.  Boccaccio’s represents mortal ladies as the realistic cause of his writing.  The Muses inspire him out of respect for their similitude with mortal ladies.  This representational play is key to Boccaccio’s self-understanding of his position as an author:

Therefore, in composing such stories as these, I am not as far away from Mount Parnassus or the Muses as some people may think.

{ per che, queste cose tessendo, né dal monte Parnaso né dalle Muse non mi allontano quanto molti per avventura s’avisano. }

Nor are Boccaccio’s intentions as far away from Dante’s as some critics have thought:

My pen should be granted no less freedom than the brush of a painter who, without incurring censure or, at least, any which is justified, depicts Saint Michael striking the serpent with either a sword or a lance. The painter depicts Saint George wounding the dragon wherever he pleases and also shows Christ as a man and Eve as a woman. He nails to the cross, sometimes with one nail, sometimes with two, the feet of Him who wished to die there for the salvation of mankind.

{ Sanza che alla mia penna non dee essere meno d’autorità conceduta che sia al pennello del dipintore, il quale senza alcuna riprensione, o almen giusta, lasciamo stare che egli faccia a san Michele ferire il serpente con la spada o con la lancia, e a san Giorgio il dragone dove gli piace; ma egli fa Cristo maschio ed Eva femina, e a Lui medesimo che volle per la salute della umana generazione sopra la croce morire, quando con un chiovo e quando con due i piè gli conficca in quella. }[5]

Boccaccio intended neither the Decameron nor the Corbaccio to be merely low entertainment.  Both the Decameron and the Corbaccio assert the importance of realism.  Boccaccio’s comic realism, like the sacraments that the Church offers, provides instruction and salvation through the materials of ordinary life.[6]

quilt made from a mixture of natural materials

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Notes:

[1] Hollander (1988) p. 1 declares:

Boccaccio’s final work in vernacular fiction has been for the most part an embarrassment, even to its admirers.  It is almost universally understood as running counter to the spirit of the preceding masterwork, the Decameron.

Hollander attempted to redeem the Corbaccio as a “literary joke.”  Id. p. 2.  More insightfully, he observed that Boccaccio describes himself as nearly forty years old one-third of the way through composing the Decameron, and about forty-two when writing the Corbaccio.  Hollander declared:

Decameron and Corbaccio are meant to be read as closely contiguous literary experiences, whether they were so or not.  These two texts tell us more about one another than we may learn from most other sources about the essential strategies of either.

Id. p. 33.

[2] Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Corbaccio 196, Old Italian text from Padoan (1992) via Decameron Web, Italian translation (modified slightly) from Cassell (1993) p. 36.  The four subsequent quotes above are similarly from Il Corbaccio 197-201.  In the author’s conclusion to the Decameron, Boccaccio chides prudish ladies: “ladies of the type who weigh words more than deeds and who strive more to seem good than to be so.”  Decameron, from Italian trans. Musa & Bondanella (2002) pp. 803.  Boccaccio’s figure of the prudish ladies aptly describes critics who declare the Corbaccio to be misogynistic.

[3] Libro de buen amor includes a “cruz cruzada, panadera” lyric that is a high point of medieval sexual innuendo.

[4] Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, 4th day, intro. 6, Old Italian text from Branca (1992) via Decameron Web, Italian translation (modified) from Musa & Bondanella (2002) p. 287.  Ladies probably weren’t actually the readers that Boccaccio intended for the Decameron.  Kirkham (1993) pp. 118-9.  The meta-narrative of the Decameron is another level in Boccaccio’s literary strategy.  The subsequent four quotes are similarly from Decameron 4.1. intro. 35-6.

[5] Decameron, Author’s Conclusion 6, Old Italian text from Branca (1992), English translation (modified ) from Musa & Bondanella (2002) p. 803.  Similarly, Author’s Conclusion 11 (id. p. 804) declares:

And just as fitting words are of no use to a corrupt mind, so a healthy mind cannot be contaminated by words which are not so proper, any more than mud can dirty the rays of the sun or earthly filth can mar the beauties of the skies.

{ e cosí come le oneste a quella non giovano, cosí quelle che tanto oneste non sono la ben disposta non posson contaminare, se non come il loto i solari raggi o le terrene brutture le bellezze del cielo. }

The comic realism of the Decameron is consistent with a moral and salvific vision for humanity.  Salvation within the Decameron’s realism means escaping death from the plague.  It also means recognizing human viciousness and cruelty and the possibility of escaping from that plague through understanding love.

[6] Boccaccio studied thoroughly Dante’s Commedia and frequently cited Dante in the Decameron, the Corbaccio, and other of his works.  The 100 stories of the Decameron can be understood as a stylistically different approach to the journey of the Commedia’s 100 cantos.  In an influential work examining the Commedia, the Decameron, and the representation of reality, Auerbach declared:

{Boccaccio} writes for the entertainment of the unlearned. … his ethics of love is … concerned exclusively with the sensual and the real … {the Decameron} rarely abandons the stylistic level of light entertainment.

Auerbach (1953) pp. 224, 226, 227. Hollander (1997), p. 90, insightfully proclaimed, “the Decameron is one of the worst read masterpieces that the world possesses.”  The fundamental problem is lack of proper appreciation for Boccacio’s Corbaccio.  Boccaccio scholars should abandon their neo-liberal commitment to symbolic property rights and turn to the government, or off-duty government workers, for help.

References:

Auerbach, Erich. 1953. Mimesis: the representation of reality in Western literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Branca, Vittore, ed. 1992. Giovanni Boccaccio. Decameron. Torino: Einaudi.

Cassell, Anthony K. trans. 1993. Giovanni Boccaccio. The corbaccio, or, The labyrinth of love. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies.

Hollander, Robert. 1988. Boccaccio’s last fiction, Il Corbaccio. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hollander, Robert. 1997. Boccaccio’s Dante and the shaping force of satire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kirkham, Victoria. 1993. The sign of reason in Boccaccio’s fiction. Firenze: L.S. Olschki.

Musa, Mark and Peter E. Bondanella, trans. 2002. Giovanni Boccaccio. The Decameron. New York: Signet Classic.

Padoan, Giorgio, ed. 1994. Giovanni Boccacio. “Il Corbaccio.” In Carlo Delcorno, ed. Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. Volume 5, Book 2. Milano: Mondadori.

the whole shipwrecked man

vortex sucks down shipwrecked men

Some fishermen hauled up a half-eaten
man, caught in a net full of flounder —
wept-for remains of a lost voyage.

Rather than profit from ruin,
they buried the man and the fish in shallow
sand.

Land, here you have the whole shipwrecked man
though, in place of the rest of his flesh,
you have those that ate it.

{ Ἐξ ἁλὸς ἡμίβρωτον ἀνηνέγκαντο σαγηνεῖς
ἄνδρα, πολύκλαυτον ναυτιλίης σκύβαλον·

κέρδεα δ᾿ οὐκ ἐδίωξαν ἃ μὴ θέμις· ἀλλὰ σὺν αὐτοῖς
ἰχθύσι τῇδ᾿ ὀλίγῃ θῆκαν ὑπὸ ψαμάθῳ.

ὦ χθών, τὸν ναυηγὸν ἔχεις ὅλον· ἀντὶ δὲ λοιπῆς
σαρκὸς τοὺς σαρκῶν γευσαμένους ἐπέχεις. }

This epigram, attributed to Hegesippus, was written in Greek probably in the mid-third century BGC.  The last line could be funny.  The context, however, is mournful.  The fishermen have an ethical sense beyond profit as much as you can.  By burying the man and the fish in shallow sand, they enable both to be, with time, washed out into the sea.  The whole shipwrecked man, “wept-for remains of a lost voyage,” will move again from the land to the sea.  The half-eaten man and the fish caught in the net are the whole shipwrecked man, the continually transforming body in an unanchored world.

Latter-day Greeks, are we not dead
and only seem to be alive,
having fallen on hard times,
mistaking a dream for existence?
Or are we alive,
while our way of life has perished?

{ Ἄρα μὴ θανόντες τῷ δοκεῖν ζῶμεν μόνον,
Ἕλληνες ἄνδρες, συμφορᾷ πεπτωκότες
ὄνειρον εἰκάζοντες εἶναι τὸν βίον;
ἢ ζῶμεν ἡμεῖς, τοῦ βίου τεθνηκότος }

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Notes:

First epigram — Greek text from Paton (1920), English translation from Wolfe (2013) p. 91.  On the dating of the epigrammist Hegesippus, about whom little is known, id. p. 175.  Id. describes this and the subsequent epigram as epitaphs.  They probably weren’t actually inscribed on tombs.  Epitaphs typically weren’t highly poetic.  In the above epigram translation, I’ve replaced “earth” with “land” for better poetic sense.  The epigram is GA 7.276.  The prose translation there uses “land” rather than “earth.”  The word “man” above shouldn’t be only understood as indicating a human being.  Men in ancient Greece faced a much higher risk of death on the sea because men predominated among long-distance commercial travelers and warriors.  Men today continue to face a much higher risk of accidental death than do women.

Second epigram — Greek text from Paton (1920), English translation from Wolfe (2013) p. 151.  The epigram also appears in GA 10.82.  It is attributed to Palladas of Alexandria, who lived in the fourth-century GC.  On the dating of Palladas work, Wilkinson (2009).  Palladas continued to follow traditional Greek religion after Constantine converted to Christianity.  Alexandria was a leading center of early Christianity.  Palladas lamented the new dominance of Christians.

References:

GA: Paton, W.R. 1920. The Greek Anthology with an English Translation. London: William Heinemann (vol. I, bks. 1-6; vol. II, bks. 7-8; vol. III, bk. 9; vol IV, bks. 10-12; vol. V, bks. 13-16). (epigrams indicated GA {bk}.{epigram # within bk})

Wilkinson, Kevin W. 2009. “Palladas and the Age of Constantine.” The Journal of Roman Studies. 36: 36-60.

Wolfe, Michael. 2013. Cut these words into my stone: ancient Greek epitaphs. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

scholars declare demonic male species and gynocentrism

gibbons ponder scholarship declaring our demonic male species

A prize-winning anthropologist at a leading U.S. university has explored how to tame what he describes as “our demonic male species.”  In a book, he and his co-author considered how to bring about a revolution in human social organization such as that imagined in Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s 1915 novel, Herland. The setting for that novel is an isolated society in which, long ago, all the males had been fortuitously killed.  The women subsequently engender only females through asexual reproduction.  The anthropology professor and his co-author recognized the implausibility of perfectly implementing this move toward an ideal society:

Like Gauguin and Melville and Mead, Charlotte Perkins Gilman eliminated male violence from her portrait of an ideal society simply by eliminating males; and we cannot perfectly paste this story’s lesson onto an ordinary two-sex society.[1]

They recognized, however, that prisons could make an important contribution to this program:

Persuading the more violent men to abandon hopes of fatherhood would doubtless keep prison builders happy and, in the end, probably engender revolution. But even if the most aggressive, potentially violent men could be persuaded to step aside for the sake of future generations, what about the women? [2]

Men are currently incarcerated for having consensual sex and not being able to make court-ordered monthly payments for the next eighteen years.  Should efforts to incarcerate men be expanded further?  Of course, the more important question is: what about the women?

Long-before tiresome recent books such as Are Men Necessary? and The End of Men and the Rise of Women, a leading biological anthropologist wrote a scholarly book with a chapter entitled, “The Pros and Cons of Males.” She briefly discussed Herland, which she described as a “marvelous 1915 utopian novel.”  She also described Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto as providing a “refuge from and defense against” the belief that women are “devoid of political instincts.”[3]  The SCUM Manifesto has obvious importance to elite anthropology.  The SCUM Manifesto declares:

the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples. [4]

The SCUM Manifesto describes “rational men”:

Rational men want to be squashed, stepped on, crushed and crunched, treated as the curs, the filth that they are, have their repulsiveness confirmed.

This work of elite anthropological scholarship lamented, “This doctrine of female inferiority has disfigured several ostensibly impartial realms, particularly the study of human evolution.”[5]  That’s the same scholarly logic that drives sexist studies of sexism.

Scholars have now recognized that females play a central role in determining primate social organization.  Some scholars once believed that the Industrial Revolution led to patriarchy.  Under patriarchy theory, men deprived women of economic resources and confined them within the (single-family, suburban, dull, and dehumanizing) home.  Other scholars, however, have traced the origins of patriarchy back to the beginning of agriculture.  That’s when men’s plows first started penetrating the earth, and men began placing seeds into the fertile ground.  In the evocative description of a highly regarded anthropologist, it was “The Plow: Death Knell for Women.”[6]  However, scholarly competition and innovation has pushed patriarchy even further back into evolutionary history:

Human patriarchy has its beginnings in the forest ape social world, a system based on males’ social dominance and coercion of females.  We can speculate that it was elaborated subsequently, perhaps in the woodland ape era, perhaps much later, by the development of sexual attachments with the same essential dynamic as gorilla bonds.…  Men, following the evolutionary logic that benefits those who make the laws, would create legal systems that so often defined adultery as a crime for women, not for men – a social world that makes men freer than women.[7]

Key to this intellectual development was directing attention to female-bonded primate groups:

If FB {female-bonded} groups have evolved as modeled, they support the view that male strategies are ultimately a result of female distribution, i.e. males compete for access to given clumps of females in a system of “female defense polygyny” {references omitted}.  Consequently the number of females per group and the number of males per female are considered to depend ultimately on the strategies of females [8]

Gynocentrism rapidly achieved dominance in scholarly deliberation in anthropology and primatology.  As a scholar of primate social organization noted in a scholarly article published in 2002:

For much of the last twenty years, females have occupied center stage in theoretical and empirical analyses of primate social organization. [9]

Women have dominated social life (gynocentrism) for as long as humanity has existed.  For humans and other primates, males’ strategies depend on female behavior.  Sociality evolved in primates because it enhanced females’ access to resources.[10]  Consistent with general patterns of primate life, elite men and women today compete to establish social rules that most effectively transfer resources from men to women.

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Notes:

[1] Wrangham & Peterson (1996) p. 238.  Richard Wrangham is the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and Wing Chair at Harvard University.  He won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987. Wrangham and Peterson describe Timothy McVeigh as an “all-American male” and Arnold Schwarzenegger as offering a “comic book caricature of the demonic male physique and persona.”  They lament, “As men, we have probably inadvertently neglected issues that women writers would have raised.” Id. pp. 247, 240, 242.  Compared to eliminating all men, gynocentrism has the advantage of exploiting men’s material productivity and using men to fight other men.

[2] Id. p. 239.

[3] Hrdy (1981) p. 11.  In 2001, Hrdy won the W.W. Howell Prize for outstanding contribution to biological anthropology.

[4] Solanas (1968) p. 1.  The subsequent quote is from id. p. 16.  Shortly after writing the SCUM Manifesto, Solanas shot and critically wounded one man, shot but missed another man, and attempted to shoot a third man.  For these acts, she served about three years in prison.  While the SCUM Manifesto has an honored place in elite scholarship, masterpieces of literature like Boccaccio’s Corbaccio are condemned to oblivion.

[5] Hrdy (1981) p. 11.  Discussion of claims of female inferiority function as an aspect of gynocentrism.

[6] Fisher (1999) p. 173.

[7] Wrangham & Peterson (1996) pp. 241-2. Other ambitious scholars have successfully traced males’ exploitation of females back to anisogamy.  The small sperm contributes less weight to the embryo than does the large egg.  This alleged exploitation started about 1.2 billion years ago when the first sexually reproducing organisms evolved.  Knowledge, capability, and interest in denouncing such sexual exploitation developed about 50 years ago.  Patriarchy has long imposed grotesquely unjust paternity laws on men and treated men as disposable persons.

[8] Wrangham (1980) pp. 287-8.

[9] Silk (2002) p. 85, describing the influential model of Wrangham (1980).

[10] Id.

[image] pair of Gibbons.  Thanks to MatthiasKabel and Wikipedia.

References:

Fisher, Helen E. 1999. The first sex: the natural talents of women and how they are changing the world. New York: Random House.

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 1981. The woman that never evolved. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Silk, Joan B. 2002. “Females, Food, Family, and Friendship.” Evolutionary Anthropology 11: 85-87.

Solanas, Valerie. 1968. SCUM manifesto: Society for Cutting Up Men. New York: Olympia Press.

Wrangham, Richard W. 1980. “An ecological model of the evolution of female-bonded groups of primates.” Behaviour 75: 262-300.

Wrangham, Richard W. and Dale Peterson. 1996. Demonic males: apes and the origins of human violence. Boston, Houghton Mifflin.

classical Arabic buttocks in medieval European context

In classical Arabic literature, a figure of feminine beauty was a narrow waist and large buttocks.  An Arabic song from the seventh century lovingly effused:

Her buttocks quiver when she walks; her back
is like a willow branch, her waist is slim. [1]

An Arabic ode from the early eighth century marveled:

Her rump is like a dune that towers, where
the sprinkling rains have shaped firm hillocks. [2]

The larger the buttocks, the bigger the blessing to an admiring man in the ancient Islamic world.  But only within reason.  In a Syrian author’s eleventh-century Arabic story, a shaykh found himself in Paradise:

The shaykh takes a quince, or a pomegranate, or an apple, or whatever fruit God wills, and breaks it open.  A girl with black, lustrous eyes whose beauty dazzles the other damsels of the Paradisical gardens, emerges. [3]

The shaykh is overjoyed and prostrates himself to God for this blessing.  While praising God he retained his good sense in classical Arabic literature:

It occurs to him, while he is still prostrate, that the girl, though beautiful, is rather skinny.  He raises his head and instantly she has a behind that rivals the hills of ʻĀlij, the dunes of al-Dahnāʼ, and the sands of Yabrīn and Banū Saʻd.  Awed by the omnipotence of the Kind and Knowing God, he says, “Thou who givest rays to the shining sun, Thou who fulfillest the desires of everyone, Thou whose awe-inspiring deeds make us feel impotent, and summon to wisdom the ignorant: I ask Thee to reduce the bum of this damsel to one square mile, for Thou hast surpassed my expectations with Thy measure!” [4]

The shaykh’s prayer revised the initial impulse of desire that God apparently perceived in his heart and granted to his eyes.  God responded mercifully to the shaykh’s praise of divine bounty and to his feeling of impotence upon seeing the enormous size of the girl’s buttocks:

An answer is heard: “You may choose: the shape of the girl will be as you wish.”
And the desired reduction is effected.

Men and women across cultures and history typically find most attractive women with waist-to-hip ratios about 0.7.[5]  But, irrespective of evolutionary psychology, classical Arabic literature and God could construct enormous buttocks.

Bustle dress from mid-1880s exaggerates buttocks

The classical Arabic ideal of large buttocks apparently moved European culture.  The ancient Greek ideal of buttocks, at least as represented by the Aphrodite Kallipygos, isn’t impressive in size.[6] A thirteenth-century Old French romance tells of a woman’s beauty from her hair down to her feet. It then adds:

In her was nothing in which one might find fault,
nothing that was not beautiful and appealing.
Riches that God had placed
under her dress or her underfrock,
courtesy forbids me
that I name them directly.
They should be praised much more
than all that you have heard.
I believe that they were, let it not be hidden,
white and smooth and roundly full.

{ En li n’a riens qu’on tiengne a let,
Qui ne soit bel et avenant,
Et s’il a en li remenant
Ne richesse que Dieux ait mise,
Soubz la pelice ou la chemise,
Que courtoisie me deffent
Que je ne nomme appertement,
Louer assez plus le devez
Que trestout ce qu’oÿ avez:
Je croy qu’il soit, n’y soit celé,
Blanc et poli et potelé. }[7]

The poet apparently was referring to the woman’s beautiful buttocks. “Full” might be somewhat less than “large.” However, an important early fifteenth-century Spanish work in the literature of men’s sexed protests registers a meaningful objection to what would now be termed sexual harassment:

She looks at her hands all covered with rings, and chews her lips to make them red, casting her eyes about, looking sideways, wriggling her bottom like mad … And if she is at home clad only in a wrapper, she will lean over and pick up something from the floor, to show her shanks proudly and a great expanse of buttocks, this to attract the attention of whoever is looking at her, or of the one she would be desired by.

{ Míranse las manos con tantas sortijas y vanse los bezos mordiendo por tornarlos bermejos, haciendo de los ojos desgaires, mirando de través, colleando como locas … Si por casa anda en saya, hace que se abaja a tomar de tierra alguna cosa por mostrar los zancajos y gran forma de nalgas con lozanía y orgullo, por ser deseada de aquel de quien es mirada, o a quien tal muestra hace. }[8]

An Italian work of men’s sexed protests from the fourteenth century explicitly connects a woman’s large buttocks to the Arabic world:

She wanted her cheeks nicely puffed and red, her buttocks ample and protruding (having heard perhaps that these things were most highly prized in Alexandria and for that reason were a very great part of the beauty of a lady), above all else she strove to make these two features abundantly conspicuous in herself.  … And fully did she succeed in becoming plump-cheeked and big-bottomed.

{ costei estimando che l’avere bene le gote gonfiate e vermiglie, e grosse e sospinte in fuori le natiche (avendo forse udito che queste sommamente piacciono in Alessandria, e perciò fossono grandissima parte di belleza in una donna), in niuna cosa studiava tanto quanto in fare che queste due cose in lei fossono vedute pienamente … E pienamente di divenire paffuta e naticuta le venne fatto. }[9]

The man’s protest focused on the expensive food that his wife ate in order to swell her buttocks:

About the milk-fed veal, the partridges, the fat thrushes, the turtledoves, the Lombard soups, the lasagne cooked in broth, the elderberry fritters, the white chestnut cakes, and the blancmanges of which she had the same bellyfulls as peasants do of figs, cherries, or melons when they are placed before them, I do not care to tell you.

{ Le vitelle di latte, le starne, i fagiani, i tordi grassi, le tortole, le suppe lombarde, le lasagne maritate, le frittellette sambucate, i migliacci bianchi, i bramangieri, de’ quali ella faceva non altre corpacciate che facciano di fichi o di ciriege o di poponi i villani quando ad essi s’avvengono, non curo di dirti. }

This rhetorically sophisticated protest would gain additional weight if the narrator and most medieval European men did not favor big-bottomed women.  Given the prestige of Arabic science and literature in medieval Europe, large buttocks may have been recognized as an ideal of womanly beauty irrespective of most medieval European men’s actual preferences.

Aphrodite Kallipygos

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

Notes:

[1] Attributed to Qays ibn Dharīh in Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, al-Aghānī, from Arabic trans. van Gelder (2013) p. 142.

[2] Dhū l-Rummah, qasīdah “To Mayyah’s Two Abodes, a Greeting,” from Arabic trans van Gelder (2013) p. 23.

[3] Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Risālat al-ghufrān, from Arabic trans. van Gelder (2013) p. 269.  I’ve added a comma after gardens.

[4] Id. (including subsequent quote).  In classical Arabic love poetry, large buttocks were admired in both women and boys: “the standard poetic simile is that of a sand hill or dune.” Id. p. 405, n. 801.

[5] Kościński (2013), Singh (2002).  With respect to body-mass index, relatively wealthy, urban men and women find most attractive skinny women.  Kościński (2013).

[6] In Horace’s Epode 8.5, “shriveled buttocks {aridae natis}” are disparaged. A commentator noted, “what almost amounts to a cult of the buttock in classical antiquity.” Watson (2003) p. 297. The ancient Greek ideal seem to have been well-rounded but not overly fleshy. Some failed to recognize that one’s buttocks are sufficient: “trainee prostitutes with an insufficiently endowed derrière simulated εὐπυγία‎ {pleasingly full buttocks} by artificial means (Alexis fr. 103. 10–11 K.–A.).” Id.

[7] Jean Renaut, Galeran of Brittany {Galeran de Bretagne} vv. 1302-12, Old French text from Foulet (1925), my English translation, benefiting from that Beston (2008). The beautiful woman was Galeron’s beloved Fresne.

[8] Alonso Martínez de Toledo, Archpriest of Talavera, II.8, Spanish text from the online presentation by Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes of the edition of Gerli (1979), English trans. Simpson (1959) p. 140.

[9] Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Corbaccio, 218, 222, Italian text from Padoan (1994) via Decameron Web, English trans. Cassell (1993) pp. 40-1. The subsequent quote is similarly from Corbaccio 220.  Id. p. 123, n. 188, observes that Alexandria was the site of a “notorious Egyptian slave market.” Boccaccio spent part of his youth in Angevin Naples and probably was familiar with at least some Arabic literature.  Kirkham & Menocal (1987).

The fourteenth-century Spanish work Libro de buen amor, which was a culturally hybrid Arabic-European work, described as desirable “widish” hips.  The Arabic folk tale La historia de la doncella Teodor, translated into twelfth-century Castilian, described as beautiful “wide” hips. Da Soller (2005) pp. 88-9, 99.

Desired buttocks in medieval European literature seem otherwise to be smaller than the ideal buttocks of classical Arabic literature.  In twelfth-century French literature, feminine beauty was “small waist; moderately full hips.”  In English literature from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, feminine beauty was typically “small waist; … not too broad or round hips.” Da Soller (2005) pp. 44-6, 73-4. Cf. Le Ménagier de Paris 2.3.20 (c. 1393), which suggests that desirable characteristics of a maiden are “a handsome mane, a beautiful chest, fine-looking loins, and large buttocks.” From French trans. Greco & Rose (2009) p. 224.

[images] (1) Dress from the 1880s with bustle exaggerating the buttocks.  Thanks to Wikipedia. (2) Aphrodite Kallipygos {Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks}, originally in the Farnese collection. White marble statue from 1st or 2nd century BGC (excluding head, right arm, and left leg), restored by Carlo Albacini in the 1780s. Preserved in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples, Italy. Source image via Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Beston, John, trans. 2008. An English Translation of Jean Renaut’s Galeran de Bretagne, a Thirteenth-Century French Romance. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.

Cassell, Anthony K. trans. 1993. Giovanni Boccaccio. The Corbaccio, or, The Labyrinth of Love. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies.

Da Soller, Claudio. 2005. The beautiful woman in medieval Iberia: rhetoric, cosmetics, and evolution. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Missouri-Columbia.

Foulet, Lucien, ed. 1925. Jean Renaut. Galeran de Bretagne: Roman du XIIIe Siècle. Paris: É. Champion. Alternate source.

Gelder, Geert Jan van. 2013. Classical Arabic Literature: a library of Arabic literature anthology. New York: New York University Press.

Gerli, Michael, ed. 1979. Alfonso Martínez de Toledo. Arcipreste de Talavera o Corbacho. Madrid: Cátedra.

Greco, Gina L., and Christine M. Rose, ed. and trans. 2009. The Good Wife’s Guide; Le ménagier de Paris: a medieval household book. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Kirkham, Victoria, and Maria Rosa Menocal. 1987.  “Reflections on the ‘Arabic’ world: Boccaccio’s ninth stories.” Stanford Italian Review VII, pp. 95-110.

Kościński, Krzysztof. 2013. “Attractiveness of women’s body: body mass index, waist-hip ratio, and their relative importance.” Behavioral Ecology. 24 (4): 914-925.

Padoan, Giorgio, ed. 1994. Giovanni Boccacio. “Il Corbaccio.” In Carlo Delcorno, ed. Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio. Volume 5, Book 2. Milano: Mondadori.

Simpson, Lesley Byrd Simpson. 1959. Alfonso Martínez de Toledo.  Little Sermons on Sin: the Archpriest of Talavera. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Singh, Devendra. 2002. “Female mate value at a glance: relationship of waist-to-hip ratio to health, fecundity and attractiveness.” Neuro Endocrinology Letters. 23: 81-91.

Watson, Lindsay. 2003. A commentary on Horace’s Epodes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Review by Philip Hills.