Perversely responding to gender injustice in love, medieval troubadour Peire Cardenal advocated strict gender equality inconsistent with Christian love. … Read the post an impious medieval man’s response to gender injustice
Some men distrust all women. Medieval love poetry helps to explain that problem. It can be overcome with sympathy and work for social justice. … Read the post sympathetically understanding why some men distrust all women
In medieval Europe, Ripoll love songs sing the joy of sex, with concern for women’s consent, without the totalitarianism of today’s rape culture. Swerve! … Read the post the now-inconceivable joy of sex in medieval times
At the core of the world in the Inferno, Dante perceived Satan-Lucifer-Leviathan, Alexander the Great, and eternal death. … Read the post Dante’s eternal death evokes Alexander’s quest for glory
The Alexandreis shows that Alexander the Great lacked big understanding of his own nature. Just being a man is sufficiently great for anyone. … Read the post Alexander the Great’s lesson for men: do less, value being more
Addressing Alexander the Great and Thalestris, the medieval Latin epic Alexandreis finally provided a humane solution to the problem of men-hating Amazons. … Read the post Alexandreis solved ancient, poetic problem of men-hating Amazons
Gaia’s vicious hostility toward her husband Uranus’s genitals indicates castration culture in Hesiod’s Theogony. Bernardus’ Cosmographia is more humane. … Read the post castration culture shows ancient, bloody grip in Hesiod’s Theogony
In sixteenth-century Europe, the Theodore de Bry sold to elite readers expensive books describing foreign lands and peoples. De Bry himself never left Europe. His books were reprints, but he added to his sources many intricate, copper-plate engravings and fold-out maps that he created from secondary sources. He produced the books in the large, prestigious … Continue reading the New / Old World in early elite books