A Distant Mirror (42 page)

Entertainment was not
only
the recital of
lofty
epics of chivalrous if tedious adultery. The coarse comic
fabliaux
in quick rhymed couplets, satiric, obscene, often cruel or grotesque, were told for laughs like dirty stories of any age, to noble as well as bourgeois audiences. Often written by court poets in parody of the romances, they treated sex more as pratfall than ennoblement, and their recital or reading aloud was as welcome in the castle as in town, tavern, and probably cloister.

Isabella could well have listened to the tales of Jean de Condé, poet in her lifetime at her mother’s native court in Hainault. His style is illustrated by a story about a game of truth-telling played at court before a tournament. A knight, asked by the Queen if he has fathered any children, is forced to admit he has not, and indeed he “did not have the look of a man who could please his mistress when he held her naked in his arms. For his beard was … little more than the kind of fuzz that ladies have in certain places.” The Queen tells him she does not doubt his word, “for it is easy to judge from the state of the hay whether the pitchfork is any good.” In his turn, the knight asks, “Lady, answer me without deceit. Is there hair between your legs?” When she replies, “None at all,” he comments, “Indeed I do believe you, for grass does not grow on a well-beaten path.”

Life’s basic situation in the
fabliaux
is cuckoldry, with variations in which an unpleasing lover is tricked or humiliated instead of the husband. While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging
from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once. Despite their more realistic characters, the
fabliaux
were no more true to life than the romances, but their antagonism to women reflected a common attitude which took its tone from the Church.

Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy. In the
Speculum
of
Vincent de Beauvais, greatest of the 13th century encyclopedists and a favorite of St. Louis, woman is “the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of tempest,” and—finally the key—“a hindrance to devotion.” Vincent was a Dominican of the severe order that bred the Inquisitors, which may account for his pyramid of overstatement, but preachers in general were not far behind. They denounced women on the one hand for being the slaves of vanity and fashion, for monstrous headdresses and the “lascivious and carnal provocation” of their garments, and on the other hand for being over-industrious, too occupied with children and housekeeping, too earthbound to give due thought to divine things.

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female. Had not a woman’s counsel brought first woe by causing Adam to lose Paradise? Of all mankind’s ideas, the equating of sex with sin has left the greatest train of trouble. In Genesis, original sin was disobedience to God through choosing knowledge of good and evil, and as such the story of the Fall was an explanation of the toil and sorrow of the human condition. In Christian theology, via St. Paul, it conferred permanent guilt upon mankind from which Christ offered redemption. Its sexual context was largely formulated by St. Augustine, whose spiritual wrestlings set Christian dogma thereafter in opposition to man’s most powerful instinct. Paradoxically, denial became a source of attraction, giving the Church governance and superiority while embedding its followers in perpetual dilemma.

“Allas, alias, that ever love was sinne!” cried the Wife of Bath. What ages of anxiety and guilt are condensed into that succinct lament, even if the speaker herself does not seem to have been greatly incommoded by what she lamented. Indeed, through her, the century’s most forthright celebration of sex was given to a woman. More than in some later times, the sexuality of women was acknowledged in the Middle Ages and the marital debt considered mutual. Theologians bowed to St. Paul’s dictum, “Let the husband render to his wife what is due her, and likewise the wife to the husband,” but they insisted that the object must be procreation, not pleasure.

To divide the amative from the procreative, as if by laying a flaming sword between the two, was another daring command contrary to human habit. Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible. It embraced Augustine’s principle that God and Nature had put delight in copulation “to impel man to the act,” for preservation of the species and the greater worship of God. Using copulation for the delight that is in it and not for the end intended by nature was, Augustine ruled, a sin against nature and therefore against God, the ordainer of nature. Celibacy and virginity remained preferred states because they allowed total love of God, “the spouse of the soul.”

The struggle with carnality left many untouched; others were tortured by it all their lives. It did not inhibit Aucassin from preferring Hell to Paradise “if I may have with me Nicolette my sweet love.” Nor did it inhibit creation of the
Roman de la Rose
, the monumental bible of love written in two sections fifty years apart during the 13th century. Begun in the courtly tradition by one author, it was expanded in a cynical and worldly version and at inordinate length by another. When 21,780 lines of elaborate allegory finally wind to an end, the Lover wins his Rose in an explicit description of opening the bud, spreading the petals, spilling “a little seed just in the center,” and “searching the calyx to its inmost depths.”

Petrarch on the other hand, after twenty years of literary mooning over Laura while fathering elsewhere two illegitimate children, succeeded in his forties, “while my powers were unimpaired and my passions still strong,” in throwing off the bad habits of an ardent temperament which he “abhorred from the depths of my soul.” Though still subject to “severe and frequent temptations,” he learned to confess all his transgressions, pray seven times a day, and “fear more than death itself that association with women which I once thought I could not live without.” He had only to recollect, he wrote to his brother the monk, “what woman really is,” in order to dispel desire and retrieve his normal equanimity. “What woman really is” referred to the clerical doctrine that beauty in women was deceptive, masking falsehood and physical corruption. “Wheresoever Beauty shows upon the face,” warned the preachers, “there lurks much filth beneath the skin.”

The nastiness of women was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case was fading. Deschamps as a poet began in good humor and ended with a rancid tirade against women, the
Miroir de Manage
, in which marriage appears as a painful servitude of suffering, sorrow, and jealousy—for the husband. Through 12,000 verses, he ground out all
the conventional clerical accusations of woman—as wanton, quarrelsome, capricious, spendthrift, contradictory, over-talkative, and so demanding that she exhausts her husband by her amorous desires. Since Deschamps elsewhere describes himself as a comfortably married man, this great pile of dead wood represented his atonement, as the end approached, for having enjoyed women and the pleasures of the flesh.

Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex. If the sacrament of marriage was holy, how could sexual pleasure within marriage be sinful? If enjoyment was venial sin, at what point did it become concupiscence, or immoderate desire, which was mortal sin? Was bearing a child outside marriage, though procreative, more sinful than intercourse only for pleasure within marriage? Was a chaste or virgin marriage, though non-procreative, more holy than marital intercourse? What if a man slept with his wife when she was pregnant or after menopause when procreation could not be the purpose? Or, being tempted by another woman, slept with his wife to “cool off” illicit desire: that is, committed one sin to avoid another? Or departed on crusade without his wife’s consent or without taking her along, which was anti-procreative, yet in the interests of the Church? These were questions that concerned the dialecticians probably more than the average person.

Like usury, sex defied doctrinal certitude, except for the agreed-upon principle that any sexual practice contrary to the arrangements and ends “ordained by nature” was sinful. The covering term was sodomy, which meant not only homosexuality but any use, with the same or opposite sex, of the “unfit” orifice or the “unfit” position, or spilling the seed according to the sin of Onan, or auto-erotic emission, or intercourse with beasts. All were sodomy, which, by perverting nature, was rebellion against God and therefore counted as the “worst of sins” in the category of lechery.

Marriage was the relationship of the sexes that absorbed major interests. More than any other, it is the subject on the minds of the Canterbury pilgrims and its dominant theme is who, as between husband and wife, is boss? In real life too the question of obedience dominates the manual of conduct composed by the Ménagier of Paris for his fifteen-year-old wife. She should obey her husband’s commandments and act according to his pleasure rather than her own, because “his pleasure should come before yours.” She should not be arrogant or answer back or contradict him, especially in public, for “it is the command of God that women should be subject to men … and by good obedience a wise woman gains her husband’s love and at the end hath what she would of him.” She should subtly and cautiously counsel him
against his follies, but never nag, “for the heart of a man findeth it hard to be corrected by the domination and lordship of a woman.”

Examples of the terrible fate that meets carping and critical wives are cited by the Ménagier and also by La Tour Landry, who tells how a husband, harshly criticized by his wife in public, “being angry with her governance, smote her with his fist down to the earth,” then kicked her in the face and broke her nose so that she was disfigured ever after and “might not for shame show her visage.” And this was her due “for her evil and great language she was wont to say to her husband.”

So much emphasis is repeatedly placed on compliance and obedience as to suggest that opposite qualities were more common. Anger in the Middle Ages was associated with women, and the sin of Ire often depicted as a woman on a wild boar, although the rest of the seven Vices were generally personified as men.
^*
If the lay view of medieval woman was a scold and a shrew, it may be because scolding was her only recourse against subjection to man, a condition codified, like everything else, by Thomas Aquinas. For the good order of the human family, he argued, some have to be governed by others “wiser than themselves”; therefore, woman, who was more frail as regards “both vigor of soul and strength of body,” was “by nature subject to man, in whom reason predominates.” The father, he ruled, should be more loved than the mother and be owed a greater obligation because his share in conception was “active,” whereas the mother’s was merely “passive and material.” Out of his oracular celibacy St. Thomas conceded that a mother’s care and nourishment were necessary in the upbringing of the child, but much more so the father’s “as guide and guardian under whom the child progresses in goods both internal and external.” That women reacted shrewishly in the age of Aquinas was hardly surprising.

Honoré Bonet posed the question whether a queen might judge a knight when she was governing the kingdom in the king’s absence. No, he answered, because “it is clear that man is much nobler than woman, and of greater virtue,” so that a woman cannot judge a man, the more so since “a subject cannot judge his lord.” How, in these circumstances, the queen governed the kingdom is not explained.

The apotheosis of subjection was patient Griselda, whose tale of endurance under a husband’s cruel tests of her marital submission so
appealed to male authors that it was retold four times in the mid-14th century, first by Boccaccio, then in Latin by Petrarch, in English by Chaucer in the Clerk’s Tale, and in French by the Ménagier. Without complaint, Griselda suffers each of her children to be taken away to be killed, as her husband informs her, and then her own repudiation and supposed divorce, before all is revealed as a test, and she willingly reunites herself with the odious author of her trials.

The Ménagier, a kindly man at heart, thought the story “telleth of cruelty too great (to my mind) and above reason” and felt sure “it never befel so.” Nevertheless, he thought his wife should be acquainted with the tale so that she will “know how to talk about all things like unto the others.” Medieval ladies depended on stories, verbal games, and riddles for their amusement, and a well-bred young married woman would need to be equipped to discuss the abject Griselda and her appalling husband. In the end, Chaucer too was ashamed of the story and in his envoy hastened to advise noble wives,

Married love, despite the formula of courtly romance, was still a desired goal to be achieved after, rather than before, the tying of the knot. The task devolved upon the wife, whose duty was to earn her husband’s love and “gain in this world that peace which may be in marriage,” by constant attention, good care, amiability, docility, acquiescence, patience, and no nagging. All the Ménagier’s wise counsels on this matter can be rolled into one: “No man can be better bewitched than by giving him what pleaseth him.” If the Third Estate, which he represented, laid greater stress on married love than did the nobility, it was doubtless because the more continuous proximity of a bourgeois husband and wife made amiable relations desirable. In England connubial contentment could win the
Dunmow Flitch—a side, or flitch, of bacon awarded to any couple who could come to Dunmow in Essex after a year of marriage and truthfully swear that they never quarreled and did not regret the marriage and would do it over again if given the chance.