A Natural History of Love (13 page)

Here is one of her heartfelt letters:

… Observe, I beseech you, to what a wretched condition you have reduced me; sad, afflicted, without any possible comfort, unless it proceed from you…. I have your picture in my room. I never pass by it without stopping to look at it; and yet when you were present with me, I scarce ever cast my eyes upon it. If a picture which is but a mute representation of an object can give such pleasure, what cannot letters inspire? They have souls, they can speak, they have in them all that force which expresses the transport of the heart; they have all the fire of our passions, they can raise them as much as if the persons themselves were present; they have all the softness and delicacy of speech, and sometimes a boldness of expression even beyond it…. But I am no longer ashamed that my passion has had no bounds for you, for I have done more than all this. I have hated myself that I might love you; I came hither to ruin myself in a perpetual imprisonment, that I might make you live quiet and easy…. oh! think of me; do not forget me; remember my love, my fidelity, my constancy; love me as your mistress, cherish me as your child, your sister, your wife. Consider that I still love you, and yet strive to avoid loving you. What a word, what a design is this! I shake with horror, and my heart revolts against what I say. I shall blot all my paper with tears. I end my long letter, wishing you, if you can desire it (would to Heaven I could), for ever adieu.

*
From the French for a man on horseback and, by extension, knightly behavior.
Cavalier
comes from the same source.

*
The word
testament
comes from the Indo-European root
tre
, having to do with triads (two deal makers and a witness). A testament was a pledge, and it concealed the idea of castration. When a man swore something was true, giving
testimony
, he put his hands on his testicles. In effect, he was saying:
You can cut off my balls if
I‘m lying
. In time, law courts decided that asking a man to put his hands on the Bible might be more decorous.

*
Compare this with a confidence offered by a twentieth-century Arabian woman, who said that wearing a veil gave her a profound sense of relief, because it freed her from being sexually attractive to men, a feeling that had dominated her thoughts and bedeviled her self-esteem.

*
Because we use the word
love
in so many ways, we find “courtly love” a useful term. However, the phrase originated in the late nineteenth century, when a French medievalist, Gaston Paris, referred to the
amour courtois
of twelfth-century France.

MODERN DAYS

THE ANGEL AND THE WITCH

During the Middle Ages, people were more intimately woven into the fabric of their society. Vassalage meant wearing many ropes of obedience and, in combination, they held one securely in check. This was doubly true for a woman, who was also bound and defined by her relationships to men, as her father’s daughter, her husband’s wife, her son’s mother. Most of one’s life was played out in public, and few people moved beyond their small community, where everyone was known and gossiped about, values were uniform, and there could be little confusion about what sort of behavior was scandalous. Some adventurous souls traveled between towns, but for most people the world ended where their land did, or at the village outskirts. Visitors from afar were unlikely, and leaving home seemed both unnecessary and frightening. Surely monsters roamed the lands beyond the hills. Knights returning from the Crusades carried stories of grand cities and silks, but also of savagery and appallingly strange and sacrilegious customs.

As the Middle Ages waned, villages grew like overspilling ponds, more large cities appeared, and it was difficult to keep track of everyone’s doings. Noblemen who wished to wage war or do business needed support from the swelling class of merchants, manufacturers, and bankers. Because socializing smoothed the way for business deals, the upper and middle classes rubbed shoulders with increasing frequency and sometimes intermarried. And so the bog of social life, where one fell into a class and stayed there, began to change into a landscape that clever folk could navigate. If one dressed correctly, and knew how to speak, he could maneuver among the classes. A man always had his reputation to protect and his position to maintain, through duels or display. Since honor was paramount, the crown of one’s status, requiring a fealty all its own, it became possible to invent an aura and an acceptable past. Appearances were everything.

Despite the social ambiguities of the time, artists and scholars were drawn to the ancients once again, especially to Plato, in whom they found truths clear-cut and eternal. Because their passion, though deeply religious in its intensity, was grounded in a secular vision of humanity, the focus of life shifted from the Church to human beings, who were pictured as life’s architects, wardens of the good and noble. We share that sentiment today and even if we don’t think angels walk the earth, we do believe in everyday acts of saintliness and heroism. Artworks revolved around symmetry and classical form, favoring the curious sleight of eye known as perspective, in which a flat, two-dimensional object creates the illusion of three-dimensional space. It’s often stated that perspective was invented in the Renaissance, but this isn’t true. Perspective was practiced long before—I saw it beautifully rendered in the 17,000-year-old cave paintings of animals at Lascaux—but it obsessed the people of the Renaissance, who perfected its chicaneries. All art is deceit: it cons the mind into imagining a world by showing it a kernel.
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Perhaps because society was changing so quickly, they wished to know exactly where a person stood in relation to everyone else. Today we often talk about “keeping things in perspective,” an idea that also preoccupied Renaissance minds. Perspective brought the dimension of time to painting; one is gradually stitched to the horizon, a distant place but also a different moment. Elements report back to key figures, they have associations and kinships, and in that sense, the painting’s visual world throbs with a tribal reality.

People were painted naked and glorious like Greek gods and goddesses, and women’s bodies were celebrated as temples of beauty. As we have seen, by the Middle Ages the status of women had improved a little. The Virgin Mary as a latter-day version of Aphrodite had come to be the image Botticelli, Titian, and others preferred; they painted women whose robust flesh glowed with color, energy, and motion. Every cell resonated with life. They were sumptuously beautiful, and beauty was good, as Plato had said. Yet at precisely the same time, a loathing for women flourished that has been unequaled in any age. Some men—particularly theologians—felt that women were the root of evil in the world because they were more bestial than men, and therefore had to be stopped, punished, and killed. At no time in history were more women condemned as witches and tortured to death. Sixty thousand in Europe, and a few thousand more in New England. But twice that many were prosecuted without being burned. Two Dominican theologians, after much experience as the pope’s inquisitors, offered the following conclusions:

A woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep … a necessary evil, a natural temptation … an evil of nature, painted with fair colors … a liar by nature…. Since [women] are feebler both in mind and body, it is not surprising that they should come under the spell of witchcraft [more than men]…. A woman is more carnal than a man…. All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.

The twentieth century has tended to depict men as sexual carnivores, predatory by nature, out of control when their hormones blast, unable to resist acts of sex or violence. “Men are beasts,” women complain; males “think with their dicks,” men confess. For much of history, that sort of view described women; the depiction of them as vile, demonic creatures didn’t start in the Renaissance. This toxic version of woman, identified with Eve, a fallen woman who had lured a man to his doom, one whose very name sounds like the word
evil
, was always prevalent. Father Odon, the abbot of Cluny Abbey, wrote in 1100:

Indeed, if men were endowed, like the lynxes of Boetia, with the power of visual penetration and could see what there is beneath the skin, the mere sight of a woman would nauseate them: that feminine grace is only saburra, blood, humor, bile. Consider what is hidden in the nostrils, in the throat, in the belly: filth everywhere…. How can we desire to hold in our arms the bag of excrement itself?

Men have both despised and adored women, found them saintly and base—the angel and the whore—but this duality was especially glaring during the Renaissance, when women’s bodies were depicted as flawless temples of beauty to be studied and worshiped, even as scores of so-called witches were reviled, tortured, and killed in public.

The woman-as-angel produced glorious works of art in what was essentially a latter-day fertility cult. One was surrounded by pictures of robust motherhood, usually in the form of a sweet-faced Madonna holding a plump, cherubic, good-natured Child. No doubt they were the ideals; nutrition for pregnant women or infants was little understood, and sickness claimed many lives. However, such a Madonna would have been a familiar image from daily life, since virtually every woman one met (except the elderly or barren) was pregnant or nursing. Wealthy women didn’t nurse their own babies; they hired wet nurses, which allowed them to become pregnant again faster, and it was their duty to produce as many children as possible. As Martin Luther said, “Even if they bear themselves weary, or bear themselves out … this is the purpose for which they exist.” High fertility was such an important feature in a future bride that a woman was sometimes encouraged to conceive before marriage, just to prove that she could before being linked to a man’s estate. Economically, daughters were a bother unless they could produce heirs. Therefore, dowries were important. A family had to bribe a man for taking on the burden of its daughter. Supply and demand dictated the going price. During the Renaissance, when there were plenty of marriageable women, dowries soared to such ridiculous heights that it was considered a monumental act of charity for someone to bestow a dowry on an orphan girl, who couldn’t marry without one. Single, unattached women, who were not recognizable as someone’s daughter, wife, widow, or sister, had no definition, thus no place in society. The literature often reveals poor young women working night and day to earn enough money for a dowry, without which they had no hope of marriage.

In such a milieu, a female child was simply a commodity, and marriage even more of a business contract. She had no say when it came to picking a husband. Loving parents tried to choose someone agreeable, but for most of them, their daughter, despite her handicaps, was an important form of wealth, actually a trading in futures, on which a family banked for social mobility, income, and heirs. Only an ungrateful or disloyal daughter objected. Pregnancy was a woman’s life and trade. Divorce was impossible. These were truths as fundamental as mountains. But she also knew that society, while not condoning infidelity, understood that hanky-panky could take place. With any luck, she would give birth to a healthy son, better yet two or three, and then she could fall in love and have affairs, provided they were discreet. Clergymen preached that husbands and wives should be the best of companions, real chums, people who loved each other and raised their children with care. And frequently they did—wills and other legal records are filled with the affectionate phrases that come from tender hearts. But more often marriage was an emotional desert, which partners crossed by nourishing themselves elsewhere.

ROMEO AND JULIET

Arranged marriages were a hand-me-down custom known to all, but at about this time, amazingly, a significant number of people began to object. Shakespeare’s plays are filled with collisions over the right to choose whom to marry, and complaints by couples who’d prefer a love match. Shakespeare didn’t invent the best known of them, Romeo and Juliet, leading characters in a classic that had been told in sundry cultures and genres. In the second century A.D., Xenophon of Ephesus presented the story as
Anthia and Abrocomas
, but it may have been older than that. Over the years it fed many imaginations, and its hero and heroine changed names. In 1535, Luigi da Porto spun the tale as a slow-moving melodrama in a novel with an eighteen-year-old heroine named
La Giuletta
. The story was still being written in the latter half of the sixteenth century, in poetry and prose, and even the distinguished Spanish writer Lope de Vega wrote a drama called
Capulets and Montagues
. In telling the story yet again, Shakespeare was doing what Leonard Bernstein and collaborators did with
West Side Story
, putting a well-known, shopworn tale into contemporary dress, locale, and issues. They knew people would identify with the heartbreak of “Juliet and her Romeo,”
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as it’s so often described, focusing on the romantic hopes of the girl. Referring to it in that way makes “Romeo” sound less like a man than a condition or trait possessed by Juliet.