Woman in Italy

From the Introduction of the Chivalrous Service of Love to the Appearance of the Professional Actress

William Boulting

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138609389
• eBook ISBN: 9780429871290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1910, this study in social evolution from the 13th to the 16th century functioned as a successor to Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). The author developed Burckhardt's idea of studying continuous trends over time whilst challenging his idea that Early Modern women enjoyed extraordinary freedom in comparison to their Medieval predecessors. Boulting contrasts the idealization of women with real women at home and in life, portraying women as expanding from protective bondage due to economic progress alongside what contemporary scholars saw as the degeneration of the Catholic Faith during and following the Counter Reformation. He explores various roles of Renaissance women including maidens, married women, housewives, motherhood, widowhood, styles of dress, nuns, saints, courtesans and academics. In doing so, Boulting hoped to demonstrate how very substantial yet how wholly partial the emergence of women was during this Late Medieval and Early Modern period and that this coincided with the complete amelioration of humanity and an increase in kindliness and sense of duty among both men and women.

PART I

WOMANHOOD IDEALIZED

CHAPTER I

THE CHIVALROUS SERVICE OF LOVE

THROUGHOUT the earlier periods of Roman history women were held in protective bondage. Yet the Roman matron was always highly honoured, and not only was a large measure of legal freedom granted to women in imperial days, but they enjoyed a degree of social liberty which, often, they shamelessly abused. And, as Tacitus tells us, the Teutons, to whom the Empire was to fall, regarded their women with a reverence that approached idolatry. German wives were wont to fight for independence at their husbands’ side. Yet the rude laws of their race kept them under male tutelage. The dark and bloody times which accompanied the overthrow of Roman rule gave Teutonic laws a wider scope, and renewed the ancient servitude and complete dependence of woman.

Nay, worse: she was loaded with shame by the victorious Church. Notwithstanding the legends of women martyred for their steadfastness in the faith, notwithstanding the veneration with which the Mother of God was regarded from the times of St. Augustine downwards, notwithstanding the large share that Bertha of Kent took in the conversion of England and Chlotilde in that of France, the fair forms of women had disturbed the austere contemplation of anchorites and tortured them with solicitations to forfeit their heavenly prize ; therefore a debased asceticism filled a clergy under the obligation of celibacy with a passionate horror of womankind. Woman was regarded as the cleverest of all the snares the craft of the devil had devised ; she was thought of as an unclean animal, in fellowship with Satan, one inherently and unconquerably wicked, and, as St. Chrysostom described her, nothing but “a necessary evil, a natural temptation, desired indeed, but bearing calamity with her, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination”.¹ At a synod held at Macon towards the end of the sixth century it was even debated whether she possessed a soul. Eunuchs were substituted for her in the choir, and she was often herded with lepers and penitents in the narthex, at as great a distance from the altar as possible.²

The echoes of Roman and Teutonic traditions may still, in those tenebrous times, have reverberated in the valleys of Provence. Roman culture lingered longest in the South of France ; that land enjoyed relative peace, and thither an extensive Mediterranean commerce brought opulence. The lords of the fertile soil, already rich, found their wealth still further augmented by levies on trade. They even achieved no small degree of refinement, though they remained unlettered. Their ladies bedecked themselves with Eastern fabrics and sought to give comeliness to the home and polish to society. The dwellers in the castle made it a profitable resting-place for travelling companies of acrobats and jugglers and all that might break the dull monotony of their lives, and châtelaines, many of whom possessed rich fiefs of their own, ladies who had been given in marriage for the ratification of peace or the increase of power, listened with delight to songs of an ideal life of romance, so remote from the colourless sobriety of daily existence. The minstrels began to vie with each other, each adding some novel and fascinating note to an old romance or inventing some fresh, wondrous story.

Furriers and fishermen, poor clerics and the sons of lackeys, often discovered that they had the profitable gift of song ; and among them were a few men of genius. Everywhere the minstrel was welcomed ; a kind of brevet-rank was accorded him at the castle, and, before long, even men of birth did not disdain to pursue the joyous art. Raimond Vital gives us a vivid picture of noble knights and gentle dames listening with rapture to a minstrel no less richly garbed than they.

If the peasant broke the tedium of the castle and enchanted its occupants, he, in his turn, often fell under the spell of some fair young dame whose delicacy and refinement appeared all the more splendid to him by contrast with the ignorant coarseness that betokened the women of his own homely class. To him her haughtiness was a foil to her grace ; Oriental silks and pearls were an artless and natural adjunct of beauty. The lady would welcome him most warmly when he sang the perilous song of love. Often his own suppressed passion, quickly perceived by its object, awoke a reticent response. At all times, the châtelaine would be gracious enough to listen to the singing of her praises, and it was felicity to her to have them spread abroad. If real passion blazed, the lady, married to some grisly, jealous baron, must be addressed in cryptic mode, understood of her alone. The enamoured poet sought refuge in the nebulous ether of all that is mystical and transcendental, or concealed his passion with all the artifices of his craft. Hence arose a poesy of love in which the importance, even of that master passion, was exaggerated ; the beloved one became transfigured into a divinity with celestial attributes and perfections. Sometimes, it is true, the minstrel dwells on sensuous delight : “I will never bestir me from lying at the feet of my lady until she admit me to her bower,” sang Bernart de Ventadour ;¹ and sometimes such ardour had tragic ending. Yet, such physical passion was not for courtesans, as with the Roman poets, but for courtly dames, and it is expressed with a rapture of submission that is a new note : the abasement of the lover would have seemed lily-livered, indecorous and wholly effeminate to the poets of antiquity.

The châtelaine eagerly accepted this novel homage ; it was directed to her very self ; it was not an abasement before woman in the abstract. But she was a married woman, and, even when she was willing to gratify her lover, she was usually too discreet to stand the hazard of the dishonour and vengeance that would follow discovery. Yet, the wandering minstrel, singing the special characteristics of a chosen mistress, heralded the Renaissance ; he is the fountain-head of the liberation of individual disposition from conventional fetters, the unconscious knight-errant of a sex.¹

The new minstrelsy, then, sang strains of prostrate devotion because marriage with the object of passion was unattainable ; she was always a married woman, under a contract which had been wholly regulated by the requirements of feudalism ; one with whom adulterous relations were both difficult and dangerous. In that age the love of man and maid was only known by that lower class which still remained almost uninstructed in the meaning of the marriage-bond. A natural passion, aroused by high-born married ladies, was forced into strange, fantastic courses ; it beat the air to achieve some supreme destiny ; it winged its ardent flight away from the warm vulgarities of flesh, and sought shelter and satisfaction in the rarer and more subtle empyrean of the spirit. In hyperbolic verse the poets of Provence praised Beauty, the be-getter of a love which takes up its abode in the innermost soul and causes the lover to fear and tremble while it spurs him to noble imaginations and deeds— deeds sometimes great and generous, sometimes acts of folly, but always passionate and unheedful of self. But there is never an epithalamium to be found. Marriage was held to be, not merely incompatible with such love, but, in its very nature, opposed to it ; indeed the doctrine seemed almost too evident to admit of question. For, since true love must be spontaneous and above all carnal appetite, the body only pertained to marriage ; the soul was free. Yet, the popularity of certain romances of Northern France,¹ such as the tale of Tristan and Iseult, and of others, both of French and Spanish origin, that told of youthful lovers seeking the sanction of marriage, indicates an unconscious revolt against the existing marriage-custom, for they emphasize the natural right of passion. But in Provence a precise, irrational and wholly conventional system of artificial sentiment, the fruit of marriage-restriction, prevailed. Mingling with the hardier fancies of Northern France this became the inspirer of song, the golden spur to all knightly endeavour, the begetter of all knightly conduct and courtesy ; it transfigured woman and endowed her with a moral supremacy² which was above dispute, though it would have moved the ancient world to scorn. It gave rise to pedantic and meticulous problems which occupied the earnest attention of men and women who were, otherwise, of sober mind ; problems that were discussed and decided at courts of love presided over by some elected queen. Passion was often feigned when it was not felt, and ridiculous ordeals were welcomed to give evidence of devotion ; “Suffering and even death for her dear sake are joy and reward enough,” sang Rogier.³

The raptures expended by the poet on some lady who usually allowed years to elapse before she granted even her hand to be kissed, and whom, often enough, her lover had never even seen, neither interfered with his marrying and becoming the happy sire of a brood of his own lawful begetting nor interrupted any chance dalliance with some priestess of Paphos.

The new worship of ladies enhanced the reverence paid to the Mother of God. This cult, which had originated centuries before, in the Eastern Church, now accorded a scarcely credible importance to Our Lady among the celestial divinities. She became the purest, sweetest and noblest figure in the whole heavenly host. The Gentle Shepherd was no longer the Intercessor : it was the Mother Who pleaded. The Son had become the Avenger—the Judge Who is to come. In the thirteenth century every town, great or small, in Europe boasted exquisite chapels dedicated to Our Lady, where her mediation might be specially entreated. One of the earliest Italian sacred dramas depicts the wicked as imploring the Mother, full of pity, to give them some relief, some hope, however small. She pleads with her Son to revoke their doom ; she adjures Him, by the nine months she bore Him in her womb, to relent. Surely her dutiful Son will perform what she entreats. He returns her a stern refusal.¹ “Every knight was the sworn servant of Our Lady ; to her he looked for success in battle— strange as it may sound—for success in softer enterprises.”² The position accorded to the Heavenly Queen and that bestowed on earthly ladies exercised a reciprocal influence of no small importance : the exaltation of either increased the reverence felt for the other.

The new service of Love passed from Provence into Italy, and, at first, was coldly received there. Rambaut, when he came to Genoa (a.d. 1190), courted a lady of that city, whose sense of propriety he greatly shocked ; whereupon he wrote a canzona in Italian.¹ But certain noble houses, such as those of Este, Romano, Camino and Montferrat, welcomed the new poesy, and, gradually, the system made its way. A great number of Italians copied the poets of Provence, but a native strain, born of the sensuous fervour of Sicily, also made its influence felt. Though, by the thirteenth century, the Provençal system of love had become affected, formal, feeble and decadent, it was nevertheless accepted and employed by Dante and his circle. The idealization of woman had been transferred to Italy.

¹ On this subject see A. Bartoli, Storia della lett. ital. Firenze, 1880, iii. 110-11 ; also Innocent III, De Contemptu Mundi.

² E. A. Westermarck, Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, 1906, pp. 665, 666.

¹ Mahn, Werke der Troubadours, i. 45.

¹ V. A. Arullani, Giorn, stor. della Liguria, cxiv. pp. 115 sqq.

¹ See La femme et l’amour au xii. siècle, etc., par Myrrha Borodine, Paris, 1909.

² C. C. Fauriel, Histoire de la Poésie Provençale, 1846, i. 513.

³ Mahn, loc. cit., P. Rogier, 118.

¹ A. d’Ancona, Origini del teatro ital., 1891, i. 141-53.

² H. H. Milman, Hist, of Lat. Christianity, 1864, ix. 74.

¹ L. T. Belgrano, Vita privata dei Genovesi, 389-93 and note.

CHAPTER II

THE DOCTRINE OF CELESTIAL LOVE AND ITS COURTLY OBSERVANCE

THE vigorous industry of the little States of Italy in the later Middle Ages was naturally accompanied by many disputes, and, hence, the study of law was closely pursued at Bologna and elsewhere. From the study of ancient law men wen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Original Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Womanhood Idealized
• PART II The Real Woman at Home and in Life
• Index