Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love

R. Howard Bloch

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780226059730, 9780226059723
• eBook ISBN: 9780226059907
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Social Sciences

Until now the advent of Western romantic love has been seen as a liberation from—or antidote to—ten centuries of misogyny. In this major contribution to gender studies, R. Howard Bloch demonstrates how similar the ubiquitous antifeminism of medieval times and the romantic idealization of woman actually are.

Through analyses of a broad range of patristic and medieval texts, Bloch explores the Christian construction of gender in which the flesh is feminized, the feminine is aestheticized, and aesthetics are condemned in theological terms. Tracing the underlying theme of virginity from the Church Fathers to the courtly poets, Bloch establishes the continuity between early Christian antifeminism and the idealization of woman that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In conclusion he explains the likely social, economic, and legal causes for the seeming inversion of the terms of misogyny into those of an idealizing tradition of love that exists alongside its earlier avatar until the current era.

This startling study will be of great value to students of medieval literature as well as to historians of culture and gender.

N O T E S

I N T R O D U C T I O N

1. “Medieval Misogyny,” Representations 20 (1987): 1–24. A series of responses to the original article appeared in the Medieval Feminist Newsletter 7 (1989): 2–16. My response to the responses appeared in the succeeding issue.

2. Misogyny, Misandry, Misanthropy, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Frances Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), vii.

3. For an excellent survey of the varieties of feminism, see Janet Todd, Feminist Literary History (New York: Routledge, 1988); Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 43–64.

4. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms (New York: Schocken, 1981), 222.

5. Cité des Dames, trans. Earl J. Richards, The Book of the City of Ladies (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 4. Thus too, Jean-Marie Aubert refers to “la monotone redite d’une même prétention mono-sexiste” (La Femme: Antiféminisme et Christianisme [Paris: Cerf Desclée, 1975], 10). Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny, in discussing the misogyny of the church fathers, insists upon their uniformity: “il ne faut pas espérer trouver chez eux des considérations originales; les moralistes réèpetent des lieux communs, dont l’antiquité vénérable ne permet guére de variations” (“Comment les théologiens et les philosophes voient la femme,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 20 [1977], 105). Blanche Dow, who has written on women and the Quarrel of the Roman de la rose, notes that “what Aristotle has said of women for the ancient Athenian, what Ovid had said to the society of Augustan Rome, what Boccaccio expressed for the dawning of the Renaissance, and the resulting attitudes toward women were identical” (The Varying Attitude Toward Women in French Literature of the Fifteenth Century: The Opening Years [New York: Institute of French Studies, 1936], 48). See also Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Christine de Pizan and the Misogynistic Tradition,” Romanic Review 81 (1990): 279–92; and Joan Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes, 1400–1789,” Signs 8 (1982): 4–28.

6. See, for example, Theodore Lee Neff, La Satire des femmes dans La poésie lyrique franfaise du moyen ége (Paris: V. Giard & E. Brière, 1990); Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966); Wulff, August, Die Frauenfeindlichen Dichtungen in den romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters bis zum Ende des XIII Jahrhunderts (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1914).

7. Dow, Varying Attitude) 260, 261.

8. “II faut donc nous résigner à faire un exposé austère, illustré par des textes qui manquent de variété, et qui ne donnera qu’une image inexacte de l’attitude réelle des hommes que nous citerons” (d’Alverny, “Théologiens et philosophes,” 105).

9. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate, xiii.

10. Book of the City of Ladies, 3.

11. Luce Irigaray writes incisively about the way in which men constitute woman as an enigma in what is assumed to be a patriarchal discourse: “So it would be the case of you men speaking among yourselves about woman, who cannot be involved in hearing or producing a discourse that concerns the riddle, the logogriph she represents for you. The enigma that is woman will therefore constitute the target, the object, the stake, of a masculine discourse, of a debate among men, which would not consult her. Which, ultimately, she is not supposed to know anything about” (Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985], 13.

12. Cited in Theodore Stanton, The Woman Question in Europe (New York: Putnam, 1884), 6.

13. “Apart from the foundationalist fictions that support the notion of the subject, however, there is the political problem that feminism encounters in the assumption that the term women denotes a common identity. Rather than a stable signifier that commands the assent of those whom it purports to describe and represent, women, even in the plural, has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause for anxiety. As Denise Riley’s title suggests, Am I that Name? is a question produced by the very possibility of the name’s multiple significations. If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble [London: Routledge, 1990], 3).

14. Once again, Christine, who is careful to distinguish between these two ways of speaking, is aware that such a distinction implies, according to the individual case, even the possibility of a woman condemning another woman. Where there lurks an alienating generalization, speaking ill of one woman guarantees the integrity not only of one’s own language, but of all women:

Et quant je di homs, j’entens

famme

Aussi, s’elle jangle et diffame;

Car chose plus envenimée

Ne qui doye estre moins amée

N’est que langue de femme male

Qui soit acertes ou par gale

Mesdit d’autrui, moque ou

ramposne;

Et se mal en vient, c’est

ausmosne

A celle qui s’i acoustume,

Car c’est laide et orde coustume.

And when I say man, I mean woman too,

if she rattles on and defames; for it is a

more noxious thing which should be all the

more despised) that is the tongue of a

woman who either because of certain

knowledge or as a joke badmouths, mocks,

or teases another; and if ill comes of it, it is

a boon to the one used to it, for it is a vile

and ugly habit. (“Le Dit de la rose,”

Oeuvres poétiques) ed. Maurice Roy

[Paris: Firmin Didot, 1891], vol. 2,

29–48, vv. 464–73; my translation)

All translations are my own unless otherwise attributed.

15. Sheila Ryan Johansson, “‘Herstory’ as History: A New Field or Another Fad?” in Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 402, 403.

16. Book of the City of Ladies, 4.

17. It can be no accident, as Catherine Brown once pointed out in my seminar, that the discourse of misogyny, which represents an attempt to speak of the other through the voice of the other, is so closely allied with allegory, the literary form or register whose very name implies “speaking otherwise.”

18. “French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth century. They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched, and they erected impassible barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental present. Compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature” (C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965], 4). So too Robert Briffault: “The sentimental idealization of the sex relation has thus assumed a character which is without equivalent in any other culture, and was unknown in the cradle of European civilisation in the Hellenic world” (The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions [New York: Macmillan, 1969], vol. 3, 506). Irving Singer concurs, but is somewhat more cautious: “The history of ideas about love did undergo a new development at the end of the eleventh and beginning of the twelfth centuries. A fresh approach to human relations arose in that early renaissance and it continued for hundreds of years, in some respects up to the present, as a recurrent phenomenon that can very well demand to have a title of its own.…Something of special significance did happen in the twelfth century, and those who see a continuity—even an evolution of ideas—developing for eight hundred years are not guilty of falsifying the facts” (The Nature of Love [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], vol. 2, 22).

19. The concept of “courtly love” was coined by Gaston Paris in an article on Chrétien de Troyes, “Etudes sur les romans de la table ronde: Lancelot du Lac,” Romania 12 (1883): 459–534.

C H A P T E R O N E

1. Jean de Meun, Le Roman de La rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1966), v. 8531–40; hereafter cited in text as Rose.

2. Jerome writes: “A book On Marriage, worth its weight in gold, passes under the name of Theophrastus. In it the author asks whether a wise man marries” (Adversus Jovinianum, 1, 47, in A Select Library of the Nicene a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• One - Molestiae Nuptiarum and the Yahwist Creation
• Two - Early Christianity and the Estheticization of Gender
• Three - "Devil's Gateway" and "Bride of Christ"
• Four - The Poetics of Virginity
• Five - The Old French Lay and the Myriad Modes of Male Indiscretion
• Six - The Love Lyric and the Paradox of perfection
• Seven - Heiresses and Dowagers: The Power of Women to Dispose
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index