Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Literary Texts

J. Brown, M. Segol, J. Brown, M. Segol

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230109803
• eBook ISBN: 9781137037411
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Exploring the relation between sexuality and cosmology in a variety of literary texts from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, the essays reveal that medieval authors, whether lay or religious, Christian or Jewish, were grappling with the same sets of questions about sexuality as people are today.

CHAPTER 1

THE WHORE AS IMAGO DEI: BEING AND ABJECTION IN HROTSVIT’S REWRITING OF THAIS

Helene Scheck

Helen Waddell (1889–1965), the famed playwright, editor, and translator, found the life of Thais to be “the crudest of the Vitae Patrum,” and Pafnutius to be “the harshest figure” (262). She calls it a “revolting story” and, though she credits Anatole France’s novelistic adaptation of it as “the subtlest indictment of asceticism in European literature” (261), she wonders why he did not simply turn the page and work with the Pelagia story instead, as she herself did.¹ The story of Thais is a typical prostitute-turned-penitent conversio legend, such as that of Pelagia or Mary Magdalene. In the Latin version of the legend, the famous desert father Pafnutius seeks out and converts the prostitute Thais. Persuaded by his exhortations, she burns all of her money and goods and follows him to a female community where she is interred as an anchoress. After three years, he releases her from her cell. She dies shortly thereafter, a saintly woman. It is a tale of abjection, first and foremost, showcasing a prostitute, who by virtue of her profession refuses to fit into the place assigned her by society, as the Christian who sins despite her faith. In its rudimentary form, the legend serves as an indictment against lascivious behavior and seeks to rein in the ever present threat of female seduction, reaffirming the proper universal order of reason over sense, male over female, and spiritual over physical.

In the Middle Ages, of course, the moral would have been applauded, at least by certain mainstream, ecclesiastically identified audiences, and what seems brutal to us might have seemed a reasonable way to correct this particular wayward woman and bring her to sainthood. Perhaps, then, we should not find Hrotsvit’s interest in this legend surprising. Certainly, to a medieval author and her audience this story would not have seemed outrageous, and the anchorhold would have been regarded with awe rather than abomination. When a woman tells the story, however, even a medieval ecclesiastical woman, we need to ask whether she is internalizing the antifeminist thrust of the story and, therefore, taking the masculinist position, or if she is offering a response to that position. The adaptation of this particular story by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, the tenth-century Saxon playwright, poet, and historian—long recognized as a protofeminist who championed women’s issues and promoted active, independent women—raises precisely these questions. It is true that to a medieval author and her audience, this story would have evoked reverence rather than revulsion; nevertheless, and although Hrotsvit surely would have shared in the impulse to speak out against lascivious behavior, the underlying premise of inherent female seductiveness seems inconsistent with Hrotsvit’s oeuvre, which places the blame for unbridled lust squarely on (pagan) male shoulders.

From a modern perspective, certainly, it is difficult to reconcile Hrotsvit’s interest in women’s issues with a story that seems to advocate female submission to male reason and order. But Hrotsvit was ecclesiastically identified—she was a canoness whose writings seemed to favor ecclesiastical reforms, as did the royal family for whom she wrote. The Cluniac reforms, which enjoyed strong support from the Ottonian emperors, advocated monastic enclosure and also gender segregation, as did earlier continental reforms and those taking place in England at the same time. Hrotsvit’s choice to write this particular play, therefore, may have arisen out of her support of those particular reform ideals. So perhaps she had internalized a masculinist, misogynist perspective. That seems too simple, though. Her choice to dramatize this story rather than another passio in which women have a far more active and positive role—that of St. Margaret or St. Cecilia, for example—may be explained in part by her mission to offer dramatic alternatives to the plays of the Roman author Terence (195/185–159 BC), which she found obscenely popular. Indeed, Hrotsvit’s preface to the dramas opens with an indictment of Terence:

Plures inveniuntur catholici, cuius nos penitus expurgare nequimus facti, qui pro cultioris facundia sermonis gentilium vanitatem librorum utilitati praeferunt sacrarum scripturarum. Sunt etiam alii, sacris inhaerentes paginis, qui licet alia gentilium spernant, Terentii tamen fingmenta frequentius lectitant et, dum dulcedine sermonis delectantur, nefandarum notitia rerum maculantur.

[Many Catholics one may find, and we are also guilty of charges of this kind who for the beauty of their eloquent style, prefer the uselessness of pagan guile to the usefulness of Sacred Scripture. There are also others, who, devoted to sacred reading and scorning the works of other pagans, yet frequently read Terence’s fiction, and as they delight in the sweetness of his style and diction, they are stained by learning of wicked things in his depiction.]²

In that light, her choice of the Thais legend makes sense, since the female protagonist of Terence’s Eunuch, a courtesan duped by the sham eunuch of the title, is also named Thais. Though the story lines are very different, the association surely would not have been lost on her audience, if Terence’s plays were truly as popular as she feared.³ Hrotsvit’s substitution of the Christian convert for Terence’s unrepentant and consummate whore is a subtle and effective gesture consistent with her objective as expressed in the preface:

Unde ego, Clamor Validus Gandeshemensis, non recusavi illum imitari dictando, dum alii colunt legendo, quo eodem dictationis genere, quo turpia lascivarum incesta feminarum recitabantur, laudabilis sacrarum castimonia virginum iuxta mei facultatem ingenioli celebraretur. Hoc tamen facit non raro verecundari gravique rubore perfundi, quod, huiusmodi specie dictationis cogente detestabilem inlicite amantium dementiam et male dulcia colloquia eorum, quae nec nostro auditui permittuntur accommodari, dictando mente tractavi et stili officio designavi.

[Therefore I, the strong voice of Gandersheim, have not refused to imitate him in writing whom others laud in reading, so that in that selfsame form of composition in which the shameless acts of lascivious women were phrased the laudable chastity of sacred virgins may be praised within the limits of my little talent. Not infrequently this caused me to blush and brought to my cheeks a scarlet flush, because being forced by the conventions of this composition I had to contemplate and give a rendition of that detestable madness of unlawful lovers and of their evil flattery, which we are not permitted even to hear.]⁴

To whitewash events, to neglect the more sordid elements, she goes on to say, would be to abandon her purpose. What better way to demonstrate a woman’s triumph over adversity than through the successfully penitent whore? She does so, therefore, in stark terms, not only dramatizing scenes at the brothel, but also depicting in detail the grim reality of the anchorhold and Thais’s fear at having to enter.

Waddell is not alone in finding the story distasteful in its extreme punishment of the wayward woman. Due to its coarseness and brutality, and because it seems to do little to promote female agency and autonomy, Hrotsvit scholars have more or less steered clear of this particular play, repulsed by it or unsure, perhaps, what to do with it. Despite this modern aversion, however, her play has been produced in the modern era, which suggests that there is more to it than simply a tenth-century reformist’s revisionist and moralizing response to Terence’s representation of women. As a case in point, Anatole France attended a marionette version of the play that may well have inspired his transformation of the legend.⁵ In his novelistic exploration of repressed male desire, Thais emerges as a noble, productive member of her newfound spiritual community while Pafnutius is implicated for his illicit desires and his hypocrisy.⁶ It is unlikely that the hagiographical narrative alone would have yielded such a response; Hrotsvit’s dramatization of it, rather, may have prompted France’s thinking about gender and power in this legend. Her play may be the very reason he did not “turn the page” as Waddell would have liked him to.

While they are different in genre, focus, and scope, in Kristevan terms Hrotsvit’s play and France’s novel both move toward, even privilege, the semiotic, overriding the Law of the Father and overflowing (or transcending) at key moments the boundaries of the symbolic to challenge naturalized, normative prescriptions for proper (Christian) behavior. Their objectives are very different, however: France uses the story to question the impulse of extreme religiosity; Hrotsvit poses deeper questions related to gender and being while promoting religiosity. Her structural presentation of the legend, with its innovative framing device, refocuses the audience’s attention from the individual sinner to a consideration of being human in the larger Christian cosmology. Extensive dialogue allows Hrotsvit to explore the nature of Thais’s offence as well as her recognition of it and repentance. Her development of the main characters, Pafnutius and Thais, and the addition of a sizeable supporting cast of disciples, youths, suitors, and fellow hermits, complicates further the straightforward account familiar to her.

At the heart of Hrotsvit’s legend is the question of what it means to be human, to be created in the image of God. She explores this question by tracing Thais’s journey from abject—socially, spiritually, and, ultimately, physically—to subject to sublimated subject through a process of self-abjection. Hrotsvit’s presentation of this trajectory of becoming offers some interesting challenges to the traditional dichotomies of masculine/feminine, body/soul, and reason/sense, and becomes an exploration of female being within a staunchly Christian cosmology. At a time when the status of the female soul was often thought to be less than that of a man—less rational, less pure, simply less than (despite the often-cited verse, Galatians 3:28, on equality of souls in Jesus Christ)—and not all ecclesiastical authorities believed that women are created in the image of God as men are, Hrotsvit’s interest in the ontological state of a fallen woman is compelling and, I argue, culturally significant.⁷ Hrotsvit’s treatment of Thais’s story blurs rather than reaffirms the distinction between each of these...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Narrating Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Texts
• 1. The Whore as Imago Dei: Being and Abjection in in Hrotsvit’s Rewriting of Thais
• 2. Alan of Lille on the Little Bits that Make a Difference
• 3. Queer Hermeneutics and Redemption in the Cosmology of the Zohar
• 4. Born Under the Sign of Venus: Phantasmatic Desire and the Woman-Who-Never-Was in the Libro De Buen Amor
• 5. The Double Bind of Chivalric Sexuality in the Late-Medieval English Romance
• 6. Divine Orgasm and Self-Blazoning: The Fragmented Body of the Female Medieval Visionary
• 7. Cosmology, Sexuality, and Music in Robert Henryson’s “Orpheus and Eurydice”
• 8. Cresseid’s Dignity: Cosmology and Sexuality in Henryson’s “Testament”
• List of Contributors
• Index