Banging Shield and Shield Together: Lesbians in Medieval French Literature

That got your attention, didn’t it?

Instead of writing up my Gawain paper, and instead of doing any real blogging; and in between learning how to be an efficient receptionist, and giving my patent Twitface Look to first the incoming Principal of Women’s College and then to our soon-to-be Head of State, The Governor-General Designate, I’ve been perusing one of the gems of Awesome’s bookshelf, the Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Bullough and Brundage. I particularly enjoyed Jaqueline Murray’s article ‘Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages’. I give her the highest praise I can give to a theory-dense article: she works through the historiography and the Theory background systematically, making it clear at every step just how the Theory relates to historical study, and she gives you big clear pointers for further reading. And, as if that wasn’t enough, as the article goes on, she demonstrates a good range of primary source work (although I guess I’d have to go and look at the primary sources in question and particular scholarship on them in order to evaluate her use of them properly).

I could give you a run-down of Murray’s theoretical approach, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to give you a titilating segment from Etienne de Fougères’ Livre des manières, translated by Robert L.A. Clark and appended to Murray’s article.

These ladies have made up a game:
With “trutennes” they make an “eu”,
they bang coffin against coffin,
without a poker to stir up their fire.

They don’t play at jousting,
but join shield to shield without a lance.
They don’t need a pointer in their scales,
nor a handle in their mould.

Out of water they fish for turbot
and they have no need for a rod.
They don’t bother with a pestle in their mortar
nor a fulcrum in their see-saw.

They do their jousting act in couples
and go at it full tilt;
at the game of thigh-fencing
they lewdly share their expenses.

They’re not all from the same mould:
one lies still and the other makes busy,
one plays the cock and the other the hen
and each one plays her role.

*p. 210 in Bullough & Brundage. Words in italics have not been successfully translated.

This passage follows a comparison of the ‘beautiful sin’ of heterosexual fornication with the ‘vile sin’ of homosexuality and instructions to kill homosexual men ‘like any cur’, so I doubt we’re meant to look favourably upon ‘these ladies’ either. However, some features Murray notes:

* de Fougères shares with canon and secular law a phallo-centric approach to sex: lesbian sex is defined by the absence of a penis.
* HOWEVER, unlike the canon and secular law, he doesn’t presume that lesbians must grow or manufacture penises as substitutes for manly apparatus. If you look at the stanzas above, he’s obviously pointing and laughing at the futility of ‘banging coffin upon coffin’, but he presents his Ladies as perfectly happy without a pestle in their mortar. He think’s they silly and unnatural for not desiring a penis in their sex act, but he does grasp the fact that they don’t want one.

and something I noticed myself, from the last stanza:

* de Fougères also shares with the legal examples Murray gives the assumption that sex involves an active and a passive partner. This meshes nicely with David L. Boyd’s side note, in ‘Sodomy, Misogyny and Displacement’, that medieval sexuality is defined by an active/passive binary, which, for men, meant that the recieving partner in homosexual penetrative sex was debased and shamed, for being made passive and therefore feminised. I wonder how this binary transfers over to lesbian sex? Murray may have addressed it, I’ll have to have a closer look at the article sometime…

In the meantime, happy innuendo, everyone!

The Humourous Later Life of St Aethelthryth

So, my attempt to make Arthurian fudge cookies isn’t going so well. When the recipe says ‘refrigerate for an hour’, but your fridge is full, covering the mixture and putting it outside for a while will only be a suitable substitute if you live somewhere where winter is actually COLD.

And on with the later life of St Aethelthryth! If you recall, we left her two weeks ago, newly proffessed as a nun at Coldingham. One week ago, we looked at her image in the Benedictional of St Aethelwold, in which she appears the right holy sourpuss.

After only a year as a nun, Aethelthryth was appointed abbess at Ely, which, if I recall correctly, was a new foundation at the time. Aelfric tells us she was a mother to many nuns- Mecthild Gretsch, in her book ‘Aelfric and the Cult of Saints’, writes as if everyone knew that Ely in Aethelthryth’s day was a double monastery, but how everyone comes by this information I’m not sure. (It could be Aelfric’s use of the term ‘mynstre’, but I don’t know what the word for convent would be if it were a distinct term…) I also read a theory once- and this was back before I had any idea how to spot a crackpot Anglo-Saxon theory when I saw it- that Ely before Aethelwold refounded it was never a ‘real’ monastery, but a house where Aethelthryth and her sisters and their women retired to live chastely (not unlike the ‘nunnan’, not nuns but consecrated widows, a distinction Sarah Foot makes in her several-volume work, ‘Veiled Women’).

Regardless of the formal arrangements at Ely, Aethelthryth continued to be on her best saintly behavior. She fasted, eating only one meal a day, except for feast days; she prayed alone; she wore woollen clothes. She took a bath only on high feast days, and then only after first bathing everyone else in the convent with her own hands.

Eight years on, she grew a ’swelling’ under her jaw- variously accounted for as a tumour, swollen glands, and a leftover plague buboe. As you do, if you’re a saint, Aethelthryth thanked God for sending her an ‘affliction in her neck’, concluding that it was punishment for having worn necklaces adorning said neck in her youth. ‘And now’, she said, ‘me thinketh that God’s justice may cleanse my guilt, since I now whave this swelling, which shineth instead of gold, and this scorching heat instead of sparkling gems.’ (Trans. in Skeat, which is not, as it turns out, by Skeat, but by Skeat, Gunning and Wilkinson, the two latter ladies having done all the grunt work and Skeat the revision.)

A leech was called to ’shoot’ the swelling, and shoot it he did, ‘and there came out matter’. In spite of this helpful leech, Aethelthryth ‘gloriously departed to God’ on the third day after his ministrations.

Strangely, dying of a tumour qualifies her for an entry in Bede’s Martyrology- the only Anglo-Saxon saint therein, in fact-, which interesting piece of information I found via Michelle of Heavenfield.

Having carked it, Aethethryth was buried in a wooden coffin and remained quiet for sixteen years. After sixteen years, her sister Sexburh, now abbess, decided Aethelthryth belonged inside the church itself, and ordered the brethren- (ah, that’s where the double monastery thing comes in)- off into the fens to look for a nice big stone to make a sargophagus out of. Off they went, rowing their way to Grantchesteter, where they found a coffin-ready made, standing against a wall, made out of white marble. The brethren nicked off with the coffin, declaring it a miracle. This explanation seems to have been acceptable, and no one asked who the coffin might have belonged to in the first place.

Next stop: the graveyard. They pitched a tent over Aethelthryth’s grave and dug her up, singing hymns all the while. Lo and behold, she lay there as if asleep. The leech who had tended her was there, and gave assurance that she looked exactly as she did the day they buried her, save that the wound he had made was healed, and all her clothes were freshly pressed and laundered. Despite this last fact, Sexburh took out the body, had it bathed and dressed in new clothes, and interred in the church, where, conveniently, the new marble coffin was found to fit her body exactly and to have a hollow in the pillow just the right size for her head. Aethelthryth’s shrine, her first shroud and her first coffin all went on to be mighty potent in the way of healing miracles, and it was generally agreed that between the incorrupt body and the miracles, we had definite proof she had been a lifelong virgin.

Ely Cathedral- which did not exist in Aethelthryth’s day but is neverthless very pretty.

Aelfric doesn’t go into any great detail about Aethelthryth’s posthumous miracles, as he did with St Edmund. Instead, he goes on to a little appendix, beginning ‘In like manner have laymen also, as books tell us, preserved often their chastity in the marriage-state, for the love of Christ’, and proceeding with a short story adapted from the Vita Patrum, about an upstanding citizen who lived with his wife in ‘claenysse’ (chastity, purity, continence- the same word Aelfric uses for the virgin Aethelthryth, but not limited to absolute abstinence), had three kids and then abstained, lived a virtuous life and finally entered a monastery. There have been all kinds of speculations about this appendix- a good summary of which you can find in Peter Jackson (not the director)’s article in Anglo-Saxon England for the year 2000, entitled ‘Aelfric and the purpose of Christian marriage’. Suffice it to say, Aelfric seems to have had nearly as much trouble with Aethelthryth’s obstinate abstinence has he did with Judith, who used her sexual attractiveness to manipulate men. (Aelfric wrote a homily/letter on Judith, which can be found in an eddition by Assman or in an online edition by Lee.) In the case of Judith, he carefully wrote out all hints of sex from the narrative, but it’s not really possible to rewrite Aethelthryth as a good wife and queen, when her whole sanctity rests on her virginity. Instead, throughout the Life Aelfric refers back to Bede and his judgement of Aethelthryth; he also shifts power off Aethelthryth and onto God, as he does with Judith; and finally he appends this example of marital ‘claennysse’ appropriate to the layity. In my humble opinion, it’s the word eac (also) which is crucial here. Laymen also have often preserved their chastity, Aelfric announces, implicitly setting Aethelthryth appart from the laity even though she lived most of her life as a laywoman. Aelfric certainly didn’t like sex much, or want anyone to enjoy it, but he did understand that the laity had to marry and reproduce; if anyone, male of female, was going to neglect their conjugal duties in imitation of Aethelthryth, he, Aelfric, wasn’t going to be responsible for it.

So that’s St Aethelthryth for you. Next week… who knows? Maybe something really odd, like the Seven Sleepers.

AElfric: quite a tricksy fellow

*Scratches head* I swear, I will never understand the ways of AElfric. In my quest to put together an essay about the importance of books in the Life of St Edmund, I happily stumbled across a synopsis of his source text, the Passio Sancti Eadmundi of Abbo of Fleury. Abbo, who had made a tactical retreat from the monastic politics of Fleury and buggered off to England to advise the Benedictines there, wrote the Passio based on the testimony of St Dunstan, who had his information from Eadmund’s sword-bearer, who either had it from the unnamed observer who saw the martyrdom, or was himself said observer.

Looking at this synopsis, I can see that AElfric made a few particular changes: he shortened Abbo’s introduction; he twiddled with the representation of Eadmund a little, presumably to make him as heroic as possible under the circumstances; he altered Bishop Theodred’s penance; and he left out a final moralising on the value of virginity.

The alteration of the penance is fortuitous for my purposes. In the passio, Theodred hangs the thieves and the next day regrets it. There is no mention of books in this synopsis, although I’ll have to chase down a proper translation. ¹As penance, he begs to wash, clothe and re-coffinate the body of St Eadmund.

By the time AElfric gets his hands on the story, however, books are explicitly the catalyst for his penitence; and he asks the nation to join him in a three-day fast. I reckons I can argue that this change universalises the relevance of canon law and canon law books and invests the laity with an interest in their contents and use.

So that’s happy.

On the other hand, AELfric cuts out the passage at the end which attributes his incorrupt body to his virginity, while in the same book he insists that AEthelthyth’s incorruptibility is testament to her virginity. Abbo, a bigshot Benedictine reformer, used the end of Edmund’s life, and his apparent virginity to appeal to those who served him to follow in his chaste footsteps. Why on earth would AElfric, himself a staunch second-generation Benedictine reformer and opponent of clerical marriage, leave out this interpretation? I dinnae understand it, I don’t think it’s crucial for this essay, but it’s sitting there and niggling at me and driving me batty.

I was reading Peter Jackson (not the director)’s article ‘AElfric and the purpose of Christian marriage’ (ASE 29) the other day, in which he discussed AElfric’s addition of an exemplar from the Desert Fathers, a fellow who had three kids with his wife before embarking on thirty years of married abstention, and then buggering off into a monastery. In the first part of the article, he talks about AELfric’s habit of singling out the virtue of chastity above all other virtues attributed to a given figure, particularly when using Desert Fathers material. With St Eadmund, meanwhile, he deliberately avoids talking about virginity, even though it was in his otherwise authoritative source. Very, very strange.

My only thought here is that perhaps lifelong chastity is not something AElfric regards as conventionally appropriate for the laity. As the Jackson article- not mention AElfric himself, constantly propping up his authority by reference to Bede- shows, AElfric had terrible trouble with AEthelthryth, a ’strong willed, sexually autonomous woman’. It’s not really the Done Thing as Queen of anywhere to refuse sexual congress (and therefore procreation) with your husband. The exemplar at the end functions as a sort of balance, an example of proper marital chastity, a co-operative effort between husband and wife. It also provides a model of chastity which enables marriage to fulfil its proper function: the creation of children, after which abstention shall commence by mutual agreement.

Maybe AElfric doesn’t want to hold up Edmund as an example of virginity, because Edmund is a member of the laity- and a king, at that. You really do want your kings to produce sons, particularly when you have Vikings swarming around trying to conquer your kingdom.

On the other hand, maybe AElfric is just frustrating and weird.

~

1. Anyone know if there’s a translation of Abbo’s Passio out there somewhere? It looks as though there might be one in Winterbottom’s Lives of Three English Saints, from the Fisher Catalogue, but that book has a long list of holds on it. A keyword search for ‘Abbo of Fleury’ only brings up four books, though. Does he go by another name? Anyone know the title of his collection of saint’s lives?

St AEthelthryth, Naysayer

It’s hard to improve on the AElfrician narrative for sheer weirdness, sometimes.

We will now write, miraculous though it is, regarding the holy St AEthelthryth, the English virgin, who was with two men and nevertheless remained a virgin.

It doesn’t get odder than that. But wait, it does! Her father, a man unfortunately named Anna, was king of the East Angles (which possibly makes AEthelthryth a distant cousin of St Edmund), and Anna was a bit of a god-botherer. His daughters, at least, inherited this trait, and none more so than AEthelthryth. Of Anna, AElfric informs us solemnly that ‘all his team was honoured by God’ (team- ‘line’ of descendants, progeny, family, etc).

This Anna married AEthelthryth off to a fellow named Tondbyrht, as his wife. Who knows what AEthelthryth thought about this at the time, but if she was determined at that stage to avoid hanky-panky, Tondbyrht didn’t put up any resistance. Quite possibly he wasn’t in a state to put anything up, because he carked it not long afterwards, and AEthelthryth was summarily handed off to King Ecfrid of Northumbria.

For twelve years AEthelthryth kept King Ecfrid hanging, and- even more bizarrely- for twelve years King Ecgfrid kept waiting for her to come around. He must’ve been a nice guy, King Ecfrid, and not inclined to enforce his conjugal rights. He stuck it out for twelve years, begging the Archbishop Wilfrid,¹ AEthelthryth’s spiritual adviser, to convince her to ‘have enjoyment of his marriage’, with no luck. He promised Wilfrid lands and money and what have you in return for a compliant wife, but no luck.

AEthelthryth, meanwhile, spent twelve years begging for permission to enter a nunnery, which Ecfrid steadfastly refused. Eventually, he gave up, and Wilfrid took her to Coldingham and veiled her as a nun.

There are a few things I wonder about, at this point in the story, and I think it all comes down to one man: Wilfrid.

Q: Why didn’t Ecfrid repudiate AEthelthryth from the day dot? An unconsummated marriage is grounds for annulment, yes?

A: Wilfrid. You don’t get far in your appeal for annulment if your local bishop wants you to stay married. (There could be political reasons here, like not wanting to alienate Anna, and I bet Wilfrid, an astute politician, would have brought them all out whenever the King spoke to him.)

Q: Why didn’t Ecfrid let AEthelthryth go into a nunnery when she first asked?

A: Wilfrid, surely. Was Wilfrid playing one off against the other? Was he telling Ecfrid he’d talk AEthelthryth around, and telling AEthelthryth to ask just one more time? Was he taking Ecfrid’s bribes, smiling, and then taking whatever AEthelthryth was offering him as ’spiritual adviser’ in her celibacy? (No, not like that. Well, ok, maybe like that. If it amuses you….)

AELfric relies heavily on Bede here, and having poked around in Bede, and Eddius Stephanus,  his biographer, Wilfrid strikes me as a very, very wily politician. I wouldn’t put it past him to be pulling all the strings in the King’s marriage… the question is: why?

~

1. Have I mentioned my giant crush on the Archbishop Wilfrid of York (or really, of Ripon and Hexham, but his diocese included York)? Um. In case you can’t tell, my taste in dead men runs to powerful reformist prelates…
Yes, I do realise it’s a bit odd.

Roland and Gawain- further expoundings

I foolishly drank red wine at Formal Dinner, and got all teary over a UNICEF presentation, and now I don’t feel like doing any work. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to trick myself into writing my commentary for my Gawain class tomorrow by putting it online. Sound fair?

First up, if you’re wondering what’s going on, read this morning’s post about the parrallels between the Charlemange/Roland and Arthur/Gawain relationships. (note- thanks for the tip-off about Ralph the Collier, Jeff. I’m going to see if Middle English Reading Group will help me out with it.)

This morning, I looked at the structural relationships between Roland and Gawain in the courts to which they respectively belong. (Now, I must note that it’s over a year since I read Roland, in translation, and my copy thereof is now in the hands of the Goblin. So I’m really pulling things out of my backside here.) There are two further aspects of the two heroes which I feel worth investigating: one, their personal natures, and two, their wider settings.

The Character of the Hero

No one ever accused Roland of being the sharpest sword in the armoury, did they? If I had my copy (I think it’s the Penguin?) here, I would quote to you from the introduction, but as is, you’ll have to trust me when I say that the editor, whose name I’ve forgotten, talks about just this fact. Roland isn’t the quickest of wit, or the wisest. Not much of a tactician, nor, one suspects, was he really one for courtly poncing around. Rather, he is young, and beautiful, and brave, and that is all that is required of him. See enemy, hoist banner, charge. Instant hero.

The editor of my Roland (damn, I wish I could remember her name…) had some very eloquent phrases to the effect that ‘The phrase ‘Middle Ages’ are a misnomer… these are the young ages’- young, good-looking, brash and overconfident. We’re talking about eleventh century Francophonia¹ here, the height of the Feudal era, but before the chivalric code and courtly literature had really taken off. Roland and his cohort are defined as knights by two things: their relationship with one another, and their courage. Intelligence and refinement are not held at a high premium.

Now, turning to Gawain. He’s a knight cut from the same mould as Roland. He is young, and beautiful. He is known for his valiant courage, and demonstrates this against tangible enemies in the wilderness of the Wirral. He loves his uncle the king steadfastly. Intelligence is not his strong point. (I have a complicated anaylsis of this, but a) i’m not that generous with the internet, and b), it’s really kind of boring to sit through.) Suffice it to say, Gawain is perfectly equipped to deal with the dangers right in front of him, but he is completely flummoxed by the otherworldly machinations of The Green Knight, Morgan and the Lady. He just plain doesn’t know what’s going on, or how to deal with it, and in the face of these mind-games he is lead into a spiral of deceit, cowardice and sin.

Which brings us to…

The Hero’s world

It doesn’t matter that Roland isn’t the pointiest pike in the rack. His world- or his poet, if you like- doesn’t ask it of him. It asks only beauty and courage and loyalty, and these he has aplenty. Gawain, likewise not the bendiest bow in the rank, would be quite at home in Roland’s world.

* Roland’s life is defined by deep homosocial relationships.² Roland is off with his troops, under the command of his uncle, supported by his foster-brother Olivier. Gawain, meanwhile, is off on his journey alone, into a world where the homosocial is undermined by the homosexual. Does Gawain even know what he would have to give to the Lord if he had his way with the Lady?

Gawain’s masculinity is at stake. Before I go on talking about hetero/homosexual, it’s worth making the disclaimer that I know these categories don’t cookie-cutter fit the Middle Ages. I prefer a disctinction which David L Boyd makes and then passes over, which is that (high) medieval (western european) sexuality is a binary not of hetero/homosexual but top/bottom, the former being appropriate to a man and the latter to a woman. M/M sex is dangerous because it feminises one or both of the participants. Boyd argues that Gawain would be feminised, in that he would have to offer what the Lady gave him, a ‘receptacle’. He doesn’t go that far, happily (for him, if not for future slash fans), but there’s a whole lot of complicated scholarship (see Boyd and Shiela Fisher, for starters), explaining how the girdle is feminising and the axe-wound is a vaginal symbol and so on. Point is, the whole setup runs Gawain in circles, and is a far cry from the straightforward manly bonding of Roland.

As someone known as Nathaniel (sorry, I don’t remember where you blog…) pointed out to me the other day, fourteenth century England had good reason to be concerned about the erosion of boundaries between the homosocial bonds of the feudal order and potential homosexual bonds, in the form of Edward II and his ‘favourites’. Gawain, and the straightforward heroic order he represents, are threatened.

* Roland’s world is utterly devoid of female sexuality. It’s not devoid of women: Bramimunde, in the Saracen court, is an active character. But on Roland’s side, there is only the distant Aude, a token passed between Olivier and Roland to cement their brotherly affection. This looks like a perfect example of Boyd’s heterosex-as-vehicle-for-homosexual-desire trope, but I don’t buy it, in this case. Marrying sisters is a good way to tie two men and their families together in a political as well as affectionate alliance. (And if you like your sister, you’d probably rather her married to someone you know and trust…) IMHO, it’s significant that Roland never makes it home to Aude and the marriage (and the sex) never takes place.

At Hautdesert, however, heterosex does imply some kind of homosexual exchange, as I noted above. Gawain can’t be quite certain of that, though. What he can be certain of is that he’s faced with transgressive and aggressive female sexuality. I’m digging in my heels and maintaining that the Lady is dominant, at least in the first temptation scene. At the very least, the boundary between masculine/top and feminine/bottom is blurred.

Furthermore, the machinations of female sexuality are behind all this confusion. As Boyd points out, the blame for transgressive homosexual desires is shifted onto women; his women-as-objects-between-men thesis can be inverted, and the men become ‘taken men’ in women’s power, as Shiela Fisher argues. Sadly neither of them consider the sexual implications of this- what does it mean for the Lady to instigate a homosexual exchange? If Gawain knows he may have to ‘pay back’ Bertilak, does he think Bertilak has orchestrated it, or the Lady? And then, at the end of the poem, we find out that Morgan is behind the whole operation. As a result of his ‘trafficking’ with women, as Sheila Fisher puts it, Gawain dons the girdle and loses his heroic standing. Women, to put it bluntly, are dangerous and they’re undermining the masculine warrior code by which Roland lived and Gawain ought to live.

* Roland’s enemies are this-worldly and they stay that way. He’s facing a whole pile of Saracens, all he has to do is charge them down and die heroically. His conflict is that between sensible tactics and his stubborn pride- pride wins, and he gets to be a hero. Bonus points.

Gawain’s enemies, on the other hand, can’t make up their mind if they’re otherwordly or thisworldly. First off, he has the otherworldly Green Knight, who is scary as hell. Next, he has the Lady, who ought to be thisworldly but is behaving very transgressively. Then there’s the fact that his host, apparently thisworldly, is also the otherworldly Green Knight. And finally we find out that the whole apparently thisworldly castle of Hautdesert is ruled by Morgan ‘the goddess’, and she orchestrated the entire sequence of events. Poor ole Gawain just can’t keep up. He doesn’t have the information he needs to understand what’s going on around him, but what’s more he just doesn’t seem to try. He just bumbles along trying to keep his head on and his masculinity invoilate from moment to moment.

* Finally, and this is a point I haven’t investigated properly in relation to either poem, there’s the question of economic anxiety. I have a book waiting to be read called ‘The Poem as Green Girdle’, which is all about commercial imagery in SGGK. For now, suffice it to say that in Roland, everything is shiny and beautiful, while in Gawain, everything is shiny and beautiful and has a definite price, even Gawain himself. Roland associates display with nobility and worth; Gawain associates display with wealth and commercial value. Roland’s worth as a hero is displayed in his rich ornamentation; Gawain’s worth as a hero is measured and curtailed by pricing. I need to poke into this a bit more, and have another look at Roland (in the French… blerg…), but I venture the suggestion that the later poem is evidencing an anxiety about the burgeoning market economy, the nature of wealth and the possibility of it amassing in non-noble hands, a concern which simply isn’t relevant in Roland.

What I’m trying to say here…

is that Gawain is an old-skool knight, a big, pretty, kinda dumb warrior of the Roland type, completely at sea in the confusing and threatening world of the fourteenth century. A good three centuries separate the two poems, and in that time a whole courtly culture has had time to develop, on the foundations of the feudal society in which Roland is located, and is now threatened by all kinds of things. The poet emphasises this disparity between the heroic past and the unstable present through the character of Gawain- not through a great courtly knight like Lancelot, or even the later French incarnation of Gawain, but through a Gawain who bears more resemblance to Roland, and who simply cannot cope with the confusion of his new situation. Perhaps this is why the poem shows such leniency toward Gawain’s cowardice in saving his own life- a hero used to facing down his enemies in combat shouldn’t be expected to unravel the twistings of monsters and Morgan.

~

1. As Keith Busby pointed out to the CMS the other night, a good deal of medieval ‘french’ literature is preserved in English manuscripts. Nobody mention this to the French department, ok?
2. If you try to tell me Roland and Olivier were having slashy gay buttsex, I will cry.

Avicenna on female masturbation

I present to you: the backstory from this Times article on the history of the vibrator. Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna- two ancients and a medieval Muslim, all widely copied throughout the West from the twelfth century onwards.

It starts hysterically with “womb furie”. Hippocrates thought the womb wasn’t a fixed item but wandered about the body looking for trouble… From earliest times there was a recognised women’s complaint characterised by nervousness, fluid retention, insomnia and lack of appetite. Hippocrates thought that a blockage in the womb was the cause of it, hence it was called hysteria from the Greek for womb (hysteros). Galen, a Greek physician, claimed it was caused by sexual deprivation, particularly in passionate women, and was noted in nuns, virgins, widows and occasionally in married women whose husbands were not up to the job.

Massage to “paroxysm” was the ticket…. And masturbation (by either sex) was regarded as wrong. It was not only a moral affront but something that was thought of as constitutionally dangerous, enfeebling mind and body. “Women [with hysteria] should not resort to rubbing,” said Avicenna, the Muslim scholar and founder of early modern medicine. It was, he advised, “a man’s job, suitable only for husbands and doctors”…

One wonders- or at least, I wonder, what Avicenna, or any of his successors prior to the invention of medical vibrators in the late 1800s, did with a woman who didn’t respond to ‘rubbing’. Was she just doomed to hysteria?

If this vein of enquiry interests you, check out Hildegaard of Bingen on male masturbation, in my old blog. And if anyone can point me to the late medieval/ early modern source which recommends the application of a hot compress to the vulva as treatment for ‘green sickness’, you win internet cookies.

Gentlemen, man your wives!

No, wait, I can’t not blog this. Welcome to Humourous Translation Mistakes 101, or Idioms You Really Wish Your Dead Language Had.

Misreading of the day: þurh hæmedþing wife gemanan- through sexy things to man (a) wife. Gentlemen, man your wives!

Anglo-Saxon regular verbs end in –an or –ian. So gemanan being the last word I copied out, I instinctively went to treat it as the verb, and wife as the object. What sort of verb would it be? A cognate of the modern ‘to man’, I assumed (“Man the guns!”). Sadly, gemanan is not a verb at all, but a weak noun of some kind (genitive? doesn’t matter, they all look the same…)

The law code V Æþelred says, of priests, þæt hy nagon mid rihte þurh hæmedþing wife gemanan: ‘That they may not have (nagon) with/in justice, through sexual intercourse (hæmedþing), the company (gemanan) of a wife.’

Or possibly through marriage. The definition is a bit circular- hæmed is ‘sexual intercourse, marriage’, and hæmedþing would be… ‘marital activities’? I quite like ‘through sexy things’, myself.

So, these priests aren’t allowed to boink their wives, basically. Which is exactly what my Humourous Translation Mistake said, but said in a much more amusing fashion. (No one bothered to write down what the wives thought about all this…)

Medieval Kink: or, what better way to up my google ranking?

I am, (un)fortunately, blessed with an innocent mind, and despite the best efforts of many of my friends and associates, sometimes, I just don’t get the dirty jokes. Fortunately, in the world of medieval literature, there is almost always someone who’s done a close text study of the dirty joke, and spelt it out in sensible terms like ’symbolism’ and ‘inversion’ and ‘verbal echoes’, which is the only way an innocent nerd like me will pick up on it.

Tonight I have discovered, courtesy of one David Mills and the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, that the temptation scenes in SGGK are full of bondage jokes.¹

I did realise they were an extended innuendo, I’m not that dim. Lady sneaks into Gawain’s bed, refuses to let him get up and dressed, baldly announces ye are welcom to my cors, and gloats about how many ladies wish they had him in their embrace, as she does here. Gawain, meanwhile, sputters and prevaricates, and manages, for three successive nights, to keep pushing their discourse back into the conventional exchange of loyalty and compliments between knight and lady. Amusing stuff, right? Is Gawain cleverly blocking her every attack? Or is he simply too dumb to pick up on what she’s offering? (The irony being that, even if he knows exactly what she’s offering, he can have no idea what game she and Bertilak, and Morgan behind them, are playing at.)

The factor that I’d not noticed until I picked up Mills’ article is that the Lady comes in and assumes the dominant role- not only by propositioning Gawain, but by doing so in the language of assault, restraint and servitude.

She addresses Gawain as a sleeping sentry, who ought to be on better guard: Ye ar a sleeper unslyge, Þat mon may slyde hider. Mills notes the use of the impersonal pronoun ‘mon’- while not specifically masculine, it removes from her any particularly feminine typecasting. Next, she announces I schal bynde yow in your bedde. Gawain picks up on this imagery of attack and conquest, asking her to deprece your prisoun, but evades the sexual innuendo, asking permission to get up and dress before he becomes the butt of any more sniggering jokes. The Lady refuses, announcing that Ye schal not rise of your bedde… I schall happe you here Þat oÞer half als, and syÞen carp with my knyght that I kagt have. In the next stanza, she alludes to other ladies, each of whom wishes she haf Þe, hende, in her holde, as I Þe habbe here. Politely speaking, many ladies wish they could hold Gawain in their arms… but the Lady’s halde on him is rather more forceful, a prisoun in spite of his attempts to extricate himself. In line 1257 she reduces him from Þe to hit holly in my honde Þat al desyres- which, as Mills puts it, ‘reduces him from a human-being to an object of desire’.

The symbolism here is working on several levels. The imagery of attack and capture parrallels nicely with the hunt scene in the previous stanza. I don’t know my courtly lyric poetry nearly as well as I should, but it strikes me that the Lady’s pursuit of Gawain is an inversion of the sort of hunting imagery associated with the ‘heart/hart hunt’ in The Book of the Duchess. Here, it is the woman who is actively hunting- and her quarry is not Gawain’s heart, but his body. (For one thing, that would be a damn sight less funny when it comes to the exchange of winnings at the end of the day…) Her ‘knightly’ role serves to create a link with her husband, out hunting and doing his knightly thing in the forest. At this stage, it looks as if there is a parrallelism forming between the two (Berty out in the forest, bravely hunting down what he wants… and the Lady, inside, going after her desire with the same dedication)- as the plot unwinds, it turns out they are in fact assaulting Gawain together, and, in hindsight, the Lady’s dominant role in the scene perhaps symbolises her husband’s masculine direction of her actions.²

Mills links the Lady’s sexual dominance with the genre of fablieux, which seems fair enough. It’s downright funny, watching poor little Gawain scrabbling to extricate himself from a sexual situation. Compared to the studly Gawain of the later Chevalier a L’Epee, whose lady-friend has to keep excusing herself from his attentions,³ our Gawain is far from the virile figure the Lady paints him out to be.

The joke goes further than mere sexual exuberance on her part, though. The Lady is offering Gawain the her body, to take his awen won from it. But how is she offering this service to his desires? [O]f fyne force, of course! By binding him in his bed and holding him against his will! What’s more, she intimates that any number of other women would love to dominate him in kind.

Now, this emasculation of Gawain is quite definitely not supposed to be read as the natural order of things. You could probably link it with the exchange of winnings and make a good homoerotic analysis out of it. And it all works wonderfully with the plot at large. But for the dirty joke to fly in the meantime, how much of an idea of erotic domination do you need circulating in your culture? It’s funny seeing a woman take on an unnatural role- but the intimation that other women would like to do the same suggests that the Lady doesn’t consider herself alone in her kink… and nor are the audience intended to.

I’m not suggesting that it would be encouraged or accepted, or that you could buy bondage gear on the streets of London. But it seems to me that the poem is suggesting that the Lady thinks domination would serve Gawain’s awen won (so therefore, the idea of domination as erotic can’t be completely foreign), and that the joke is on Gawain. As he scrabbles to escape, does he even realise exactly what she’s offering? Is he trying to preserve his honour by not sleeping with his host’s wife… or is he trying to keep his manly person out of the hands of this rogue domme and her unnatural tastes?

~
1. David Mills, ‘An Analysis of the Temptation Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, JEGP 1968, p. 612-630.
2. But then, of course, there is Morgan Le Fay lurking around in the background, directing him. Gawain’s reduction to a sexual object in this scene may also be reflecting his reduction to the object of Morgan’s grudge against Arthur.
3. If you missed out on the fun, read about how Gawain keeps the ladies happy in bed here.

The Naked Philologist Brings You (Medieval) Bedroom Satisfaction

Let’s talk about… Medieval Sex. Which is, as anyone will tell you, one of my very favourite topics, right after megalomaniac bishops.¹

Last night, while reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Sources and Analogues, a collection of texts largely in translation, by Elisabeth Brewer, ² I discovered Le Chevalier a L’Epée. A section- in informally styled English prose translation- appears at the end of her chapter on Temptation episodes associated with Gawain.³

In this section, Gawain meets a knight in the forest, who invites him home for tea and scones. Along the way, some shepherds warn Gawain that no one invited to the castle for tea and scones ever returns. Gawain is rather put off by this, but cannot honourably back out. So he heads on up to the castle, where his host goes to every effort to set him up with his lovely daughter. Come evening, the host shuts Gawain and the girly into his own bedroom, ordering her to “shut the doors, my girl, and do what he tells you, for I know such knights have no need of a crowd.”⁴ The girl strips down and cuddles up with Gawain, whereupon she informs him that- unlike all the other men her father has brought home- she cares very much for him, and doesn’t want him to die. Accordingly, he mustn’t make any amorous moves upon her, or the big sword which hangs over her father’s bed will come down and cut him to pieces.
Gawain is perplexed, and “he suspected that she told him all this to protect herself, so that he could not satisfy his desire. On the other hand, it could not be concealed… that he had lain all night with her alone, both of them naked, in her bed, and that he had, on account of a single word, desisted from making love to her”.⁵ So he snuggles up closer, and lo and behold the sword drops down and clonks him one on the shoulder, whereupon Gawain ‘lost all desire’ and retreats to the far side of the bed.⁶ After a while, though, his pride- or possibly his libido- prods him into trying again.

He drew close to her very gently because he was not a peasant. He was playing a certain game when the sword jumped from its scabbard and made another attack on him… But the sword was deflected a little and turned to his right shoulder so that it cut three fingers’ breadths into the skin…⁷

He begs a ‘truce’ from the lady, who snarks back that if he’d given the truce when she asked it, he’d be a lot better off now. The pair of them lie awake all night until her father raps on the door. She opens it, and he is astounded to find Gawain still alive. Noticing the blood on the sheets, he demands to know what went on. On hearing that the sword deflected from Sir Gawain, he tells Gawain that the sword was to choose his daughter’s husband, because it would deflect from the best knight who came to her. There’s a big wedding feast, and then the host escorts them to bed, where he “married them with goodwill”⁸.

That night he had his desire, and no sword was unsheathed there. If he returned again to the attack upon the courteous damsel, it does not distress me, and she was not upset.⁹

Everything is fine and dandy for a month or so, before Gawain decides he ought to take his new wife back to Arthur’s court. Off they set, but at the bend she suddenly refuses to move unless he goes back to the castle and brings her beloved greyhounds. Gawain, being a nice enough bloke, does so, and when he returns to her, a knight bristling with arms careers up and plants himself between Gawain and the lady. Said knight takes her bridle and leads her away, and she goes with him, as quiet as you please. Gawain, who is only lightly armed, calls out and reproves the other knight for taking away his beloved. As Gawain is at a disadvantage, and his opponent will not allow him to return to the castle for more arms, Gawain proposes a fair contest: they set the lady between them, and her consent will decide which of them shall keep her. Gawain is convinced he will win this contest, but

the girl, who knew very well how Gawain could aquit himself in love, wanted next to know about the knight, and how bold and valiant he was. You all, both great and small, and those who laugh as well as those who groan, know that there is scarcely a woman in the world, if she is a sweetheart and a wife, with the best knight there can be from here to Greater India, who would ever love him enough to value him as much as a pinch of salt if he was not valiant in the castle- you all know to what prowess I refer.¹⁰

The lady then gets cold feet, and tells her new paramour that she will not go anywhere without her greyhounds. The knight returns to Gawain, and the same scene is played out, save that the dogs return straight to Gawain, who taunts his rival:

… if you hope to satisfy this girl, you will have little joy of her- I hope she can hear what I am saying- for I can assure you that when she was mine she got what she wanted, and now see how she has served me! It doesn’t happen like that with this does as it does with the woman, as you can see: he will never change his master who has reared him for a stranger. A woman completely throws over her master if he does not give her all she wants, and it is an astonishing thing about such an exchange that she will leave her own for a stranger.¹¹

They have a nice manly joust over it; Gawain kills the stranger and keeps the dogs. The lady begs him to take her back, saying that she only feared for his life, as he was so lightly armed, and accordingly she had gone with the stranger to save Gawain. Gawain doesn’t believe a word of this, and leaves her in the dust, taking the greyhouds with him as his prize.

Now, needless to say, there are many objectionable gender stereotypes here. I’m jolly glad my father refrains from shutting me naked in a room with random young men, and also refrains from chopping up my suitors. Gawain isn’t really that nice a bloke- his reputation being more important than the lady’s wish to ‘protect’ herself from his desire.

But do you notice that all the way through this episode, a knight’s big tough manliness depends on his bedroom performance… and that depends on his ability to satisfy his lady friend’s desires? That a *nobleman* is distinguished in the bedroom by gentility and playing ‘games’ before intercourse? That lack of sexual satisfaction on the woman’s part is acknowledged- though not approved- as a common cause of relationship breakdown?

I found this quite interesting. I haven’t read far and wide in high medieval literature, either French or Middle English, and this was the first time I’d encountered such a strong focus on female pleasure in a sexual context. Is this more common than I’d thought? Is it a special for Le Chevalier a L’Epée?
These things I wonder.
Plus, it’s a rollicking good story.

~

1. I blame Awesome, who, in second year, noted that class attendance was dropping off halfway through semester, and rocked up to class with the announcement that “I can see we’re boring you a little. So I decided to scrap what’s in the program this week. Let’s talk about sex in Anglo-Saxon England”, and read us dirty riddles for an hour or so. This was a highly effective teaching strategy, because dirty riddles aren’t something you forget easily.^1.1
2. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992). Previous edition From Cuchulainn to Gawain, 1973. I have grave reserves about this book as a scholarly text. Brewer includes no introductions to the sources- we don’t knowtheir origins, dates, or even their original languages. Her citations are minimal and the bibliography non-existant.

Having said that, her introduction and nine chapters of ’sources and analogues’ do provide a quick grounding in the genre of Arthurian romances in the time of the Gawain poet. Plus, some of them are fun to read. I’d recommend the book as a source for high school students or perhaps first years, or as light background reading for anyone else. If you’re wanting serious research into the sources and contemporaries of SGGK, don’t go here.
3. pp. 109-126.
4. pp. 115-116.
5. p. 117.
6. p. 117.
7. p. 118.
8. p. 120. I’m curious about this wedding, incidentally. Anyone know much about medieval French marriage law and customs?
9. p. 120.
10. p. 122-123.
11. p. 124.

1.1 Also, Sydney Uni is the place to be in 2009 for medieval sex. Awesome and a colleague are offering a course entitled ‘Sex and Sin’, or possibly ‘Sex and Sinners’. A whole semester of medieval sex! I almost wish I wasn’t graduating…