Abstract
There is a reason why Dante was so concerned with visualizing speech. In Canto V, Inferno, he asks Francesca “how and at what point at the time of sweet sighs did love concede that you should be aware of your hesitant desires?”1 He then shows how the literary description of Lancelot’s succumbing to love led Francesca and Paolo to feel the intimacy of the moment. Significantly, however, what “overcame” them (ci vinse) is the visualization of the famous literary kiss. They are unable to continue with the reading; yielding to the scene, they materialize the kiss. What was once a literary sin now becomes an immoral act in a Christian world. For the Middle Ages, sight—visualization’was the sense most critically involved among all the senses in the effort to know.2 For that reason, perhaps, Dante placed extraordinary stress on sight and eye imagery through the Commedia: how the pilgrim sees is an expression of the pilgrim’s struggle to know. The attempt to convey the meaning of the Commedia’s vision was itself an epistemological struggle. Indeed, the poem’s structure, itself, is based upon the increase of sight.
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Notes
Dante, Inferno, Canto V, ll. 118–20. “Ma dimmi: al tempo d’i dolci sospiri, / a che e come concedette amore/che conosceste i dubbiosi disiri?” Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ed. Tommaso Di Salvo (Bolgna: Zanichelli, 1985), 91, ll. 118–20.
Norman Klassen, Chaucer on Love, Knowledge and Sight (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1995), x. In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century natural philosophy, “confidence in the centrality of sight spill[s] over into philosophy as sight becomes strongly associated with varieties of knowledge.”
Pierre J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), notes that some twelfth- and thirteenth-century scholastic thinkers varied in their proposal of the three-fold division (virgin, widow, and married persons), namely that “the three states of chastity are (1) those who never have and who propose never to experience sex willingly (virgins); (2) those presently unmarried who have experienced sex willingly and who propose never more to experience it (‘widows’); (3) those who are married and who legitimately exercise their rights to sex” (161). Payer signals with quote marks that the category of widows could also include those who had not married but still engaged in intercourse (161–62).
What is interesting is that “it is not uncommon to find women following two or three bye industries,” (i.e., industries carried on in the home, usually dealing with textile or with the “production or sale of food and drink”) “whereas men as a rule confined themselves to a single craft.” Eileen Power, Medieval Women, ed. M. M. Postan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 62.
See also Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)
David Herlihy, Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990)
Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, ed., Single Women in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)
P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, ca. 1300–1520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)
Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith M. Bennett, “Crafts, Gilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years after Marian K. Dale,” in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. Judith M. Bennett, Elizabeth A. Clark, Jean F. O’Barr, B. Anne Vilen, and Sarah Westphal-Wihl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 17 [11-25].
“The Imagined Woman” is Chiara Frugoni’s phrase. Chiara Frugoni, “The Imagined Woman,” in A History of Women in the West, vol. II, trans. Clarissa Botsford (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 336–422. As I use it, I mean a contrived image of woman ungrounded in social or personal experience.
Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 37, 41.
Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15.
Thomas Fox, Sexuality and Catholicism (New York: George Braziller, 1995), 19. Wiesner-Hanks notes that “for New Testament roots of Christian ideas about sex, the letters of Paul and those attributed to Paul are far more important than the Gospels containing the words of Jesus” (22). However, as Wiesner-Hanks adds, “Like all early Christians, Paul expected Jesus to return to earth very soon, and so regarded sex as one of the earthly concerns that should not be important for Christians” (23). Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in The Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice (London: Routledge, 2000). Although, as Wiesner-Hanks notes, “Jesus seems to have said very little about sex,” (Christianity and Sexuality, 22), Paul Veyne and Michel Foucault argue that “well before the triumph of Christianity,” among the pagan Romans “there existed a ‘virile puritanism.’… Christianity, through its interpretation of Genesis and original sin and the teachings of Saint Paul and the Church Fathers, provided … a conceptual framework for the new sexuality, complete with its own vocabulary, definitions, classifications, and distinctions.” Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 93. Le Goff s cites Veyne and Foucault, “L’amour et la sexualite,” L’Histoire 63 (1984): 52–59.
Ibid., 93. There is something pointedly ironic about sexual morality becoming “a central Christian issue.” After all, “Jesus said remarkably little about sexual conduct, and sex was not a central issue in his moral teaching.” James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2. Indeed, the Gospels themselves “are very discreet on the subject of sexuality” (Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, 95). Even the apostle Paul, for the most part, affirmed sexuality and marriage. He “did not identify the flesh with sinful sexual activity” (95). Yet, it is interesting to note how virginity itself becomes viewed both as menaced or menacing in Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie’s Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1999) and in Karen A. Winstead’s Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972)
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002).
Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (New York: Routledge, 2005), 43.
Margaret Hallissy, Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer’s Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 14.
G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), 20, 375–404.
Klapisch-Zuber, “Including Women,” 7. See also Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th-18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 1.
The way in which reality, so to speak (literally), is sheer linguistic construct is captured by Andre Brink’s insight about Don Quixote (Andre Brink, The Novel: Language and Narrative from Cervantes to Calvino [New York: New York University Press, 1998]). Brink writes, “The main action of the opening situation is constituted by processes of naming, of [Quixote’s] horse, his lady, and himself” (20). In each case, “the name is more than a mask for a paltry reality: what really happens is that in each case the name transforms what is into what may be” (21).
Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 39, described nonlinguistic signs whose lack of definite signifieds and instability leave them open to construction and conversion, constituting thereby a “floating chain of signifieds.”
Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 119 [115-25].
Robert Goldman, Reading Ads Socially (London: Routledge, 1992), 68.
Disneyland is hyperreal because it is “presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of our world] is real,” while, in fact it is as infantile, nonsensical, and raucous as Disneyland, just as “prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral.” Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 2nd ed. ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 174–75, specific quotes are on p. 175.
Prasenjit Duara, “Response,” in Symposium on Prasenjit Duara’s Rescuing History from the Nation, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29.4 (1997): 2.
Nona C. Flores, “‘Effigies Amicitiae … Veritas Inimicitiae’: Antifeminism in the Iconography of the Woman-Headed Serpent in Medieval and Renaissance Art and Literature,” in Animals in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Nona C. Flores (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996), 179 [167-95].
Adrian Wilson and Joyce Lancaster Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis, 1324–1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu, accessed August 16, 2007.
Avril Henry, ed., The Mirour of Mans Saluacioun[e]: A Middle English Translation of Speculum Humanae Salvationis, a Critical Edition of the Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illustrated from Der Spiegel der menschen Behältnis, Speyer: Drach, c.1475 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).
“Faging” means “coaxing, beguiling.” In his edition of Richard St. Victor’s “A Treatise Named Benjamin,” Edmund G. Gardner, ed., The Cell of Self Knowledge: Seven Early English Mystical Treatises Printed by Henry Pepwell in 1521 (New York: Duffield and Co., 1910), 27n1, notes that one of the copies (Harley MS 674) reads “glosing” for “faging.”
James Morton, ed. and trans., The Ancren Riwle: A Treatise on the Rules and Duties of Monastic Life (London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, Printers, 1853), 53.
Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), 178.
William Langland, Piers Plowman (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), Passus 18, 153.
Susan Mosher Stuard, ed., Women in Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976).
See also, Michael M. Sheehan, Marriage, Family and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies, ed. James K. Farge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996)
Jacqueline Murray, ed., Love, Marriage, and Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001), chaps. 2, 5.
The Church’s motives were humane as well as spiritual: it “tried to forbid marriages forced upon the couple against their will, to reduce levels of consanguinity, and to sanction the indissolubility of the relationship. First and foremost, however, it tried to give the legal contract more dignity, accompanying it with special blessings.…” Frugoni, “The Imagined Woman,” 347. Despite the fact that “theological discussions of marriage emphasized that both parties had to consent to the union, a provision which served at least in theory to mitigate the absolute control that noble men exercised in negotiating marriages, the predominant theme was the subordination of women.” Sharon Farmer, “Clerical Images of Medieval Wives,” Speculum 61 (1986): 519 [517-43].
At least two popes, Alexander III and Celestine III, tried to “tread an equitable path through conflicting claims and interests” in disputes concerning the legitimacy of certain marriages—disputes often complicated by collusion or genuine ignorance or dual ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction concerning inheritance through the marriage. Charles Duggan, “Equity and Compassion in Papal Marriage Decretals to England,” in Love and Marriage in the Twelfth Century, ed. Willy Van Hoeck and Andries Welkenhuysen (Leuven/Louvain, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1981), 72 [59-87]. Both popes explicitly attached importance “to marital affection, to mutual responsibilities, to care for children, to a fair solution if alienation arises, to the eradication of abuse, and at least to discretion in potentially scandalous situations.” (72).
Aristotle’s various writings dominated the curriculum in the universities, according to Prudence Allen, and his concept of gender formation fairly much shaped the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century attitudes on gender behavior. Prudence Allen, R. S. M., The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC -AD 1250 (Montreal, Quebec: Eden Press, 1985), 441–44. Thomas Laqueur points out that Aristotle’s Masterpiece or the Secrets of Generation Displayed, “loosely based on the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata,” “was continuously reprinted from the middle of the fifteenth century to the 1930’s, if not to the present.”
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 246n6.
Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, “Introduction: Accounting for Sexual Meanings,” in Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 20 [1-27], emphasis mine.
Sara Maitland, A Big-Enough God (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1995), 2.
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© 2011 M. C. Bodden
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Bodden, M.C. (2011). The “Imagined Woman”. In: Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337657_3
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