Abstract
The “silencing” of Silence is a rich metaphor for the way medieval women writers chose to express themselves. As R. Howard Bloch has shown, medieval male authors associated women with verbosity and saw their language as a cover for deception. Eve, through her speech and its sexual consequences, created discord between man and God.1 Silence, then, can be seen as the dispossession of women’s voices, and it finds a parallel in other discourses in the century before Le Roman de Silence was written, in particular, theological debates on marriage and sexuality as well as misogynist literature. In this chapter I argue that this evidence shows a preoccupation with women’s ability to own their own power and contributes to an environment in which the proper boundaries of women’s roles were well-defined, whether as wife or as the bride of Christ.
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Notes
R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 15–20.
Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 13.
Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 4.
Augustine, Confessiones, ed. Gillian Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Book IV.2, pp. 68–69.
English translation by P. S. Pine-Coffin, Saint Augustine: Confessions (London: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 72.
Augustine, De bono coniugali, De sancta virginitate, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 10.
English translation for this passage only from Ray Kearney, St. Augustine, The Excellence of Marriage, Holy Virginity, The Excellence of Widowhood, Adulterous Marriage, Continence (New York: New City Press, 1999), p. 36.
Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 22.
Georges Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 8–9.
James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 137.
James A. Brundage, “Implied Consent to Intercourse,” in Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou (Washington: Dunbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1993), pp. 246–248.
Charles Donahue, Jr. clarifies this decretal. Marriage was made by consent of the parties; however, in the case of consent to a future marriage, intercourse was needed in addition to consent. Charles Donahue, Jr., Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 32.
Charles J. Reid, Jr., Power Over the Body, Equality in the Family: Rights and Domestic Relations in Medieval Canon Law (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), p. 52.
Audrey B. Davidson and Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., “The Medieval Church and Rents from Marriage Market Regulations,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 32 (1997), 215–245.
Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, pp. 220–221. See also Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Married Priests and the Reforming Papacy: The Eleventh-Century Debates (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1982), p. 1.
Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 77–80. See also Irven M. Resnick, “Marriage in Medieval Culture: Consent Theory and the Case of Joseph and Mary,” Church History 69.2 (2000), 350.
Irven M. Resnick, “Marriage in Medieval Culture: Consent Theory and the Case of Joseph and Mary,” Church History 69.2 (2000), 350.
Neil Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), p. 14.
Jo Ann McNamara, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 11.
Alcuin Blamires, ed., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 2–5.
Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC–AD 1250 (Montreal: Eden Press, 1985), p. 247.
E. Ann Matter, “The Undebated Debate: Gender and the Image of God in Medieval Theology,” in Gender and Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 41.
Sharon Farmer, “Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives,” Speculum 61.3 (1986), 520.
Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1983), pp. 77–78.
Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 292. Translation mine.
John Toland, Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), p. 74.
Petrus Alfonsi, Disciplina clericalis, ed. María Jesús Lacarra (Zaragoza: Guara Editorial, S.A., 1980), pp. 125–126. Translation mine. “The Well” was adapted by Boccaccio, Toland notes, to promote sympathy for the cuckolded husband. Toland, Petrus Alfonsi, p. 156.
De Nugis Curialium, p. 300. Jerome, in his Adversus Jovinianum, includes the example of Cicero, as well as many others, to argue that marriage and philosophy are mutually exclusive. The best known of these was that of Theophrastus, who declared, “Non est ergo uxor ducenda sapienti. Primum enim impediri studia philosophiae, nec posse quemquam libris et uxori pariter inservire” (“The philosopher should therefore avoid taking a wife, for to begin with this hinders the study of philosophy, and no one can minister to books and a wife at the same time”). Quoted in P. G. Walsh, “Antifeminism in the High Middle Ages,” in Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage: From Plautus to Chaucer, ed. Warren S. Smith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 225.
Katharina M. Wilson and Elizabeth M. Makowski, Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage: Misogamous Literature from Juvenal to Chaucer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 7.
P. H. Cullum, “Gendering Charity in Medieval Hagiography,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 144.
Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 17.
Marbod of Rennes, Liber decem capitulorum (Roma: Herder Editrice e Libreria, 1984), p. 125.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Saints’ Lives and the Female Reader,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 27 (1991), 15.
An excellent analysis of the married woman saint appears in Marc Glasser’s “Marriage in Medieval Hagiography,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 4 (1981), 3–34.
John W. Baldwin, “Five Discourses on Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Northern France around 1200,” Speculum 66.4 (1991), 797.
Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 35.
John Van Engen, “Letters and the Public Persona of Hildegard,” in Hildegard von Bingen in ihrem historischen Umfeld, ed. Alfred Haverkamp (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2000), p. 415. As Van Engen points out, this persona of a “Spirit-filled” writer rather than one trained in the Schools was Hildegard’s own creation. “Indocta” did not mean that Hildegard was illiterate, but rather that she did not attend a cathedral school, follow a wandering teacher, or study at a convent with a good library. A vita of Jutta of Sponheim, her teacher, discovered in 1992 shows that Jutta was very capable intellectually and knew Latin. Newman, however, characterizes Hildegard’s Latin grammar as “always shaky.” See Barbara Newman, “Sibyl of the Rhine: Hildegard’s Life and Times,” in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 6–7.
Hildegardis Bingensis Epistolarium, ed. Lieven Van Acker (Turnholt: Brepols, 1991), Corpus Christianorum 91, Ep. 31R, 83. Translation mine.
Barbara Newman, “Hildegard and Her Hagiographers: The Remaking of Female Sainthood,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 26–27.
Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 3–4.
Stephen D. Moore, “The Song of Songs in the History of Sexuality,” Church History 69.2 (2000), 332. Moore goes beyond the traditional interpretation of the text as a sexual relationship between male and female to one between two males.
E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christendom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 6.
Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones Super Cantica Canticorum I.1 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–1958), p. 3. Translation mine.
Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 8.
Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, ad Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 273–274.
Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 303–306.
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© 2012 Sally A. Livingston
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Livingston, S.A. (2012). Silence, Language, Sexuality. In: Marriage, Property, and Women’s Narratives. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010865_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010865_3
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