 Before starting this episode, I just wanted to note that as the episode title suggests, it's going to include discussion of sex and sexuality with occasional more or less explicit detail, so you might not want to listen in the company of your children, or for that matter, your parents, or grandparents. Actually, you know what, just listen to it alone. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Good Wife – Gender and Sexuality in the Middle Ages. Have you ever been tempted to describe retrograde views about gender and sexuality as being medieval? If so, you were more right than you probably knew. A particularly good example is the condemnation of homosexuality as immoral. Famously, the Greeks generally considered male-male sexual relationships to be acceptable, in some cases even noble, as with the sacred band of Thebes. Pederastic relationships were seen as serving a potentially useful social function, with an older man inducting a teenage boy into political life. As for the Romans, they did not divide erotic proclivities into the heterosexual and the homosexual. Instead, they distinguished between the dominant masculine role of penetrating a partner, who might be either female or male, and the more shameful and passive role of being penetrated. Even lesbianism was understood along these lines. When the Romans were disturbed by it, this was not so much because both partners were women, but because of the inevitable implication of this, namely that one of the two women would have to play the active, penetrating role. But surely moral condemnation of homosexuality as such goes back at least as far as the origins of the Christian religion, right? Not exactly. Late ancient Christians too lacked the concept of homosexuality, especially if we mean by this a settled sexual preference or identity. Sex between men, which was always of more concern to churchmen than lesbian sex, was certainly denounced by Augustine and others, but it did not emerge as a specific sin called sodomy until the 11th century. The term appears in Peter Damian as a neologism formed in imitation of the word blasphemy. So the Latin words there are sodomia and blasphemia. Damian was a tireless crusader on behalf of the moralizing reform movement that swept across Christendom at that time. This same reform movement, promoted by Pope Gregory VII, also resulted in a new demand for celibacy among clerics. That was not universally welcomed by the clerics themselves. In one case, they burned a reformer alive for promoting this novel restriction. Already before the time of Damian, and for a long time after him, sex between men was classified as just one example of a broader sin called luxuria. As the name may suggest to the English speaker's ear, this is the moral failing of being too susceptible to pleasure. The pleasure need not be sexual in nature. Luxuria could even include a weakness for things like soft bedding and fine clothes. But there was a strong association between being luxurious and engaging in deviant sexual practices. What counted as deviant sex? According to some authors, pretty well any sexual activity apart from intercourse between a man and a woman in the missionary position. It was seen as natural because of the front-facing orientation of the genitals, or because it put the woman literally under the man in a reflection of their hierarchical relationship. Bestiality, masturbation, and even cannibalism were sometimes classified along sodomy as bestial or luxurious sins. If Damian was moved to draw particular attention to sodomy and give it a name, it was perhaps because this was the version of the sin most likely to be practiced by clerics and monks in their exclusively male environments. Still in the 13th century, Albert the Great thinks of sodomy as a form of luxuria, which he now defines more narrowly as an experience of pleasure according to the reproductive power that does not comply with law. To explain why exactly these sins are so sinful, medieval thinkers took up the tools of philosophy. One option was to draw on the scientific tradition. Avicenna's massively influential medical compilation, The Canon, includes a section on coitus which explained male desire for sex with other men in anatomical terms. But the Latin scholastics tended to favour psychological explanations. As Albert's definition suggests, he saw the problem primarily as an inability to resist the attraction of unlawful pleasures. As for the reason why such pleasures are unlawful, the usual rationale was that non-reproductive sex constitutes a misuse of the generative power. One problem that arose here was why couples known to be infertile may licitly marry and have sex. This presents a serious difficulty for anyone who thinks that all morally licit intercourse must at least potentially issue in reproduction an assumption that still today underlies religious strictures against contraception and homosexuality. The medieval's were at least as alive to the complexities of moral life as we are today, as we can see from the enormous body of penitential literature produced in the wake of the Gregorian Reform. That reform involved the institution of regular confession by believers, prompting the need for texts advising clerics on how to tend to their spiritual flocks. The penitential literature attempts to bring order to human disorder. Vices are listed and sorted into their various types with indications of the tariff of penance due for each sin. A potential danger here was that speaking too openly of sodomy or other sins could, to put it bluntly, give people ideas. Even worse, sodomites might realize that they were far from alone in their perversion. Thus, the author of one penitential text, William Paraldus, recommended that, This vice is to be spoken of with great caution, both in preaching and in confessional questioning, that nothing be revealed to men that might give them occasion to sin. The penitentials also tell us a great deal about attitudes toward sexuality more generally, for instance that sex outside of marriage was popularly considered to be no big deal to the frustration of church authorities. What we're seeing here is the, if you'll pardon the expression, penetration of scholastic and especially legalistic ways of thinking into the intimate lives of everyday people. Advice to confessors often drew on the great canonists like Gratian and Hortensius who in turn look back to older authors like Augustine and Isidore of Seville. Isidore encapsulated much medieval thought on sex and gender relations in his etymologies of man and woman. Man, in Latin vir, is so named because there is greater force, vis, in him than in women. Woman, moulire, gets her name from softness, molite, for the two sexes are differentiated in the strength and weakness of their bodies. The standard view among intellectuals was that women's bodies are more moist, more cold, and hence softer, which in turn gave rise to the notion that they are highly susceptible to a variety of sins ranging from avarice to sexual excess. This attitude toward women was assumed as a matter of course by most schoolmen on the basis of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Galenic medicine. Not that women were a matter of much interest at the universities. Passages that mention them usually do so only in order to set up a good puzzle, as when Henry of Ghent asks whether a widow who remarries should go back to her first husband if he is raised from the dead. One scholar who made a review of such texts concludes that the scholastics' failure to discuss the weakness of women in any depth was not because they were gender-blind egalitarians, but because women simply were not interesting to them as women. They were not part of their intellectual world. Still, it is easy to find what we would now describe as misogynistic statements in many a scholastic thinker. To take only the most famous of those thinkers, we find Aquinas wondering why it made sense for God to create woman at all, and answering that she was needed as help for man, and specifically for the purpose of procreation. He elsewhere remarks that one should love one's father more than one's mother because the father is the active principle, the mother a passive and material principle. In still another passage, he states that women should not speak publicly to the church because, in general, they are imperfect in wisdom. His student Giles of Rome similarly explains that a woman ought naturally to be subject to a man because she is naturally inferior to the man in prudence. On the bright side, Aquinas doesn't think that women should actually be enslaved to men. He explains that women's passivity does not make them subordinate to men in the fashion of slaves, but in the manner appropriate to the household or city, in which the subject is ruled with a view to her own good. Another richly misogynistic branch of scientific literature is gynecology, that is, medical treatises that are actually about women. These treatises offered extensive and often explicit information about women's bodies, including their genitals. These works were also widely translated into vernacular languages. One translator, sounding a bit like Dante at the beginning of his Convivio, even says that he is producing a Middle English version of a gynecological work in order that it may be of use to a female audience that cannot read Latin. Nonetheless, it would seem that these books were mostly written and read by men. A scientific interest in women did not necessarily imply a friendly attitude towards women. We find in such books the repeated claim that menstrual blood is poisonous, with one commentator wondering why it doesn't kill the menstruating women. The great medieval defender of women, Costin de Pizan, to whom we'll be coming in due course, protested that one widely read gynecological work, called Secrets of Women and falsely ascribed to Albert the Great, was a treatise composed of lies. Of course, even medieval schoolmen did not think that all women are bad people. They knew well the stories of female saints who were sometimes singled out for special praise because they had overcome their natural inferiority and risen to the heights of piety and virtue. Since women were supposedly especially prone to strong sexual desires, it was all the more admirable if they refrained from sex out of piety. Even within marriage, chastity was valued, though it was reason that a wife who vowed abstinence should give up her vow if her husband ordered her to do so. It may seem paradoxical that woman, who was purportedly created to help man with procreation, should ideally adopt virginity or chastity, but characteristically Aquinas is ready with a distinction that resolves the problem. Procreation is indeed good, but it is a good of the body, whereas virginity is ordered to the good of the soul in respect of the contemplative life, because the chaste person is devoted to thinking only of God. Such attitudes made possible the remarkable career of Catherine of Siena. In some ways, she may seem a familiar figure. Like Hildegard of Bingen, she achieved prominence and even a degree of authority because of the mystical visions she enjoyed. Born in 1347, Catherine swore a life of chastity already at the age of seven and later entered into a mystical union with God. Only she could see a wedding ring that appeared on her own finger. Her most famous miracle was the appearance of stigmata on her hands and feet, that is, wounds like the ones inflicted on Christ in the crucifixion. This would also become her most controversial miracle, because Franciscans were reluctant to admit that anyone but the founder of their order could be distinguished in this way. In 1470, almost a century after Catherine's death, the sitting pope was even persuaded to forbid depicting her with the stigmata. In her own lifetime, Catherine was able to parlay her reputation as a mystic into genuine political influence. She engaged in papal politics, trying to help bring an end to the great schism within the church that began in 1378. Throughout her career, she urged reform of the church like a latter-day Peter Damian, and towards this end wrote hundreds of letters to contemporary clergy and nobles. One story has her meeting Pope Gregory XI and being asked how she is so well informed about the situation at the papal curia. Her forthright response? Catherine's political engagement unfolded side by side with a radical commitment to personal asceticism. This too may seem a paradox. When late antique Christians devoted themselves to lives of self-abnegation, they would typically withdraw from society completely. Women took part in that movement, such as Syncletica in the 4th century, and a thousand years later women were still following this path, like Julian of Norwich a generation or so after Catherine of Siena. But Catherine managed to exercise influence in the world of men, precisely because of her reputation for pious discipline. As reported in Raymond of Kapua's Hagiographical Account of Her Life, she effectively starved herself to death at the age of 33. This has led some scholars to suggest that Catherine may have suffered from anorexia. It has also been noted that she was only one of many female mystics to have a complex relationship with food, and often with the Eucharist in particular, which Catherine for a time took as her only sustenance. In one of her visions, Catherine was promised a mouth and wisdom which none can resist. She turned these instruments less to philosophy than to the cause of moral crusading, sometimes literally since she was a fervent supporter of the crusades. But her major work, the Dialogue on Divine Providence, does offer material to interest the historian of philosophy. It provides yet another example where ideas are expressed in a vernacular language, in this case Italian. Catherine sets out a vision of individual morality that explains her own ascetic practices. For her, physical suffering is the inevitable consequence of sin. No amount of agony can ever make good the wrong of defying God, since He is infinite goodness, but the sort of distress experienced by most people does not affect the pious ascetic anyway. She does not really suffer at all, since she no longer wants anything other than what God wills. The idea may distantly remind us of the Stoic proposal that we can secure happiness by wholeheartedly accepting whatever divine providence ordains, and more proximately recall Marguerite Poet's idea of unifying our will with God's. To achieve this, the ascetic must wage war on her own wayward will. Penitential practices, insists Catherine, are only a means towards the ultimate goal of aligning the will with that of God. Catherine echoes Marguerite's point that union with God is a higher objective than ordinary charity and virtue, though she makes this proposal in a far less provocative way and retains the idea that chastising the body is a key part of the mystical path, something Marguerite came to reject. This difference of opinion undermines the notion that bodily asceticism was a defining feature of mysticism among medieval women. Certainly, Catherine herself did not see mortification of the body as paradigmatic feminine. She wrote that the soul must exercise manly fortitude if it is to combat the sensual aspects of human nature. The ravages to which Catherine subjected her own body may strike you as more disquieting than admirable. Some medieval observers might have agreed. A couple of episodes back I mentioned Henry Souza, a follower of Meister Eckhart, whose own ascetic practices are detailed in a hagiographical account of his life. It may have been written by his spiritual daughter, Elspeth Stagel. While of course presenting Souza as a spiritual hero, the biography also seeks to discourage female readers from following his example. Extraordinary, even life-threatening self-abnegation is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but is more appropriate for strong men than weak women. Were any medieval men willing to entertain the possibility of a woman who is praiseworthy for her mind rather than her piety and spirituality? Well, earlier in this episode, I said that most schoolmen were deeply and for the most part unreflectively convinced of women's inferiority. One exception to this rule was Peter Abelard. As is clear from the letters he exchanged with his brilliant student and lover, Heloise, Abelard was impressed by and even infatuated with Heloise in large part because of her intellect. Perhaps for this reason, after they were parted, he went on to write one of the most impassioned defenses of women written in the Middle Ages. It is a treatise on the dignity of nuns like Heloise and her sisters, full of theological arguments for admiring and cherishing women. Abelard reminds us that it was women who anointed Christ during his lifetime and argues that the original sin initiated by Eve has been compensated by the Virgin Mary. In fact, Abelard was only one of many medieval authors who wrote on the defense of women or who rebutted misogynist arguments. The earliest example would seem to come in the late 11th century with Marbaud Avarin who wrote a poem attacking women followed by a response in praise of her. In the 14th century, the case for women will be advanced by Jean Lefebvre who incidentally refers to Heloise and calls her philosophesse. He and other pro-women authors draw on Biblical material, including the apocryphal books, and are at pains to list virtuous women from pagan history and among Christian saints. Telling points made in such texts include the observation that men implicitly condemn their own mothers when they mount misogynistic arguments and a proof that woman is intended as a partner to man and not as inferior on the grounds that Eve was made from the rib in Adam's side and not from his foot. It must, however, be said that there is a good deal of praising with faint damn in the works written in defense of women. Lefebvre, for instance, comments that woman is superior to man in her freedom because she has less reason and more will. But the masters of ambivalent praise of women were the 14th century poets Boccaccio and Chaucer. Both composed works gathering together stories of good women. This sounds like a forthrightly feminist project, but highlighting exceptionally virtuous females can go hand in hand with lamenting the fact that most are far from exceptional. Thus, Boccaccio complains that women typically concern themselves only with sex and child-rearing, despite having the ability to do those things which make men famous, if only they are willing to work with perseverance. As for Chaucer, he focuses on women who suffer from the mistreatment of men. This is apt to provoke the reader's sympathy, but also convey the sense that women are inevitably passive and frequently victimized by male deceptions because they are so easy to deceive. Chaucer's most fascinating and ambiguous text on women comes in his Canterbury Tales in the form of the prologue of the Wife of Bath's Tale. Our protagonist, Alison, tells the satirical and frequently outrageous story of her five marriages. She minces no words about the pleasure she takes in sex, announcing that, In wifehood I will use my instrument as freely as my Maker hath it sent. She is willing to admit that virginity is admirable, but stresses that it is not obligatory. She might almost be responding to Aquinas's remarks on this topic when she says that maidenhood may be preferred to marriage, like goldspoons to wooden ones, yet, A lord in his household, he has not every vessel all of gold, some are of tree, and do their lord service. Her unsentimental eye also discerns that marriage is a kind of economic exchange, in which sex is a debt paid by one partner to another, in her own case with little pleasure, when she was married to older men. This prologue also contains a remarkable reflection on the tradition of misogynist literature and its connections to the culture of clerks. Alison's final husband, Janken, is such a clerk who was at Oxford. He reads from a book full of nasty remarks about women, compiled from a wide range of authors including none other than Heloise, a surprising inclusion until we remember the diatribe against marriage in her letters to Abelard. Our previous interview guest, Monica Green, has quipped that this fictive book of wicked wives might be the most thoroughly studied book that never existed. When an outraged Alison tears pages from the book and slaps Janken, he retaliates with such force that she is not senseless and rendered temporarily deaf, a memorable portrayal of domestic violence. The wife is clearly a comic character, but the modern reader naturally sympathizes with her plight in this scene and more generally with her scathing critique of men, their violence and cruelty, their fecklessness and sexual inadequacy. But is this really what Chaucer wanted us to take from his poem? When you know about the sin of Luxuria, you can't help noticing the delight she takes in fine clothes as well as sex, or the suggestion that she uses religious pilgrimage as an opportunity for sexual adventure. On the other hand, when you're familiar with medieval misogyny, you can't help noticing how comprehensively she parodies and rebuts the typical accusations made against women. I tend to side with those who see Chaucer as using positive and negative sentiments towards women primarily as a tool for vivid characterization. Even as Alison debunks misogyny, she is herself being debunked. Certainly, she is not recommended to us as a model of female virtue or as proof that women are truly equal to men. For that, we would need to turn to a more committed anti-misogynist than Chaucer, and preferably to the greatest of all medieval anti-misogynists, Christine de Pizan. We'll be doing that in a couple of episodes when we look at the role played by Christine in a debate over the misogyny of Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose. But before we wash our hands of the poem about the wife of Bath, I'll be speaking to Isabel Davis, an expert on Chaucer and what his works reveal about gender relations in the 14th century. That's next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.