A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [141]
Life’s basic situation in the fabliaux is cuckoldry, with variations in which an unpleasing lover is tricked or humiliated instead of the husband. While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once. Despite their more realistic characters, the fabliaux were no more true to life than the romances, but their antagonism to women reflected a common attitude which took its tone from the Church.
Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy. In the Speculum of Vincent de Beauvais, greatest of the 13th century encyclopedists and a favorite of St. Louis, woman is “the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of tempest,” and—finally the key—“a hindrance to devotion.” Vincent was a Dominican of the severe order that bred the Inquisitors, which may account for his pyramid of overstatement, but preachers in general were not far behind. They denounced women on the one hand for being the slaves of vanity and fashion, for monstrous headdresses and the “lascivious and carnal provocation” of their garments, and on the other hand for being over-industrious, too occupied with children and housekeeping, too earthbound to give due thought to divine things.
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female. Had not a woman’s counsel brought first woe by causing Adam to lose Paradise? Of all mankind’s ideas, the equating of sex with sin has left the greatest train of trouble. In Genesis, original sin was disobedience to God through choosing knowledge of good and evil, and as such the story of the Fall was an explanation of the toil and sorrow of the human condition. In Christian theology, via St. Paul, it conferred permanent guilt upon mankind from which Christ offered redemption. Its sexual context was largely formulated by St. Augustine, whose spiritual wrestlings set Christian dogma thereafter in opposition to man’s most powerful instinct. Paradoxically, denial became a source of attraction, giving the Church governance and superiority while embedding its followers in perpetual dilemma.
“Allas, alias, that ever love was sinne!” cried the Wife of Bath. What ages of anxiety and guilt are condensed into that succinct lament, even if the speaker herself does not seem to have been greatly incommoded by what she lamented. Indeed, through her, the century’s most forthright celebration of sex was given to a woman. More than in some later times, the sexuality of women was acknowledged in the Middle Ages and the marital debt considered mutual. Theologians bowed to St. Paul’s dictum, “Let the husband render to his wife what is due her, and likewise the wife to the husband,” but they insisted that the object must be procreation, not pleasure.
To divide the amative from the procreative, as if by laying a flaming sword between the two, was another daring command contrary to human habit. Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible. It embraced Augustine’s principle that God and Nature had put delight in copulation “to impel man to the act,” for preservation of the species and the greater worship of God. Using copulation for the delight that is in it and not for the end intended by nature was, Augustine ruled, a sin against nature and therefore against God,