A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [142]
The struggle with carnality left many untouched; others were tortured by it all their lives. It did not inhibit Aucassin from preferring Hell to Paradise “if I may have with me Nicolette my sweet love.” Nor did it inhibit creation of the Roman de la Rose, the monumental bible of love written in two sections fifty years apart during the 13th century. Begun in the courtly tradition by one author, it was expanded in a cynical and worldly version and at inordinate length by another. When 21,780 lines of elaborate allegory finally wind to an end, the Lover wins his Rose in an explicit description of opening the bud, spreading the petals, spilling “a little seed just in the center,” and “searching the calyx to its inmost depths.”
Petrarch on the other hand, after twenty years of literary mooning over Laura while fathering elsewhere two illegitimate children, succeeded in his forties, “while my powers were unimpaired and my passions still strong,” in throwing off the bad habits of an ardent temperament which he “abhorred from the depths of my soul.” Though still subject to “severe and frequent temptations,” he learned to confess all his transgressions, pray seven times a day, and “fear more than death itself that association with women which I once thought I could not live without.” He had only to recollect, he wrote to his brother the monk, “what woman really is,” in order to dispel desire and retrieve his normal equanimity. “What woman really is” referred to the clerical doctrine that beauty in women was deceptive, masking falsehood and physical corruption. “Wheresoever Beauty shows upon the face,” warned the preachers, “there lurks much filth beneath the skin.”
The nastiness of women was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case was fading. Deschamps as a poet began in good humor and ended with a rancid tirade against women, the Miroir de Manage, in which marriage appears as a painful servitude of suffering, sorrow, and jealousy—for the husband. Through 12,000 verses, he ground out all the conventional clerical accusations of woman—as wanton, quarrelsome, capricious, spendthrift, contradictory, over-talkative, and so demanding that she exhausts her husband by her amorous desires. Since Deschamps elsewhere describes himself as a comfortably married man, this great pile of dead wood represented his atonement, as the end approached, for having enjoyed women and the pleasures of the flesh.
Doctrine tied itself into infinite knots over the realities of sex. If the sacrament of marriage was holy, how could sexual pleasure within marriage be sinful? If enjoyment was venial sin, at what point did it become concupiscence, or immoderate desire, which was mortal sin? Was bearing a child outside marriage, though procreative, more sinful than intercourse only for pleasure within marriage? Was a chaste or virgin marriage, though non-procreative, more holy than marital intercourse? What if a man slept with his wife when she was pregnant or after menopause when procreation could not be the purpose? Or, being tempted by another woman, slept with his wife to “cool off” illicit desire: that is, committed one sin to avoid another? Or departed on crusade without his wife’s consent or without taking her along, which was anti-procreative, yet in the interests of the Church? These were questions that concerned the dialecticians probably more than the average person.
Like usury, sex defied doctrinal certitude, except for the agreed-upon principle that any sexual practice contrary to the arrangements and ends “ordained by nature” was sinful. The covering term was sodomy, which meant not only homosexuality but any use, with the same or opposite sex, of the “unfit” orifice or the “unfit” position, or spilling the seed according to the sin of Onan, or auto-erotic emission, or intercourse with beasts. All were sodomy, which, by perverting nature,