A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [146]
In a passionate outcry at the close of the century in her Epistle to the God of Love, Christine again asks why women, formerly so esteemed and honored in France, are now attacked and insulted not only by the ignorant and base but also by nobles and clergy. The Epistle is a direct rejoinder to the malicious satire of women in Jean de Meung’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose, the most popular book of the age. A professional writer with a master’s degree in Arts from the University of Paris, Jean de Meung was the Jonathan Swift of his time, a satirist of the artificial conventions in religion, philosophy, and especially chivalry and its central theme of courtly love. Nature and natural feeling are his heroes, False Seeming (hypocrisy) and Forced Abstinence (obligatory chastity) his villains, whom he personifies as mendicant friars. Like the clerics who blamed women for men’s desires, or like the policeman who arrests the prostitute but not the customer, Jean de Meung, as a male, blamed women for humanity’s departure from the ideal. Because courtly love was a false glorification of women, he made women personify its falsity and hypocrisy. Scheming, painted, mercenary, wanton, Meung’s version of woman was simply the male fantasy of courtly love in reverse. As Christine pointed out, it was men who wrote the books.
Her protest was to provoke a vociferous debate between antagonists and defenders of Jean de Meung in one of the great intellectual controversies at the turn of the century. Meanwhile her melancholy flute still sounded in poetry.
It is a month today
Since my lover went away.
My heart remains gloomy and silent;
It is a month today.
“Farewell,” he said, “I am leaving.”
Since then he speaks to me no more.
It is a month today.
As shown by the sumptuous bindings of surviving copies, her works were in large demand by wealthy nobles. At the age of 54 she retired to a convent in grief for the condition of France. She lived for another eleven years to write a poem in praise of the figure who, to posterity, stands out above all others of her time—another woman, Joan of Arc.
Fixed as they were in the pattern of female nature conceived for them by men, it was no accident that women often appeared among the hysterical mystics. In the uncontrollable weeping of English Margery Kempe there is a poignancy that speaks for many. She began to weep while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem when “she had such great compassion and such great pain at seeing the place of Our Lord’s pain.” Thereafter her fits of “crying and roaring” and falling on the ground continued for many years, once a month or a week, sometimes daily or many times a day, sometimes in church or in the street or in her chamber or in the fields. The sight of a crucifix might set her off, “or if she saw a man or beast with a wound, or if a man beat a child before her, or smote a horse or other beast with a whip, if she saw it or heard it, she thought she saw our Lord being beaten or wounded.” She would try to “keep it in as much as she could, that people might not hear it to their annoyance, for some said that a wicked spirit vexed her or that she had drunk too much wine. Some banned her, some wished her in the sea in a bottomless boat.” Margery Kempe was obviously an uncomfortable neighbor to have, like all those who cannot conceal the painfulness of life.
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