A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (16 page)

The courtly love tradition was an attack upon the clerical misogyny that dominated the Church’s attitude towards women, with its unrelenting and obsessive denigration of the female as ‘filthy matter’. It did so by exalting love between man and woman. Woman was seen as man’s saviour. In terms of Western civilization, this was completely novel. Classical poets had sung the praises of their mistresses, but there was no tradition of elevating woman to the status of the universal beloved object. The worship of Mary as Queen of Heaven had established a precedent. But the courtly love poets celebrated illicit love, mocked marriage and defied prevailing Christian morality. They came close to heresy. The troubadour Renaut de Beaujeu in
Le Bel Inconnu
refutes the Bible by claiming that man was created to serve woman, from whom all good flows.

Speaking of Eleanor’s court, the historian Friedrich Heer wrote:

The essence of love, as taught at Poitiers, was not the indulgence of uncontrollable passion, but the moulding of passion by a man’s lady, his ‘mistress’.
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According to Heer, a revolution in romantic relationships was not all that was achieved in the south of France. He believes that there is some evidence to suggest that women may also have had the right to vote and took part in the elections to the local government.
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The elevation of love between man and woman to a sacrament anticipates the work of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). Dante’s meeting with Beatrice Portanari transfigures his life. In her he sees the apotheosis of goodness and beauty. The encounter inspired his first work,
La Vita Nuova.
In his masterpiece,
The Divine Comedy,
written after Beatrice had married a Florentine merchant and died at the early age of 24, he tells of the journey the poet takes through the three kingdoms of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. It is Beatrice who escorts him from Purgatory to Paradise. As she comes to him in a green mantle, a garland of olives on her head, he remembers his love for her:
‘d’antico amor senti la gran potenza’
(‘I felt the great power of the old love’).

But this is not the adulterous love of the troubadours. Dante’s love for Beatrice is chaste, and his salvation depends upon it. However, what is remarkable about his vision is that it implies no disregard of or contempt for what is human, no triumph of spirit over matter: Beatrice is both. Though exalted, she remains a very human figure. In the words of Marina Warner, Dante ‘. . . was too profound and noble a thinker to fall into dualism and use the perfection of Beatrice to denigrate the human race or the rest of the female sex . . .’
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Such a vision of woman as both human and an expression of beauty with the power to transfigure others could not counter the misogynistic currents running through Christianity. By the time Dante had completed his work, those currents were beginning to run more strongly. They would become a raging torrent.

The Church, always disapproving of the courtly love tradition, discovered that the land of the troubadours was home not only to seditious and disturbing ideas about women, but to a major heresy – Catharism. A large section of the population had abandoned the Catholic Church altogether in favour of a movement that rejected the world as evil and preached that the Pope and his bishops had forsaken the teachings of Jesus.
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The persecution of the Cathars linked heresy to ideas about women in a way that would facilitate the witch-hunts of later centuries.

The Cathar movement had originated in the East, cradle of many such dualistic faiths going back to before Christianity. Like earlier heresies, and indeed, like early Christianity itself, it had shocked the orthodox because of the prominent role women played in it. The Cathars allowed women to preach and to become part of the movement’s spiritual elite, the Perfects. Wealthy women of Languedoc were among the most prominent of the patrons of Cathar preachers as they were of troubadour poets.

Pope Innocent III declared a crusade against Catharism in 1208. It was conducted savagely. Over a period of thirty years, hundreds of thousands were butchered, burned and hanged, with Cathar women being singled out for special humiliation and abuse as the fate of Lady Geralda, one of the most renowned of the Cathar women, grimly illustrates. After being taken prisoner, she was thrown down a well and stoned to death. ‘Even by the standards of the day, the act was shocking,’ commented one historian of the heresy.
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The crusade against the Cathars effectively wiped out the culture that had nourished the tradition of courtly love. Troubadours continued to write love poetry – but it was chastened and thoroughly Christianized. The purge against heresy became a purge against expressing certain ideas about
the relationship between men and women. Poets now sang that the purity of love was defined by the denial of its own goal: the possession of the beloved. According to Warner, this was a concept which ‘would have been nonsense’ to the early troubadours.
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The Mother of God and Queen of Heaven now emerges as part of the ideological struggle and acquires the title Notre Dame – Our Lady. The poets substitute love for one lady – Mary – for the ladies of the court. Gautier d’Arras, who came from Northern France, and wrote in disapproval of the spirit of Eleanor’s court, proclaims ‘Let us marry the Virgin Mary; no one can make a bad marriage with her,’ and casts disdain on the love of real women.
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Deification dehumanizes women as much as its polar opposite, demonization. Both deny women their ordinary humanity. However, that humanity is the theme of one of the greatest portraits of women ever written which appeared around 1387 to light the gathering gloom of the waning of the Middle Ages. It gave voice, perhaps for the first time since the comedies of Aristophanes over 1,700 years earlier, to woman not as goddess or temptress but as a human being with vices and virtues like any other. As portrayed in
The Canterbury Tales
of Geoffrey Chaucer (1342–1400), Alison, the Wife of Bath, is certainly no Beatrice – no man will find salvation through love for her. Nor is she an embodiment of the virtues of Mary. She does not try to be. Her vices, like her virtues, are rooted in the demands made upon her by the exigencies of everyday life. For Alison, men are a management problem, but one that she is confident can be solved by women who use their wits. More importantly, she protests against the history of misogyny and its injustice. In doing so she denounces every misogynist from ‘Old Rome’ to the Bible, including Metellus, ‘that filthy lout’ who beat his wife to death for drinking wine, and Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, who divorced his wife because she
went out with her head uncovered (see
Chapter 2
); she is especially scathing on the Church’s tradition of defaming women. In ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, she speaks out:

For take my word for it, there is no libel
On women that the clergy will not paint,
Except when writing of a woman-saint,
But never good of other women, though.
Who called the lion savage? Do you know?
By God, if women had but written stories
Like those the clergy keep in oratories,
More had been written of man’s wickedness
Than all the sons of Adam could redress.
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Her husband (the fifth) infuriates her, constantly reading from his collection of misogynistic homilies. After a furious row, she persuades him to fling his book in the fire and to submit to her rule.

‘The Wife Of Bath’s Tale’, which follows, is about an attempt to answer the question, made famous many centuries later by Sigmund Freud, ‘What do women want?’ The hapless knight who is set the task of finding an answer fails until the solution is given to him by an old woman:

A woman wants the self-same sovereignty
Over her husband as over her lover,
And master him; he must not be above her.
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But for Alison, there was no real puzzle. Sovereignty meant freedom to be herself, in all her womanly nature.

The Wife of Bath’s indignation about the misogyny of the Church came just a few decades before it would take on its most deadly, indeed, nightmarish form. This was also prefigured
in the misogynistic disdain for human sexuality expressed by Pope Innocent III, who exterminated the Cathars and the culture of courtly love. He proclaimed ‘man was formed from the itch of the flesh in the heat of passion and the stench of lust, and worse yet, with the stain of sin.’
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The Pope saw the world as beset with evil. In 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council, confession was made compulsory for all adult Catholics. This way, the Church could police the souls of the faithful more effectively. He ruled that women’s role in the religious life be severely reduced. They were permanently barred from hearing confessions and preaching; even their role in singing during service was to be restricted. In everyday life, women too were to be confined to the role of – in the words of St Thomas Aquinas – ‘man’s helpmate’. He advocated that men should make use of ‘a necessary object, woman, who is needed to preserve the species or to provide food and drink’. Brutal force employed by an absolutist Church was the ultimate means of deterrence. Not until the totalitarian states of the twentieth century was there an institution which could wield such power. Yet, underlying it was a terrible insecurity. Cathars were not the only threat. The Church ruled that Jews must wear a distinctive form of clothing – a yellow patch and a horned cap to mark them as the murderers of Christ. In the outbreaks of religious hysteria that became more common during this period, mobs turned upon Jewish communities in vicious pogroms. According to Heer, ‘every abortion, animal or human, every fatal accident to a child, every famine and epidemic, was presumed to be the work of an evil doer. Until they had been eliminated the Jews were obvious culprits; afterwards, it was women, witches.’

The witch craze which ran from the late fourteenth to the late seventeenth centuries and resulted in the deaths of unknown thousands of women retains the ability to shock us
largely because it is the only known instance in the history of persecution in which to be a woman was to be a chief suspect in a vast conspiracy and the grounds for imprisonment, torture and execution. It is the most deadly event in the history of misogyny, and still, after the lapse of many centuries, the most disturbing and perplexing.

Throughout much of human history, right up until the present, people have believed in witches, both male and female, and saw their magic as capable of being exercised for benign as well as malign purposes. Periodically, witches were punished.
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But the early Church believed that the Incarnation had effectively vanquished Satan and he was not seen as exercising a powerful influence over witches or anybody else. For the first millennium and more of Christianity, belief in witches was generally treated as a superstition of the ignorant, and the Church warned against it. Usually, when witches were killed it was at the hands of enraged or frightened peasants. The official position of the Church remained that magic did exist, and some women – and men – could use it, in particular to bring about impotence and cause abortions. But it condemned as a sin the belief that witches could ride through the air at night, turn love for a person into hatred, transform themselves or others into animals, and have sex with demons.
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By the late thirteenth century the mood had changed. A darker, more pessimistic attitude replaced this healthy caution and theologians began reconsidering the status of the Devil, his demons and their human servants. Why?

Heresies had already shaken the once sturdy edifice of Catholicism. They were followed by the pandemic of the Black Death (1347–50) – one of the greatest disasters ever to strike Europe. An estimated 20,000,000 died. The world that emerged in its wake was one more full of dread and uncertainty.
‘At the close of the Middle Ages, a sombre melancholy weighs on people’s souls.’
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The late Medieval mood of pessimism, mixed with doubt and fear, expressed itself in a way that would have a direct impact on the fate of women: the growth in interest in demons, a need to prove that they were real, and therefore that the Devil and his demons were abroad in the world. As the historian Walter Stephens summed it up, ‘Without proof of a devil, there can be no proof of God.’
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The most convincing proof of the reality of demons would be their ability to interact with human beings. There is no more powerful and corporal form of interaction than sex. But to have sex, demons needed bodies. Many learned monks bent over ancient texts in bare cells burned the midnight oil pondering the corporality of demons; the great authorities St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) were invoked for those who were in favour of devilish embodiment. Augustine had pointed to the pagan gods, who he believed were demons, and their fondness for raping and impregnating women as proof they could interact with humans. St Thomas Aquinas believed demons were the supreme, supernatural gender-benders. They could appear as females – succubi – and go about extracting semen from men.
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Then they would transform themselves into male demons or incubi, and impregnate women. The sceptics argued that demons were illusionary.