Research Portfolio Essay #5 Sunday, Oct 15 2006

Chaucer and Gender, Michael Masi. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2005. 161 pages.

 

            On how his book Chaucer and Gender came to be, Michael Masi is direct: “As graduate students… during the late 1960’s we never heard mention of ‘gender studies’” (ix). In short, Masi recognized Chaucerian gender studies as a new and important field in the study of medieval literature. Over a period of three decades, Masi expanded his medieval feminist studies into a wider range of what is now called gender studies. Masi defines this field in the first chapter of his book as “the history of empowerment, the advantages which one gender (male) has over the other” (2). “The importance of gender and gender relations in the literature of the Middle Ages,” notes Masi, “not only struck me as extremely useful and inherently interesting, but also elicited considerable response from students” (ix). Therefore, Masi designed this book as a tool for students of the emerging field of medieval gender studies. In this essay, I will first summarize Masi’s background of gender studies for evaluating the text; second, summarize some topics Masi addresses in his book and then evaluate how well he achieves his goal.

            Right in the summary on the back of the book, Masi notes that Chaucer has been long considered to be “a writer with psychological sensitivities.” That he pointed this out so early on in the reader’s impression of the book indicates that Chaucer was unusual for the medieval period. To further exemplify this, Masi dedicates the first chapter of the book to a review of medieval gender theory. This serves as a background for evaluating the rest of the text. Masi explains that, even in the Middle Ages, there was already a well developed dichotomy between man and woman. He notes that in order to determine how this binary came to medieval thinkers, “one must look to the scriptures or the speculations of the ancients for logical explanations of this biological condition” (3). Like most modern scholars of medieval culture, Masi acknowledges that the gender construct rested on the twin pillars of antique thought and Christianity. While he addresses the temptation of Eve as a major cause of medieval misogyny, Masi as a gender studies theorist adds on to the feminist perspective by noting that “Genesis also stresses the importance of the union and cooperation between the genders” (7). While Eve is seen as “weak and vunerable,” she is also seen as important as Adam’s “helpmate” (7). Another influence on medieval thinkers, Aristotle, also sees women as “defective,” but acknowledges that women are necessary to “incubate” the male sperm (13). Since both of these schools of thought still acknowledge the importance of the relationship between male and female, Masi then suggests that “courtly love… is probably the singular most important factor in the polarization of the genders” (8). Here, the relationship between man and woman is artificial, so it is removed from the biological relationship that both antique thought and Christian thought assumes. Since Chaucer includes courtly tradition in his works, Masi suggests that “Chaucer must have derived a variety of notions about gender from… mainstream sources such as Aristotle… Aquinas… Ovid and the Roman de la Rose” (21). In other words, Chaucer’s ideas of gender came from many of the great works of antiquity and the Middle Ages, so one must consider all these works when interpreting Chaucerian gender constructs.

            Masi discusses a range of issues involving Chaucer’s depiction of the relationship between the genders. However, since my particular range of studies involves women and the supernatural, I will summarize “Chapter 7: Chaucer and the Incubus” (145-161). In the Middle Ages, the incubus was considered to be “a supernatural demonic personality which is invoked as a threat to women” (145). The incubus can represent “the return of the repressed” in psychological terms, or be used as a tool by women to excuse an unexplained pregnancy. In Chaucer, the incubus demonstrates the vulnerability of women even while they are asleep. Masi claims that there are “at least three allusions to the incubus and perhaps one to a succuba” in the works of Chaucer (147). Two of these allusions occur in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. One of these allusions can be found in The Wife of Bath’s Tale. The Wife of Bath refers to incubi satirically in response to “the presence of friars in this land who have now chased away all evil spirits and merely replaced the incubus but can do no more harm than make a woman pregnant” (147). For the Wife, incubi are a benign species that seduce women no more than human men. Given the Wife of Bath’s story, it is likely that her experiences have caused her not to think of the incubus as a “hostile rapist” but as “the friendly incubus which appears in the likeness of an attractive young man” (145). The next allusion occurs in The Miller’s Tale, which he supposedly wrote around the same time he penned The Wife of Bath’s Tale. After the student and the Miller struggle over the Miller’s wife’s bed, they fall back onto the Miller’s wife, and “she startles awake and afraid. In terror she cries to her savior for help, invoking the Holy Cross of Bromeholm” (156). Though she does not explicitly refer to an incubus, the fact that she “instinctively invokes” the Cross of Bromeholm proves that this is what she feared. Masi writes that “the reason for the Cross’ fame was the relic’s special power as protector against the devil,” showing that she feared a demonic presence (158). According to Masi, when Chaucer utilizes the incubus, he goes against gender stereotypes and “seems to delve into those areas where motivation and behavior are driven by distinct gender awareness, an awareness which sometimes plays against the stereotypes” (160). The use of incubi demonstrates Chaucer’s knowledge and sympathy for the feminine.

            Utilizing the Masi’s background of medieval gender constructs and the summary of the actual text, I will now purport to evaluate the book. If Masi’s goal was to design an academic tool for students of gender studies, he was very successful. Masi included examples and parallels from Chaucer’s contemporaries as well as other gender studies done on Chaucer. The fact that the text remains unbiased allows it to serve as a suitable textbook for students of the humanities. One of the possibilities suggested by this book is obvious from the introduction onward- that Chaucer can be studied through the lens of the emerging field of gender studies. Since Chaucer had feminine sympathies despite his own gender, it is fitting to study his portrayal of male and female relationships since he was able to identify with both sexes. Since Chaucer was also very psychologically motivated and attuned, it would be interesting to study how his characters are motivated by gender. At the same time, I feel that the book clearly leaves out some important questions about the masculine gender. In the chapter Chaucer and the Incubus, I feel that Masi could have included the male reaction to this female-centric threat. The fact that some of their wives claimed to be attacked by male demons must have affected men in some way. Though I have never read another book on the subject of Chaucer and gender, I can assume that this text presents a newer, more daring field. Since gender studies has only recently been recognized, I can assume that Chaucer and Gender was one of the first of its kind. However, compared against other books on various Chaucerian studies, I feel that Masi’s text includes many more examples from other Chaucerian scholars. Also, the fact that Masi uses both the Middle English and modern English translations of Chaucer whenever he quotes him is incredibly helpful for a student just beginning to study Chaucer. A specific point that I did not find convincing in this text is that Chaucer never uses the incubus to demonstrate “the exploitation of a woman’s fear or a dark indicator of how some female fantasies may operate” (160). Since Chaucer purported to entertain with his work, I think that these sensational topics would have appealed to him. Since the Wife of Bath sees incubi as benign, it is not a stretch to assume she might enjoy being seduced as one, and who is to say that the Miller’s wife did not see the threat of the incubus as payment for her previous sexual transgression. In summary, though there are faults with Michael Masi’s text, Chaucer and Gender, one can refer these to the fact that it is a pioneer idea in a new field of Chaucerian studies. I believe that it serves as a readable and academic textbook for students of gender studies.

Lauren Orsini,
University of Mary Washington

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Research Portfolio Essay #4 Saturday, Oct 14 2006

Elspeth Whitney, Witches, Saints, and Other “Others”: Women and Deviance in Medieval Culture. Women in medieval Western European culture, Garland Publishing, Inc. New York, 1999 – Article.

 

            As naturally gendered organisms, human beings have forever questioned the relationship between the sexes. In the middle ages, the dichotomy had progressed so far as to suggest that one sex (male) represented good and the other (female) was prone to evil. In her essay, “Witches, Saints, and Other ‘Others’: Women and Deviance in Medieval Culture,” Elspeth Whitney makes two major assertions: first, that medieval women are included in, if not the majority of, prominent deviant communities; and second, that there are inverse parallels between witches and female saints.

            The first observation that Whitney makes is that evil or deviant communities in the middle ages either included, or were totally compiled of, women. There were four major “Othered” groups during the Middle Ages: witches, heretics, lepers, and Jews. The only thing that these communities have in common is that they all are excluded from the norm of Christian life. Therefore, all four groups, though different amongst themselves, were all accused of the same evil deeds because they fit into the “outsider” category (298). By the late medieval period, “accusations of infanticide, sexual perversion, ritual cannibalism, and obscene and scatological practices had coalesced into a powerful image of evil applied to a variety of different groups” (299). Witches and heretic groups were both assumed to “worship the devil” among other acts, while both lepers and Jews were “because of fear of ‘pollution,’… unable to touch food in the marketplace” (298). Exclusion of the four was both total and systematic. Why women were supposed to make up most of these “outsider” groups rests on the fact that medieval culture “rested on the… twin pillars of the pagan classical world and Christianity” (303). Therefore, most medieval thinkers were acquainted with Aristotle, who said “the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior” (304). Aristotle based the inferiority of women on biological ideas, that women were cold and wet while men were hot and dry, and therefore women “lack[ed] the power to concoct semen out of the final state of the nourishment because of the coldness of its nature” (304). It is important to note here that the Greeks saw women as passive incubators for the male sperm while it formed a child. On the other pillar of Christianity, women were not faring any better. For the medieval church, “the biblical Eve came increasingly to symbolize the inherent physicality and sinfulness of women, Adam the innocent victim of a conspiracy between the devil and the first woman” (307). The inclusion of Adam as an innocent victim is a dangerous idea in a “persecution society” such as the medieval period. Prominent men came to see themselves as victims of deviant females who, in their “outsider” groups, did everything from consuming children to worshipping the devil (300).

            Whitney’s second assertion is that in the middle ages the lives of witches and female saints made inverse parallels. First of all, both were prominent in society. In the early middle ages, witches were a peasant’s superstition. However, in the 1450s, “officials of the church, who earlier had dismissed stories of… witches as merely fantasies… began to accept the reality” (301). In 1486, the famous witch hunting pamphlet, Malleus Maleficarum, was first published, consolidating the already emerging idea of the female witch. The stereotype of witch was “increasingly sexualized… at times verging on the pornographic” as the witch became solidly female (301). Her frightening sexuality made her a popular example of evil to both the clergy and medieval thinkers. The female saint was also prominent because “the late Middle Ages saw both a dramatic increase in the absolute number of female saints and an even more striking increase in the number of women saints relative to male saints” (309). These numbers suggest that female spirituality saw a dramatic increase during the period and that “women seem to have been prominent in… many orthodox religious movements” (309). There also arose a number of “highly visible female mystics” whose teachings were as prominent as those of male mystics (309). In fact, these females “frequently became public figures, speaking publically and even, occasionally… influencing papal politics” (310). Second, both were said to be capable of the same magical activities. Whitney notes that, “both are known to fly or ‘levitate,’ to control natural forces, to find lost objects, to tell the future, to read minds…” (310). Also, like the peasant’s early idea of a witch who chose to do good or bad to her neighbors, “saints, in the interest of sanctity, hurt, as well as helped, people” (310). Third, both were persecuted for parallel reasons. Whitney notes that a society’s choice of targeted deviants tells us “about a society’s cultural anxieties” which was, in the case of the Middle Ages, women (299). She adds that “the emergence of the female witch as an object of fear and loathing almost certainly reflected increasing ambivalence about gender and gender roles” (300). Therefore, the persecution of witches put to bed male anxieties about sexuality. The same type of threat led to the increased persecution of female saints. Because men saw women as a sexual temptation drawing them away from religious faith, “female sanctity embodied, in male eyes, an inherent contradiction” (311). An increased distrust of female saints occurred and many of them were put on trial for heresy. Because of the parallel witch trials, men could only see female faith “in negative terms as possession not by God but by Satan” (311). Probably, the parallel between witches and female saints was visible and unsettling to medieval men.

            The idea of the woman as a deviant and a witch was so intensely imprinted into people’s minds that “not until the eighteenth century did the figure of the witch lose its power to invoke the powers of ecclesiastical and secular governments” (302). In fact, the last execution of a witch didn’t occur until 1782. Both of Elspeth Whitney’s assertions, that women made up a large part of “outsider” groups, and that witches and female saints drew startling parallels, show a larger political force at work: the need of men to assure the submission of women to themselves. The fear of powerful or evil women loomed so large in their minds that a “moral panic” was eminent (299). Therefore, it was the “Othering” of women by those in power that led to their frequent portrayal as deviants.

 

Lauren Orsini, University of Mary Washington

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Research Portfolio Essay #3 Sunday, Oct 8 2006

Beate Popkin, Wives, Mothers, and Witches: The Learned Discourse about Women in Early Modern
Europe. Journal of Women’s History; Autumn 1997; 9, 3; GenderWatch (GW) p. 193

 

            It is hard to disagree with the statement that women were frequently negatively portrayed in context to men in the Middle Ages. Author Beate Popkin takes this assertion one step further by stating that the feminine became the “Other” in the Medieval period. In her essay “Wives, Mothers, and Witches: The Learned Discourse about Women in Early Modern Europe,” Popkin makes two major claims. I will address each of her assertions that first, women are “Othered” to men through marriage and sexuality and second, the female witch is the resulting manifestation of the “Othered” woman.

            Popkin suggests in the beginning of her article that the discourse of women changed as a result of the shift of medieval masculine identities. Previously, there had been “the model of the warrior and the monk, each pursuing his passions in an all male environment” while during the late middle ages men were expected to “focus their attention on the welfare of the nuclear family and live their lives in close proximity to women” (1). At this point, men were now aware of the feminine sphere and their identity became dependent on “a profound need to define woman’s place in relation to man and to assure her subjection to him” (1). Men had to assure themselves that they were living alongside women, not among them. Therefore, the idea commonly shared by late medieval thinkers was that “human beings were created unequal and therefore must assume different positions in society” (2). This was not a new idea; in fact, it dated back to Ancient Greece. Aristotle, for one, “considered women’s inferiority to rest on three characteristics: she was physically weaker than man; she was intellectually less capable; and she was less able to control her emotions through reason” (2). This was also justified in the most influential book of the middle ages- the Bible: “the fact that Eve was made after Adam and from his body… pointed to her baser status” (3). The Bible further asserts that Eve was the first to give into the temptation of the devil, and therefore all women must be protected by men from temptation. Based on these facts, it was very easy for men to see women as “the Other,” the negative opposite of themselves. This made living in families in close proximity to women much more palatable, because a powerful, patriarchal figure was seen as necessary to keep the weaker, lustful female controlled.

            If then, the uncontrolled woman was a naturally sinful creature, then it was easy for medieval thinkers to so completely embrace the idea of a female witch. In an age where “church courts… regulated marriage and punished… infidelity and deviant sexual behaviors,” controlling women’s sexuality was very prominent on men’s minds (3). The idea of the female witch “point[s] out the threat women’s bodies appear to pose to men” (4). At this time “learned urban men in stable marriages faced the moral imperative of subjecting their sexual impulses to their partners- and the proliferation of marriage courts indicate that they did- it should be no surprise that women’s unruliness and sexual disorderliness loomed so large in their minds” (4). Therefore, men instead of facing their inability to cope with this moral task, tended to project their dilemma onto “the Other.” As the problem of morality continued to worry men, the marginalization of the female witch became more and more explicit. Texts like the Malleus Maleficarum and De la Deminimanie des sorciers described the illicit activities of witches in great detail, such as “witches copulating with the Devil… witches’ Sabbaths, with their frantic dancing” (4). The fact that male thinkers chose to portray women in such immoral situations betrayed their sexual anxiety regarding women. Eventually, female witches began to signify “the Other” of men not just sexually, but religiously as well. The idea of the female witch emerged first at “village level,” where she was deemed evil because she targeted others with her magic (6). However, when she reached the ears of the English and Scottish elite, her evil nature shifted: “while at the village level she was regarded as evil because she did harm to others… elite writings attributed her evil nature to the fact that she had rejected God and made a pact with the devil” (6). Now she was not only held accountable of the crime of wrong doing, she was also a practioner of heresy. This was the ultimate form of “the Other” since it was opposite of everything intellectual men held to be good: “not only could fears about one’s ability to master sexual restraint be projected onto the witch, her vilification also served to appease the anxiety intellectuals felt about their allegiance to God” (7). When men considered unwatched women to be capable of becoming witches, they found themselves as the benevolent check to the sinful “Other.”

            As the late middle ages dawned, men began to live among women in family units and “they perceived women’s power as standing in the way of their constructing viable social roles for themselves” (8). By “Othering” women to themselves through the construct of marriage and by manifesting this concept into the idea of the female witch, men were able to see women as a lesser, emotional weaker, more easily tempted version of themselves. By developing their fears about sexual restraint and religious faith into one single concept, men created one obsession that culminated into a false idea about all things feminine. The female witch may not have actually existed, but she was a dangerously real idea in the minds of unconfident, anxious men.

 

Lauren Orsini, University of Mary Washington

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Research Portfolio Essay #2 Sunday, Oct 1 2006

E. Ann Matter, Theories of the Passions and the Ecstasies of Late Medieval Religious Women. Essays in Medieval Studies – Volume 18, 2001, pp. 1-17 – Article.

 

            It is well known to scholars that pious medieval men and women would often experience passions, or visions and fits, as physical and psychological manifestations of their faith. In “Theories of the Passions and the Ecstasies of Late Medieval Religious Women,” E. Ann Matter analyzes this theory as it survived and changed from the early Middle Ages up to the “long Middle Ages,” or the 16^th and 17^th centuries (3). I will examine two assertions that Matter makes in her essay: first, that there was a distinct difference in the passions of men and of women, and second, that female passions were more closely linked with demonic possession and witchcraft.

            In order to understand the medieval perspective of passions, we must observe both the spiritual and medical background to it. Religiously, Christians classified most of the passions as we consider them today (anger, jealously lust, etc.) as part of the Seven Deadly Sins. Today, we see passions as part of internal human nature. And according to Matter, in the Middle Ages people “understood human nature in a different way- if not exactly a result of, then at least intrinsically allied to, external forces” (1). Spiritually, human nature was something external to the human body. This dovetailed marvelously with the medical view of the passions at the time. Much of medieval medical thought was derived from Isidore of Seville’s Entymologie, a translation of classical Greek ideas of medicine.
Seville’s book outlined a four part diagram that grouped one of the four cardinal directions, seasons, elements, and humors of the body together. In other words, external forces such as the seasons and elements determined each person’s inner temperament. The consequence of this widespread belief was an explicit dichotomy separating male and female temperaments, and therefore passions. For example, men fit at the top of the diagram, paired with “South, Summer, Fire, Choler (dry and hot),” and women fit in “North, Winter, Water, Phlegm (moist and cold)” (2). This led to beliefs like that of William of Conches: “The warmest woman is colder than the coldest man” (3). This, of course, refers to internal temperament, not physical temperature. Because of the “humoral theory of human nature, with the strong distinction between male and female essences… [There were] “male” and “female” forms of spirituality and mysticism” (4). Therefore, the passions of men and women were experienced differently based on their opposite internal states.

            Next, Matter focuses exclusively on female passions. Because of the widespread belief in the humoral theory of human nature, even female mystics like Hildegard of Bingen justified their own passions and spirituality in this way. Hildegard took the theory one step further and described the passions of women in all four of the corners of the theory. According to her, “the sanguine woman is soft, tender, fertile… the phlegmatic woman is hardworking, practical, lusty; choleric women are soft, discreet, loyal; and the melancholic woman is the only kind of woman better off without a man… in short, intellectual” (3). Hildegard was the first person to describe the bodily humors in terms of psychosexual human behavior. This “constitute[s] a model capable of accounting for the overlapping of physical and mental states” that were considered to occur during spiritual passions (3). It should be noted that Hildegard also incorporated herself into the theory as a melancholic woman. A later scholar, William of Auvergne, wrote that “women constitutionally given to melancholia… would have a physical disposition to mystical rapture- and that even the reverse is possible- that is, that a woman given to vehement prayer and devotions can actually develop melancholia” (5). This profile fit a number of medieval mystic and visionary women such as Maria of Oignies, Christine the Marvelous, and Brigit of Sweden. However, after a burst of female spiritual activity in the 14^th century, “one can see a ‘progressive caution’ in the hagiographical writing about holy women” (5). This reflects “a dangerous collapse in the representation of the familiar polarities of female spirituality” as outlined in the humoral theory of passion (5). This led to the rising belief that spiritual women were actually overcome by demonic possession, as was the case with the trials of Joan of Arc. The climax came in the publication of the 15^th century handbook “Malleus maleficarum,” which associates Satanic powers with women, who were thought to be weaker and more prone to submission to the devil. The text turns the psychosexual structure of the humoral system against women, stating that “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable” (6). Here, according to Matter, “is the terminus of a previously auspicious… current in the assessment of female spirituality” (6). From then on, women’s passions were seen as Satanic possessions of the devil, and resulted in the later prominently female witchcraft trials of the upcoming centuries.

            E. Ann Matter’s two assertions that first, male and female passions were understood to be different and second, that female passions were linked with demonic possession and witchcraft, both climaxed and manifested themselves in the resulting, predominantly female, witchcraft trials. The mystery in the visions and fits of spiritual women became too unusual for the medieval clergy to handle. Female saints became labeled as female demons, and the collapse of female sanctity was complete. Because the passions were usually a combination of physical and psychological manifestations in people, they were ultimately tied to the unknown. In conclusion, the fact that medieval thinkers feared the unknown was the downfall of religious women.

 

Lauren Orsini, University of Mary Washington

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