These feminine stereotypes appear everywhere in patristic literature. They appear in Jerome’s writings when he stresses woman’s “fickle-mindedness” and the “softness of her soul” and in the works of John Chrysostom, who fears that a salacious feminine nature could all too easily replicate itself in even the most religious of men should they incautiously let down their guard. Warning against the dangers of “spiritual marriage” between male and female ascetics, Chrysostom warns that regular contact with women makes men “softer, more hot-headed, shameful, mindless, irascible, insolent, importunate, ignoble, crude, servile, niggardly, reckless, nonsensical, and, to sum it up, women take all their corrupting feminine customs and stamp them into the souls of men.”33 These ideas underwrite Rupert of Deutz’s commentary on Genesis and the twelfth-century writings of both Hugh and Andrew of St. Victor, who see all women as more fleshy and less rational than men and certainly more prone to sin.34 Along a multitude of such currents and eddies, these ideas flowed practically unchanged into the books of men like Jehan le Fèvre and Jean de Meun, books that leave Christine awash in an ocean of self-loathing.
THE BIOLOGY OF FEMININE DECEIT
Natural philosophy, biology, and medicine, no less than religious tradition, abetted this reduction of women to evil woman, rooting the differences between men and women in their respective bodily makeup, their different temperatures and, eventually, in the medical theory of complexion. Aristotle’s writings stand at the origin of this tradition with their confident pronouncements concerning the male’s superiority over the female, a superiority rooted in man’s greater heat. According to Aristotle, heat purifies and invigorates the man’s semen, transforming it into an active, creative, and ensouling principle. Women produce semen as well, evident in the moisture and liquid they produce when aroused, but their bodies being cooler, their semen is less refined, passive rather than active, the mere material on which the male principle operates. Greater heat at conception results in a male, whose perfect form, greater strength, and powers of intellect all manifest his superiority. Women, by contrast, are cooler, their bodies and intellectual abilities less developed. Women, as Aristotle famously puts it, are nothing but “mutilated males” and “imperfect men.”35
The second-century physician Galen would refine these ideas so common to the Hellenistic culture of the Roman Empire. “Just as mankind is the most perfect of all animals,” he writes in On the Usefulness of the Bodies Parts, “so within mankind the man is more perfect than the woman, and the reason for this perfection is his excess of heat, for heat is Nature’s primary instrument.”36 With these assumptions in place, Galen developed a general theory of complexion, and from Galen’s writings it passed on through various routes to medieval and early modern thinkers. Galen reasoned that since all living creatures consist in different combinations of the four basic elements (earth, air, fire, and water), they must also possess different and defining combinations of the four basic elemental qualities (hot, cold, dry, wet). While health required that a being have the right complexion, that is, the proper balance of these qualities, everyone agreed that different animals possessed different complexions. Fish were moister than lions, birds warmer than worms. In addition, environmental conditions, dietary regimes, and astrological forces could shape a creature’s complexion.37 As a result, even individuals of the same species possessed, within the limits defined by the species’ formal principles, different ratios of the four elemental qualities. Among human beings, for example, these external factors not only played a part in determining a race’s characteristic appearance, its typical skin and hair color, its average size and strength, but even its general disposition and psychological makeup, whether members of the race were, say, more or less courageous, intelligent. or humorous than members of other races. John Buridan, the fourteenth-century University of Paris arts master, would argue that there are two kinds of complexion, one derived from a creature’s birth, another through its experiences. Summarizing these ideas, while emphasizing the import of celestial influences, the late thirteenth-century Dominican theologian John of Paris adds, “Complexions vary with varied causes. This proposition is self-evident, since under this and that constellation we have this and that complexion and mores and figure and color and disposition.” This is why, he concludes, “all Saxons are of the same sort, and Frisians and Poles and Thuringians, because they are nourished in the same place and by the same constellation.”38
Significantly, not only did the standard complexion of human beings differ from those of other animals, and even between different groups of people, the complexion of men and women differed. Writing in his thirteenth-century encyclopedia On the Property of Things, Bartholomew the Englishmen explains, “The male passes the female in perfect complexion, for in working, in wit, in discretion, in might and in lordship. In perfect compleation, for in comparison the male is hotter and dryer, and the female the contrary.”39 While some men were more warmly complected than others, some more coolly, and even some women warmer than men, in general men were warmer than women, and this difference mattered, supporting assumptions about fundamental differences between the sexes. As a result of greater warmth, male virtues are “formal and shaping and working,” whereas female virtues are “material, suffering and passive.” Not only does the male in every species tend to be stronger and larger than the female, it is also cleverer and wiser, more capable of avoiding dangers and peril. “Therefore,” Bartholomew adds, claiming Augustine as his source, “a man passes a woman in reason and sharpness of wit and understanding.” From medical theory to Augustine, Bartholomew then slides easily to scripture, when he adds that “by the authority of the apostle he sets a man before a woman in dignity and worthiness of the Image and likeness of God.” And so it is that Bartholomew brings his discussion of the differences between male and female complexion back to the dangers of female speech, quoting from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: “I suffer not a woman to teach in Church or congregation: For it is written: Under man’s power thou shalt be, and he shall be thy Lord.”40
Complexion theory provided biological support to long-standing misogynist attitudes, particularly the notion that every woman is a liar. Sometimes these attitudes would be presented in a matter-of-fact tone, a neutrality of language underlining the objectivity of analysis. In his Questions on the Eight Books of Aristotle’s Politics, John Buridan cites female complexion as the central reason why women cannot be judges, why their counsel cannot be trusted. Judges and counselors, he explains, must be wise, prudent, and in control of their passions. But these are traits rarely found in women, because of a general complexion that puts female reason at the mercy of their out-of-control passions, that renders their judgments fluid and inconstant and certainly not subject to right reason.41 Significantly, Buridan later adds that women cannot even properly be said to possess prudence, the virtue that allows us to identify what is truly good and to select the most appropriate means to achieve it. Women only seem to possess prudence and right reason. In reality, they possess mere cunning (astutia), which allows them to seek their own private good or, by mere luck, the common good.42 Several decades later, Nicole Oresme, an eminent theologian and member of Charles V’s court, would echo these ideas in his translation and gloss of Aristotle’s Politics, arguing that prudence is so rarely found in women because their deliberation lacks maturity, and “the softness of their nature” means their advice can never be firm.43
Cunning was hardly a neutral term. Aquinas had defined it as the vice opposed to prudence and rejected its use outright. In the Summa of Theology, for example, organizing his discussion of cunning or craftiness around the authority of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, he writes, “The Apostle says, ‘We renounce the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor adulterating the word of God.’ Therefore, cunningness is a sin.”44 The contrast between prudence and cunning would surface in other, equally telling, places. Both Aquinas and Bonaventure employed the distinction
to elaborate the absolute differences between Christ’s incarnation and the Devil’s stratagems. It is Christ’s prudence that counters the Devil’s cunning, thus rendering the incarnation, life, and crucifixion of Christ the perfect antidote and response to the Devil’s evil machinations and lying schemes.45
But it was Aquinas’s famous mentor, Albert the Great, who brought out the real difference between male prudence and female cunning. Late in his treatise Questions on Animals, Albert asks whether men are more easily trained in morals than women. Perhaps not, he begins, offering in dubious defense of female educability the fact that women are more like children and children are more easily trained than their elders. Authority might support this position as well, for hadn’t Aristotle contended that women possessed more prudence than men? But Albert will have none of this. He counters both the alleged values of female childishness and Aristotle’s authority with what he assumes everyone takes to be unimpeachable common, proverbial, and popular wisdom. “Women are great liars,” he writes, “weak, diffident, shameless, deceptively eloquent, and in a nutshell, woman is nothing other than a devil disguised in human form.” Popular opinion finds its intellectual support in complexion theory. Women, Albert explains, are more humid than men, and while this makes it easier for women to receive information, it also makes it difficult for women to retain that information.46
The consequences of a moist female complexion, Albert warns his readers, are awe-inspiring in their horror. Excessive humidity renders women fickle and inconstant, prone to passion, and always embroiled in sin. Invoking language that could be mistaken for something out of the Lamentations of Matheolus, Albert notes their temperament leaves women perpetually unsatisfied and forever in search of new pleasures. When a woman is beneath one man, he writes, she cannot help but wish she were already under another. Countering Aristotle’s claim that women possess more prudence than men, Albert contends, as Buridan would later, that properly speaking women only seem to possess prudence, when in fact they possess mere cunning. Invoking the age-old association of women with the body and the senses, men with the soul and reason, Albert observes that “the senses move woman towards every evil, just as the intellect moves man towards every good.” Albert roots female dependence on the senses in a deficiency “in the intellectual operations, which consist in the apprehension of the good, the deliberation of truth and the avoidance of evil.” As a result of these deficiencies, woman is “directed by sensory appetites which incline her towards evil.” In short, Albert writes, woman is a defective man, and whatever she cannot acquire through honest means, she endeavors to acquire “through lies and diabolical deceptions,” and this is why every woman ought to be shunned “like a venomous snake and horned devil.”47
Albert’s comments return us to the very sorts of writings Christine had in mind as she pondered woman’s wretched ways. So far as Christine knew, Albert most likely had written one of them. In the opening pages of The City of Ladies, Christine mentions Women’s Secrets, a book popularly ascribed to Albert, although most likely written and then glossed by a student and followers. Women’s Secrets, a key source for the most influential of all witch-hunting treatises, The Hammer of Witches, describes itself as a handbook designed to “bring to light certain hidden, secret things about the nature of women” so that confessors will know how to interrogate them and what sorts of penances to assign for their sins. Unsurprisingly, the treatise depicts women as overflowing with sin and deceit in large part because they “are so full of venom in the time of their menstruation that they poison animals by their glance; they infect children in the cradle; they spot the cleanest mirror and whenever men have sexual intercourse with them they are made leprous and sometimes cancerous.”48 Feminine deceitfulness arises from a woman’s very body, from her very essence. Kramer and Sprenger, those close readers of Women’s Secrets, glossing an entire religious and scientific tradition, would put it this way in The Hammer of Witches: “For she is lying in speech just as she is lying in nature.”49
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN, MISOGYNY, AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Alone in her room, books proudly proclaiming the biological inferiority and inescapable sinfulness of women surrounding her, Christine carefully dramatizes the plight of women who have heard nothing but misogynist slander their entire lives. “Alas God,” she writes, “why did You not let me be born in the world as a man, so that all my inclinations would be to serve you better, and so that I would not stray in anything and would be as perfect as a man is said to be?”50 But Christine does not mean this, and she knows that it is men who lie to women, who lie about women. Christine takes it upon herself to reveal and prove those lies for what they are.
Unlike John of Salisbury in the Policraticus, unlike her own book, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, in The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine does not ask if it is acceptable to lie. Instead, she wants women to see themselves for what they really are and the world for what it really is. In this sense, The Book of the City of Ladies is, at one and the same time, critique, diagnosis, and therapy. The actions women can take to confront an aggressively deceptive world depend entirely on the possibilities they find within themselves, on the self-knowledge that generates those possibilities. The practical importance of this kind of knowledge appears in The Treasure of the City of Ladies, the handbook for women that Christine presents as the companion piece to The Book of the City of Ladies. In the former, Christine advises that the noblewoman must know who she is and whether she is best suited to the contemplative or the active life. While the contemplative life is dearer to God, the “active life has more use in this world.” If a woman opts for the active life, she must be completely clear about her standing at court. She must be able to distinguish what is truly good from what only appears to be good, and having made these discriminations, she must know how to respond.51 She must, in other words, possess and exercise the faculty of prudence, the faculty that, as Thomas Aquinas notes, allows us to match proper means to proper ends. But this is precisely the faculty that the misogynists, drawing on both biblical exegesis and natural philosophy, so strenuously asserted that women lacked. Without it, women can only be cunningly disguised deceivers, incapable of either virtue or honesty, little different from the Devil in the Garden of Eden.
In The Book of the City of Ladies Christine, along with three allegorical figures—Ladies Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, who appear suddenly and without warning in her locked study—sets herself the task of undercutting and refuting misogynist claims that women lack prudence.52 She adopts a variety of strategies to accomplish this. Among other things, she questions the misogynists’ motives. Why do men say such hateful things about women? Some men slander women in a misguided effort to help other men, demeaning the object of their lust to help free them from the sinful chains of desire. Other men are simply cruel and vicious, taking pleasure in slander and vice. Some, having led dissolute lives in their youth, wantonly deceiving and seducing women, are now old and decrepit, impotent, angry, and unrepentant as they vainly recall past pleasures forevermore out of reach.53 This was certainly the case with Matheolus, Lady Reason tells Christine, “who himself confesses that he was an impotent old man filled with desire.” Whatever the cause, she assures Christine that such blanket condemnations can arise only from a wickedness of heart that blinds a man to “the good deeds which women have done for him” and, without doubt, such assertions are contrary to nature, “for there is no naked beast anywhere, nor bird, which does not naturally love its female counterpart.”54
Highlighting the motivations behind male misogyny, Christine highlights something else as well. The misogynist always moves from the particular to the universal, generalizing from one bad experience with some specific woman (whether imagined or real) to universalizing claims about all women. Just as Tertullian and Jerome had indulged in this tactic so many centuries before, so do Christine’s contemporaries. In The Letter to the God of Love, a poem Christine composed in 1399, several years before beginning w
ork on The Book of the City of Ladies, she had already pointed out this dubious practice, bemoaning its presence in the sorts of poems and verses that fill the workbooks assigned to young boys in school. The clerics who write these books, Christine complains, fill them with doggerel like “Adam, David, Samson, and many other men were deceived by women both early and late: what living man will escape? Others say that women are very deceitful, crafty, false, and worthless. Still others say that they are highly untruthful, changeable, inconstant, and flighty.”55 More galling is the double standard that allows men to make these generalizations about women, never about themselves. Late in The Book of the City of Ladies, Lady Rectitude points out that men seem to expect and demand more from women than they do from themselves and other men. When men waver, when men sin, they brush it off as nothing of consequence, as being simply the result of human nature. By contrast, when “a few women lapse (and when these men themselves, through their own strivings and their own power are the cause), then, as far as these men are concerned, it is completely a matter of [feminine] fragility and inconstancy.”56 As Tertullian had it, every woman is an Eve.
The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment Page 25
