1. See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (New York, 1963), part 1, qu. 92; part 3, qu. 32. Innocent III is particularly virulent on the topic of woman. "Menstrual blood," he writes, "ceases in the female after conception so that the child in her womb will be nourished by it. And this blood is reckoned so detestable and impure that on contact with it fruits will fail to sprout, orchards go dry, herbs wither, the very trees let go their fruit; if a dog eat of it, he goes mad. When a child is conceived, he contacts the defect of the seed, so that lepers and monsters are born of this corruption"; On the Misery of the Human Condition , trans. Mary Dietz (New York, 1969), 9. In the misogynistic thinking of the Middle Ages, there can, in fact, be no distinction between the theological and the gynecological. Woman is a limit case of man who remains, as in Platonic thought, bound by the material, by flesh and lust. "Man was formed of dust, slime, and ashes, what is even more vile, of the filthiest seed. He was conceived from the itch of the flesh, in the heat of passion and the stench of lust, and worse yet, with the stain of sin"; ibid., 6.

2. It can be no accident, as Catherine Brown pointed out in my seminar, that the discourse of misogyny, which represents an attempt to speak of the other through the voice of the other, is so closely allied with the literary form or register whose very name implies "speaking otherwise."

3. Le Roman de la rose , ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris, 1974), lines 8561-70.

4. John of Salisbury, Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers , ed. J. B. Pike (Minneapolis, 1938), 357.

5. Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," The Canterbury Tales , ed. F. N. Robinson (Cambridge, 1957), lines 248-52.

6. "Ce n'est pas merveille trop dure/Se le mari nul temps ne dure/Contre sa femme mal pitieuse,/Envers la tençon rioteuse/Que souvent li scet aprester" (It is no great wonder if the husband doesn't last very long against his pitiless wife, if he doesn't hold out against the riotous arguments that she knows how to prepare for him); Jehan Le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus , ed. A.-G. Van Hamel (Paris, 1872), lines 829-33.

7. "Car um puet oyr sovent/Um fol parler sagement./Sage est qe parle sagement"; Recueil général et complet des fabliaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles , ed. A. de Montaiglon, 6 vols. (Paris, 1872), 2:256.

8. Cited by Victor Le Clerc, "Les Fabliaux," in Histoire littéraire de la France , vol. 23 (Paris, 1895), 98.

9.   break

Et cil qui font les mariages,
Si ont trop merveilloz usages,
Et coustume si despareille
Qu'il me vient a trop grant merveille.
Ne sai d'u vient ceste folie,

Fors de rage et de desverie.
Je voi que qui cheval achete
Ja n'iert si fox que rienz y mete,
Comment que l'en l'ait bien couvert,
Sil ne le voit a descouvert;
Par tout le regarde et descueuvre.
Mes la fame si bien se cueuvre,
Ne ja n'i sera descouverte,
Ne por gaaingne ne por perte,
Ne por solaz ne por mesese,
Por ce, sans plus, que ne desplese
Devant qu'elle soit espousee.

[And those who marry have a most unusual and unnerving way of operating that surprises me greatly. I don't know whence this foolishness can come except from madness and rage. For a man who buys a horse would not be so crazy as to put any money down if he had not seen it uncovered first, no matter how well covered it was in the first place. He looks it all over and uncovers it. But woman covers herself so well that she can never be uncovered--neither for gain nor for loss, neither for solace nor for grief; for this, and no more, that she might not displease before being wed; Roman de la rose , lines 8661-77.]

10. Innocent III, Misery , 20. Chaucer repeats the topos: "Thow seyst that droppyng houses, and eek smoke,/And chidying wyves maken men to flee/Out of hir owene hous"; "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," lines 278-80.

11. Le Débat sur le "Roman de la rose": Edition critique, introduction, traductions, notes , ed. Eric Hicks (Paris, 1977), 15.

12. Ibid., 35.

11. Le Débat sur le "Roman de la rose": Edition critique, introduction, traductions, notes , ed. Eric Hicks (Paris, 1977), 15.

12. Ibid., 35.

13. Christine, whom no one would consider a misogynist, addresses the Provost of Lille in self-deprecating terms that, despite the possibility of sarcasm, would be taken as evidence of misogyny if from the pen of a man: "Bien est vray que mon petit entendement y considère grant joliveté . . ." (While it is true that my little understanding finds very amusing . . .). Then again, even so important a female figure as Hildegard of Bingen appropriates certain theological presuppositions that serve as the ontological basis of much of the misogynistic thinking of the Middle Ages: "When God saw man he saw that he was very good, for man was made in his image. But in creating woman, God was aided by man. . . . Therefore woman is the creation of man. . . . Man symbolizes the divinity of the Son of God and woman his humanity. Therefore man presides in the courts of this world since he rules over all creatures, while woman is under his rule and submits to him"; cited in Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (London, 1983), 57.

14. This is a historical aporia implicit to psychoanalytic explanations of misogyny in terms of male anger at rejecting mothers as well as to anthropological explanations involving the collective anxiety of males in dealing with the fear of feminine power. The difficulty of the former is that in biologizing misogyny it is at the same time naturalized, since there can be no escape from the basic cultural process expressed in the oedipal imposition of the father between mother and son and the son's concomitant anger. The problem with the latter is of a more logical order. To wit, if misogyny is the symptom of men's fear of the real power of women, then the more misogynistic a culture is, the stronger females can be assumed to be; in this way antifeminism represents not the derogation of women but an expression of their material enfranchise- soft

ment. See Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle, 1966); H. R. Hayes, The Dangerous Sex: The Myth of Feminine Evil (New York, 1964).

15. Leaving aside the unknowable affective element of woman-hating, misogyny is a way of speaking about women as distinct from doing something to women, though speaking may be a form of doing and even of social practice, or at least its ideological component. Misogyny is a speech act such that the subject of the sentence is woman and the predicate is a more general term.

16. See my Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago, 1983), 37-44.

17. Philo, On the Creation (London, 1929), 227.

18. Augustine, De libero arbitrio , ed. J. H. S. Burleigh (London, 1953), 169.

19. Augustine, De ordine , ed. J. Jolivet (Paris, 1948), 444.

20. Tertullian, "On Exhortation to Chastity," in The Ante-Nicene Fathers , ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, vol. 4 (Buffalo, 1885), 54.

21. Augustine, De Libero arbitrio , 163. This is also an important concept in the Aristotelian tradition according to which in procreation man supplies the form and woman the matter; see in particular De la génération des animaux , ed. P. Louis (Paris, 1961), 3-5, 39-43.

22. Philo, On the Creation , 237

23. Tertullian, "On the Apparel of Women," in the Ante-Nicene Fathers , 4:14.

24. Ibid., 16.

25. Ibid.

23. Tertullian, "On the Apparel of Women," in the Ante-Nicene Fathers , 4:14.

24. Ibid., 16.

25. Ibid.

23. Tertullian, "On the Apparel of Women," in the Ante-Nicene Fathers , 4:14.

24. Ibid., 16.

25. Ibid.

26. Tertullian, "On the Pallium," in The Ante-Nicene Fathers , 4:9, 12.

27. Tertullian, "On the Apparel," 17.

28. Ibid., 20.

27. Tertullian, "On the Apparel," 17.

28. Ibid., 20.

29. One of the salient ironies of misogynistic discourse is that it often becomes rhetorical or ornamental in direct proportion to the extent to which it denounces woman as ornament.

30. Tertullian, "On the Apparel," 17.

31. "So true is it that it is not intrinsic worth, but rarity, which constitutes the goodness (of those things): the excessive labour, moreover, of working them with arts introduced by means of the sinful angels, who were revealers withal of the material substances themselves, joined with their rarity, excited their costliness, and hence a lust on the part of women to possess (that costliness"; ibid., 23.

32. "For they who rub their skin with medicaments, stain their cheeks with rouge, make their eyes prominent with antimony, sin against HIM. To them, I suppose, the plastic skill of God is displeasing! In their own persons, I suppose, they convict, they censure, the Artificer of all things. For censure they do when they amend, when they add to, (His work); taking these, their additions, of course, from the adversary artificer. That adversary artificer is the devil"; ibid., 20-21.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

32. "For they who rub their skin with medicaments, stain their cheeks with rouge, make their eyes prominent with antimony, sin against HIM. To them, I suppose, the plastic skill of God is displeasing! In their own persons, I suppose, they convict, they censure, the Artificer of all things. For censure they do when they amend, when they add to, (His work); taking these, their additions, of course, from the adversary artificer. That adversary artificer is the devil"; ibid., 20-21.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

32. "For they who rub their skin with medicaments, stain their cheeks with rouge, make their eyes prominent with antimony, sin against HIM. To them, I suppose, the plastic skill of God is displeasing! In their own persons, I suppose, they convict, they censure, the Artificer of all things. For censure they do when they amend, when they add to, (His work); taking these, their additions, of course, from the adversary artificer. That adversary artificer is the devil"; ibid., 20-21.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Tertullian, "On the Pallium," 8.

36. Augustine, De trinitate (Washington, D.C., 1963), 105.

37. "From that time forth she [Reason] found it hard to believe that the splendor and purity [of numbers] was sullied by the corporeal matter of words . And just as what the spirit sees is always present and is held to be immortal and numbers appear such, which sound, being a sensible thing is lost into the past"; Augustine, De ordine , 434.

38. Philo, On the Creation , 227.

39. Ibid., 237.

40. Ibid., 249.

38. Philo, On the Creation , 227.

39. Ibid., 237.

40. Ibid., 249.

38. Philo, On the Creation , 227.

39. Ibid., 237.

40. Ibid., 249.

41. Saint Chrysostom, Homily 15, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , ed. P. Schaff, vol. 9 (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1956), 441.

42. Saint Chrysostom, Homily 17, ibid., 10:116. break

43. Virginity as such is obviously a concept crucial to the study of misogyny, one too vast for even superficial treatment within the limits of the present essay. Suffice it to say that virginity, like misogyny itself, is impossible to locate since the ever narrowing definitions given by the church fathers relegate it to the realm of a pure idea. To be more precise, virginity contains a historical reference to Adam and Eve and to a theological state of man, as in Augustine's notion of technical virgins who reproduce in paradise without desire or pleasure; it contains a doctrinal reference to Mary, the Virgin who redeems Eve; and it is associated on an individual level with a lack of personal sexuality. It is here that the concept of virginity becomes more interesting, since the more one seeks to fill the category, the more elusive it becomes; and the Patristics, in their desire for the absolute (which, as absolute, is synonymous with virginity), are not satisfied until the concept of virginity, like woman, is emptied of sense. It is not enough, for example, merely to be chaste; in order to be a virgin it is necessary never to have experienced desire. Nor is the absence of desire sufficient; the stimulation of desire in another impugns one's own chastity; see John Chrysostom, Homily 15, 443. And since desire is engendered by, and can consist in, a look, a virgin, seen, is no longer a virgin. "Every public exposure of an honorable virgin is (to her) a suffering of rape," Tertullian maintains ("On the Veiling of Virgins," 29). Jerome even wonders if it is licit for virgins to bathe since, in seeing their own bodies, there is always the potential for desire: "For myself, however, I wholly disapprove of baths for a virgin of full age. Such an one should blush and feel overcome at the idea of seeing herself undressed"; Letter 107, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , 6:194. Thus there are only two possibilities: 1) virginity, as an absolute, a totality or Idea, does not exist; 2) the abstraction that virginity implies is destroyed by its articulation. This is another way of saying that the loss of virginity implied in its exposure is analogous to the loss of universality of an Idea implicit to its expression; or, there is no way of talking about virginity that does not imply a loss since the universal is always veiled by the defiling garment of words. In that case, virginity itself becomes a veil. (Jerome speaks of the "veil of chastity"; ibid., 192). Language becomes the ornament, the veil, that defiles the virgin by exposure, since the senses, equated with the body, have no direct access to an Idea, allied with the soul. "No one," John Chrysostom writes, "has anywhere seen a soul by itself stripped of the body"; "Letters to the Fallen Theodore," in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , 9:104.

44. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love , trans. John J. Parry (New York, 1969), 28.

45.

Las! or ay le cuer trop marri.
Car orendroit est tant ripeuse,
Courbée, boçue et tripeuse,
Desfigurée et contrefaite
Que ce semble estre une contraite.
Rachel est Lya devenue,
Toute grise, toute chenue,
Rude, mal entendant et sourde,
En tous ses fais est vile et lourde;
Le pis a dur et les mamelles,
Qui tant souloient estre belles,
Sont froncies, noires, souillies
Com bourses de bergier mouillies.

[Alas! now my heart is very sad, for she is now so mangy, stooped, humpbacked and pot-bellied, disfigured and undone that she seems to be a deformed person. Rachel has become Leah, all grey, white-haired, rough, continue

senile, and deaf. In all she does she is heavy and vile; her chest is hard and her breasts that used to be beautiful are wrinkled, black, spotted like the wet bags of a shepherd; Lamentations , book 1, lines 672-84.]

46. Capellanus, Courtly Love , 201, 204, 207.

47. Walter Map, De nugis curialium , ed. Montague R. James (London, 1923), 160-61.

48. Capellanus, Courtly Love , 204.

49. How, one might ask, can the reader to whom the work is addressed be other than a woman as defined in Andreas's own terms as the one subject to persuasion: "Woman is commonly found to be fickle, too, because no woman ever makes up her mind so firmly on any subject that she will not quickly change it on a little persuading from anyone"; ibid., 204.

50. Ibid., 210. break

49. How, one might ask, can the reader to whom the work is addressed be other than a woman as defined in Andreas's own terms as the one subject to persuasion: "Woman is commonly found to be fickle, too, because no woman ever makes up her mind so firmly on any subject that she will not quickly change it on a little persuading from anyone"; ibid., 204.

50. Ibid., 210. break