Bernard of Morlaix - MORE COMPLAINT

Bernard of Cluny by John Balnaves.
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CHAPTER 4 MORE COMPLAINT

Homosexuality

In De contemptu mundi Bernard of Morlaix castigates homosexual sins in the course of a general diatribe about wickedness which precedes his lengthy satirical treatment of the sins of the clergy in Book 3, not, as one might have expected, in the course of his fulminations against sexual sins in Book 2. In De octo vitiis, he returns to the subject, but he does not deal with it under the heading of lust. It forms part of a general disquisition about sin which follows his systematic treatment of the eight deadly sins.

Bernard's treatment of homosexuality presents a number of problems. In the first place, there is the problem of what exactly he means. He does not, of course, talk about "homosexuality", but about "sodomy". The word "homosexual" is a late nineteenth century coinage. It means "having a sexual propensity for persons of one's own sex." There is no Latin word equivalent to "homosexual." It is a Greek and Latin hybrid (like "television"), to which no concept of classical or medieval times corresponds. Discussion of various aspects of homosexuality in the middle ages is therefore difficult. The problem is not peculiar to the high middle ages. It persists into much later times, as may be exemplified by controversy about the dissolution of the monasteries in Henrician England.

G.G. Coulton, dealing with the Comperta collected from the Cromwellian visitations of 1535-1536, mentions specifically only one case of sodomy, but manages to convey the impression that the Comperta provide evidence that the practice was common in monasteries.¹ Dom David Knowles, finding it necessary to follow Coulton into "the dismal swamp of the Comperta,"² notes that

Casual readers of the Comperta receive their principal shock, which cannot but affect their attitude to all that comes after, from the very numerous entries of sodomy in the northern houses, which come first in order. These amount, for the north only, to the massive total of 181. Regarded with a little care, however, these entries become somewhat less overwhelming. In the first place, the East Anglian houses, where homosexual practices are explicitly distinguished from solitary vice, provide only four instances of the former offence. If we then return to the northern lists we note that on the very first occurrence of "sodomy" it is explained as solitary sin, and it is so defined in eighty- four instances out of the total given above ... The inference seems therefore permissible that in many, perhaps all, of the cases where the word is left undefined it denotes solitary vice only. If so, this leaves us with a total of only twelve clear instances of homosexuality in the whole of the Comperta, four of them in East Anglia and eight in the North. This total is indeed so low as almost to be surprising, but since the East Anglia figure is a firm one, there would seem to be no a priori reason for distrusting the northern.³

The more general meaning of sodomy, in which it includes solitary vice and is scarcely distinguishable from "sins against nature", is found throughout the middle ages, and it causes confusion. "Not only was there ambiguity [in the middle ages] about what constituted the sin against nature, there was also confusion about what constituted sodomy."⁴ The term "sodomy" derives from the story of Lot and the people of Sodom in Genesis 19,4-11. It is not entirely clear from the text of Genesis whether the sin of Sodom was of a sexual nature or not,⁵ but it is quite clear from Leviticus 18,22 and 20,13 that ancient Israel strongly disapproved of sodomy.

The problem is one of inconsistent use of the term, not a failure of precise definition. Several writers discussed the subject in almost clinical detail. For example, Saint Peter Damien, in the eleventh century, in his Liber Gomorrhianus, distinguishes degrees of sins against nature.⁶ And Saint Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, in his Summa theologiae, has the following:

Uno quidem modo, si absque omni concubitu causa delectationis venereae pollutio procuretur, quod pertinet ad peccatum immunditiae, quam quidem "mollitiem" vocant. Alio modo, si fiat per concubitum ad rem non eiusdem speciei, quod vocatur bestialitas. Tertio, si fiat per concubitum ad non debitum sexum, puta masculi ad masculum, vel foeminae ad foeminam, ut Apostolus dicit ad Rom., quod dicitur sodomiticum vitium. Quarto, si non servetur naturalis modus concumbendi aut quantum ad instrumentum non debitum, aut quantum ad alios monstruosos et bestiales concumbendi modos.⁷

The meaning of "sodomy" expressed in Saint Thomas' third category was probably the most common meaning throughout the middle ages. It seems to be the sense in which Bernard of Morlaix uses the word. It is perhaps the most common usage today also. It needs to be distinguished from anal intercourse, which falls into Saint Thomas' fourth category, though the categories are not mutually exclusive.

Catholics who went to school before the second Vatican Council will remember that there are four sins crying to heaven for vengeance. They are wilful murder, the sin of Sodom, oppression of the poor and defrauding labourers of their wages.⁸ The collocation suggests that the reason why these sins cry to heaven for vengeance is that they all entail wilful and immoral exploitation of others. That sodomy was regarded as specially wicked for that reason is indicated also by the old Codex juris canonici, in which sodomy, along with other sins against the sixth commandment, if committed "cum minoribus infra sexdecim annorum," attracts specially heavy penalties.⁹ There was no suggestion that sodomy was a sin belonging to a special class of people. It was simply a very serious sin which anybody might commit. A quite different approach is taken in the new Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominantly sexual attraction towards persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained ... The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. They do not choose their homosexual condition; for most of them it is a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided ...¹⁰

In the ancient world, cultural attitudes toward sodomy (in Saint Thomas' sense) were diverse and complex.¹¹ Approval and disapproval varied from time to time and from place to place, but at no time or place does there seem to have been a concept of homosexuals as a special class of people. Sodomy was something that men and women did, but those who did it were not seen as a class apart from the rest of humanity. The concept of homosexuals as a special class of people seems to be peculiar to the twentieth century. It was certainly quite unknown in classical times, both in Greece and in Rome. Homosexual activity was sometimes disapproved of, though for the most part tolerated,¹² but persons engaging in it were not regarded as forming a class or a kind of people in the way that people engaging in prostitution, whether male or female, were. Throughout the middle ages, homosexual activity was consistently disapproved of, and persons engaging in it were still not regarded, by themselves or anybody else, as forming a special class of people.

In De contemptu mundi, Bernard of Morlaix complains that sodomy is practised openly, and nobody attempts to hide it.

Against all reason and nature, he becomes she. Juno and Petronilla are abandoned¹³ ... The man forgets his manliness and becomes like a hyena. Look at all these men buried in unnatural filth! What kind of sin is this? What do I call it? ... The shame of it! This foul plague sweeps through castle and town, even through the church ... The disease attacks both the lowly and the powerful. The rule of natural sexual appetite disappears. Normal intercourse declines because of this plague. Cattle and dogs and horses know nothing of it, nor does a man who is whole. Half-male is what I call them, half-men is what I declare them, those who defile one another, giving to one another what they owe to the weaker sex. Myrrha, Jocasta, Phaedra and Lycisca can now be proud of themselves¹⁴ ... Beasts do not have reason, yet in this matter they behave reasonably. Men have reason, yet in this matter they behave unreasonably ...¹⁵

A passage in De octo vitiis repeats some of these points, but has a somewhat different tone.

The fire of Sodom burns in rotten wood ... Any vessel that has been tainted by it takes on the flavour.¹⁶ Once a man has been seduced by it, it is very difficult for him to get the infection out of his system. Even in honourable old age, a man can relapse and be excited by it again. The more pleasant it is, the greater the sin; the less the pleasure, the less the guilt. This one sin of Gomorrah ... brings a hellish kind of peace, but that peace is paid for with tears. This one sin of Gomorrah ... burns boys and youths and stern old men ... The vice of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah flourishes. Women are regarded as worthless, but the love of boys is valued highly. The wife grieves for her broken life, while her young husband philanders. Juno yields her place to Ganymede. The embraces and sexual intercourse of marriage are spurned; there are plenty of catamites to provide substitutes. The male prostitutes¹⁷ are seductive with their practised expressions. They were born to take the active, masculine sexual role, but they take pleasure in foully playing the passive, feminine part.¹⁸ They sell their lubricous loins to anyone who will pay; sin after the fashion of Sodom makes no distinctions ... This kind of copulation was never practised by animals. The smart stallion copulates with a mare, the wicked man with his fellow man. The bull copulates with a cow, but the male human demands the loins of a male human ... Man alone is aroused by his fellow man and commits this sin ...¹⁹

Bernard is not talking about homosexuals as a social group, or as people who have "a sexual propensity for persons of their own sex." He is talking about men who deliberately and from choice, knowing that it is wrong, engage in sexual intercourse with other men or with boys. He says nothing about heterosexual sodomy, and he says nothing about lesbianism. He regards sodomy as unnatural, both because it is contrary to reason and because the animals do not do it.²⁰ It is especially wicked because it leads to disruption of families and child prostitution. Bernard does not appear to think that homosexuality is in any way innate, or that sodomites do not choose their condition.²¹

Bernard says that sodomites are extremely common, "as many as the fields have ears of barley, the sea oysters, the beach grains of sand, the ocean islands, India grains of incense, the Tiber reeds."²² John Boswell, of Yale University, uses this statement, and similar utterances by many of Bernard's contemporaries, as evidence that there was "an efflorescence of gay culture" in the twelfth century.²³ Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of references to sodomy in the twelfth century express profound disapproval of it, Boswell speaks of a "positive attitude towards homosexuality"²⁴ and an "indifference to homosexual behaviour of the institutional church during this century ."²⁵ He produces a handful of writers whose work might reasonably be interpreted as expressing approval or tolerance of sodomy (Baudri of Bourgueil, Marbod of Rennes, Hilary the Englishman and the author of the "Debate between Ganymede and Helen).²⁶ He discusses Aelred of Rievaulx, expressing the view that "there can be little question that Aelred was gay."²⁷ He says that Saint Anselm of Canterbury "brought the tradition of passionate friendship among monks into the limelight of medieval society (as he also prevented the promulgation of the first antigay legislation in England)."²⁸

On the basis of such examples, he concludes that there was "an extraordinary flowering of gay love" in the twelfth century.²⁹ He makes a distinction between "homosexual" and "gay."

"Homosexuality" refers to the general phenomenon of same-sex eroticism and is therefore the broadest of the categories employed; it comprises all sexual phenomena between persons of the same gender, whether the result of conscious preference, subliminal desire, or circumstantial exigency. "Gay," in contrast, refers to persons who are conscious of erotic inclination towards their own gender as a distinguishing characteristic ..."³⁰

On such a definition, it is possible that men like Aelred and Saint Anselm might be described as "homosexual." If "subliminal desire" is enough to characterise a homosexual, perhaps they were homosexual, but it is unlikely that they engaged in sodomy. Even if Aelred's confession to his sister ("meam pudicitiam perdidi") refers to some physical expression of homosexual love when he was a boy, rather than to solitary vice, it is quite certain that he did not practise sodomy after he entered the monastic life.³¹

One problem with Boswell's definition is that all friendships between persons of the same sex might be characterised as homosexual, on the grounds that they are manifestations of subliminal desire. So, the relationship between Ausonius and Saint Paulinus of Nola (who "passionately loved him") is seen by Boswell as representing "a trend in early Christian sexual morality which was both significant and influential."³² Even Abelard's lament of David for Jonathan is seen as evidence of "increased familiarity with and tolerance of gay people and their feelings by persons who were not themselves gay."³³ On that basis, Roland and Oliver would have to be reckoned homosexual.³⁴ In fact, nearly everybody would be in some degree homosexual.

In the Carmina de Trinitate, Bernard of Morlaix discusses the relationship between the Persons of the Trinity. "Sic tria sunt unum, sed et unum sic tria vere."³⁵ He says that, if we dare to compare what is trifling with what is supreme,³⁶ we can get some faint notion of the relationship between the Persons of the Trinity even from the writings of the pagans.

Ergo poeta, duos dum commendaret amicos,
"Hi duo corporibus" ait "ibant mentibus unus."³⁷
Sic David Jonathe, sic Tideus et Polinici,
Eurialus Niso, Phoceus adhesit Horesto,
Piritoo Teseus, Coridon est nexus Alexi,
Dimidium mentis animeque sue profitetur³⁸
Virgilium Flaccus, quem carnis amabat amore.
Quod si tanta fuit gentilibus huius amoris
Unio, quanta putas deitatis inest deitati?³⁹

Even pagan writers can understand the possibilities of unity in the relationships between human persons. How much greater the unity in the relationships within the Trinity? Bernard's examples are interesting. One is biblical, not pagan; the story of David and Jonathan is told in the Book of Samuel (or 1 Kings in the Vulgate). Three derive from classical mytholology, namely Polynices and Tydeus, Pylades and Orestes, Theseus and Pirithous. Two are pairs of what might be called fictional characters from Vergil: Euryalus and Nisus from the Aeneid and Corydon and Alexis from the second Eclogue. The final example is historical, namely Horace and Vergil. Boswell, one supposes, would regard all of these relationships, except perhaps the last, as homosexual, even as "gay." Vergil's text suggests that we are meant to think of his pairs of friends as being "gay." But it is quite certain, from the context in which they are discussed, that Bernard had no such concept. Close friendships between men were, for him, good and noble. There was no suggestion that they might be homosexual.

Boswell recognises the problem of regarding all same-sex friendships as homosexual. He refers to Alfred Kinsey's suggestion that "homosexual and heterosexual persons are representatives not of distinct types but simply of the end points of a sliding scale ranging from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality ... If this view is correct, then "gay" people are those far enough toward the homosexual end of the Kinsey scale to think of themselves as chiefly homosexual." But in that case, arguments based on examples of people who are well towards the heterosexual end of the scale do not strongly support the thesis of an "extraordinary efflorescence of gay subculture" in the twelfth century.⁴⁰

Another problem is that writers in the twelfth century frequently used language which seems to us to be highly emotional, not to say erotic, to express experiences which were essentially spiritual. Bernard of Morlaix offers an example in his preface to the De contemptu mundi.

Quippe ego sepe ab sponso audieram, sed non exaudieram, "Sonet vox tua in auribus meis." Et mihi iterum a dilecto clamabatur, "Aperi mihi soror mea." Quid igitur? Surrexi ut aperirem dilecto meo, et dixi, "Domine ut cor meum cogitet ut stilus scribat ut os annuntiet laudem tuam, infunde et cordi et stilo et ori meo gratiam tuam." Et dixit mihi Dominus, "Aperi os tuum et ego adinplebo illud." Aperui igitur os meum, quod inplevit Dominus spiritu sapientiae et intellectus ...⁴¹

The Canticum canticorum was a powerful influence on medieval spiritual writing, where its sexual imagery was interpreted allegorically. But that does not mean that the "original" or "literal" meaning of the canticles was not known or was ignored. There was seen to be a very real connection between divine love and human love. As C.S. Lewis points out,

It is a mischievous error to suppose that in an allegory the author is "really" talking about the thing symbolized, and not at all about the thing that symbolizes; the very essence of the art is to talk about both. And for this particular conjunction, of divine and sexual love, [Thomas] Usk has precedent in the two gardens of Jean de Meun, in the Beatrice of the Divine Comedy, and in the Song of Songs.⁴²

Boswell appears to give insufficient weight to this factor in interpreting his twelfth century sources. "Many twelfth-century clerics, monastic and secular, were involved in and wrote about passionate friendships like Anselm's. Some of these - e.g., Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, doubtless the most influential religious leader of the day - were certainly not aware of any erotic elements in their feelings. Others, however, were clearly consciously romantic."⁴³ But "passionate friendship" was not required for the kind of expression of feeling which is at issue here. It is not a matter of being unaware of erotic elements, but rather of enhancing and intensifying meanings by the allegorical use of erotic elements. To some extent, it had become almost conventional. Peter the Venerable writes to saint Bernard as follows:

Diu est frater karissime ex quo bonae conversationis tuae aromata spirituali suavitate fraglantia intimo cordis odoratu hauriens, teque ante diligere quam nosse, ante venerari quam contemplari incipiens, te videre, te amplecti, tecum de animae profectibus loqui desideravi.⁴⁴

Not even Boswell suggests a homosexual relationship between Peter the Venerable and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. There are other ways, too, in which interpretation can present difficulties. Boswell claims that Hildebert of Lavardin "states outright that calling male homosexuality a sin is a mistake and the `the council of heaven' has erred in doing so."⁴⁵ But that is to put altogether too much weight on a poem which is little more than a scholarly joke.⁴⁶

There are difficulties too with Boswell's definition of "gay". "`Gay' ... refers to persons who are conscious of erotic inclination toward their own gender as a distinguishing characteristic."⁴⁷ There was evidently a lot of sodomy in the twelfth century (though whether more or less than in other centuries is not clear). But nobody regarded the practise of sodomy as "a distinguishing characteristic." Neither the very few who wrote approvingly nor the very many who wrote disapprovingly of it suggested that it constituted a characteristic which set people apart. Boswell argues that the term "Ganymede" was a twelfth century equivalent of the term "gay".

The similarity of this word to "gay" in its cultural setting is striking. In an age addicted to classical literature, the invocation of Greek mythology to describe homosexual relationships not only tacitly removed the stigma conveyed by the biblical "sodomitia," the only word in common use before or after this period, but also evoked connotations of mythological sanctions, cultural superiority, and personal refinement which considerably diminished negative associations in regard to homosexuality. Although "Ganymede" was also used derisively, it was basically devoid of moral context and could be used by gay people themselves without misgivings."⁴⁸

Boswell's account of the connotations of "Ganymede" is certainly not supported by a study of the use of the word by Bernard of Morlaix, for whom it was a term of strong moral disapproval. Nor would it seem to be supported by a study of twelfth century. literature generally. Further, it is misleading to speak of "gay people" in the context of the twelfth century. To do so begs the question of the existence of a "gay subculture." The existence of a gay community seems to be a peculiarly modern construct. Boswell's definition of "gay" suggests that people belong to the gay community because they see themselves as different.

Similar doubts about the existence of a gay subculture are expressed by Jo Ann McNamara, who has an alternative explanation for some of the phenomena discussed by Boswell.

The affectionate clerical rhetoric that has been identified as a "gay subculture" may easily have reflected the insecurity of men separated from women in expressing the affectionate relationships of "people" outside the old gender system. Anselm of Bec saw both Jesus and himself as mothers. Having driven women out of his vision of communal life, Bernard [of Clairvaux] advised abbots to treat their monks with a mother's nourishing love rather than fear. Bernard's own vision of himself as a woman was equated with his humility and weakness. He said that he was not equal to the tasks imposed on man in the world.⁴⁹

The gender system in the twelfth century will need to be considered again when we come to consider Bernard of Morlaix's treatment of the subject of women, especially since "Europe in the early twelfth century provides an exceptionally well documented restructuring of the gender system."⁵⁰ The point at present is that the evidence for an "extraordinary flowering of gay love"⁵¹ in the century is not very strong.⁵²

Perhaps the homosexual of the high middle ages that we know most about is Arnold of Verniolle. He is discussed by Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie in his study of Montaillou.⁵³ A translation of a large part of the text of his heresy trial is given in Michael Goodich's The unmentionable vice.⁵⁴ Boswell deals with Arnold briefly.⁵⁵ Arnold does not fit Boswell's thesis very well. His trial occurred well after the date by which, according to Boswell, the period of tolerance had come to an end and the church began to be hostile toward homosexuals.⁵⁶ As Ladurie points out, Arnold was tried for heresy, not homosexuality.

In the end it was his illegal exercise of the priesthood which brought about Arnaud's downfall, for it was on those grounds that he was first denounced to the Bishop. One thing led to another, and Jacques Fournier finally detected, behind the crime of performing Mass illegally, the crime of homosexuality.⁵⁷

Goodrich confirms that "the inquisitor was more concerned with the defendants' supposed theological (i.e. heretical) transgressions than with their private behaviour." Arnold was punished because he was a Franciscan apostate and because he pretended to be a priest when he was a mere sub-deacon.⁵⁸ Boswell points out that Arnold's heresies included "his belief that homosexual acts were no more serious than fornication." That is true, but there is nothing in the record of the trial which suggests any less (or greater) tolerance in the thirteenth century than in the eleventh or twelfth.

Nor does the trial of Arnold produce any evidence for the existence of a gay community in Pamiers. Certainly, there seems to have been a lot of sodomy going on in the town, but neither Arnold nor any of the witnesses who testified about him regarded their sodomy as a distinguishing characteristic. They appear to have recognised that they were wilfully committing a serious sin, though there was apparently some difference of opinion about the exact degree of seriousness. They do not seem to have regarded themselves as different from others, or as belonging to a gay minority or a gay community.

Bernard's treatment of sodomy belongs to the genre of complaint literature. The subject does not loom large in his poems, and what he says about it is directed towards his celibate monastic audience. He shows no sign of approval of it, nor do his contemporaries. Bernard gives considerably more attention to . complaint about women, a different and more familiar kind of complaint literature.

Women

Misogyny is as old as European literature. In Works and days, Hesiod advises, "Do not let a flaunting woman coax and cozen you. She is after your barn. The man who trusts women trusts deceivers."⁵⁹ And in the Theogony, he tells how Prometheus stole fire from Zeus, who, in retaliation, "made an evil thing for men as the price of fire." He had Hephaestus make out of clay "the likeness of a shy maiden ... and when he had made the beautiful evil to be the price of blessing, he brought her out ... and wonder took hold of the deathless gods and mortal men when they saw that which was sheer guile, not to be withstood by men. For from her is the race of women and female kind; of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live among mortal men to their great trouble ... Zeus who thunders on high made women to be an evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil."⁶⁰

Complaint against women is not only a medieval commonplace, it is a universal commonplace. R. Howard Bloch argues that misogyny is an integral part of Western literature; that "the phenomenon of misogyny is that of literature itself."⁶¹ The Genesis creation story, and interpretations of it by Saint Paul, Philo of Alexandria, Tertullian, John Chrysostom and Jerome, as well as by Augustine, lend weight to that theory. The creation of Eve is inextricably linked with naming and verbal expression. "And Adam said: This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man."⁶²

Bernard of Morlaix has plenty of complaint against women, both of the kind exemplified by Hesiod and of the kind identified by Bloch, which links misogyny with seduction by words.⁶³ In De octo vitiis, Bernard writes:

A man is very foolish if he is often alone with a woman. He loses his peace of mind. When you first visit a woman, she sighs deeply. She stands behind you with meek face and lowered eyes. She speaks softly and listens gravely when you speak to her. She encourages you to speak with her. Pretending to be devout and virtuous, she listens to you as though you were a prophet. She likes to hear your admonitions about chastity, but she is not really contrite or sorry for her sins. The second time you visit her, she welcomes you as if she had a clear conscience. She looks up at you, her small face serious and modest. The third time you visit her she looks at you boldly and laughs. She poses playfully. The holy woman has turned into a seductress ... She laughs a lot, as if to say, "I love you, brother ..."⁶⁴

In a similar vein, he writes in the Chartula nostra:

Bitter death, with no respect for mankind, will make an end of worldly things which are deceitful and unhealthy. The love of women, which is an occasion of serious sin, will come to an end. The conversation of women is nothing but a vitriolic poison, offering a baneful cup under the guise of the sweetness of honey. For the beauty of women is an insidious snare for souls. It traps foolish men with flattering words which are deceitful and impious and it leads many men to hell.⁶⁵

The complaint of Andreas Capellanus, in a lengthy treatise devoted to instruction in the art of courtly love, is essentially similar. "Furthermore, not only is every woman by nature a miser, but she is also envious and a slanderer of other women, greedy, a slave to her belly, fickle, devious in her speech, disobedient and impatient of restraint, stained with the sin of pride and desirous of vainglory, a liar, a drunkard, a babbler, no keeper of secrets, too much given to wantonness, prone to every evil, and never loving any man in her heart."⁶⁶ He develops those points at inordinate length, and at the beginning of the last chapter of the De amore, he advises his friend Walter:

Read this little book, then, not with the intention of taking up the life of a lover, but rather to be entertained by the learning in it. Then, when you have learned how to excite the minds of women to love, you may, by refraining from so doing, win an eternal recompense and thereby deserve a greater reward from God. For God is more pleased with a man who is able to sin and does not, than with a man who has no opportunity to sin.⁶⁷

R. Howard Bloch points to the internal contradiction of the De amore. Andreas complains, "We know that everything a woman says is said with the intention of deceiving, because she always has one thing in her heart and another on her lips."⁶⁸ Andreas' book is all that it claims to reject. "If you want a woman to do anything," he says, "you can get her to do it by ordering her to do the opposite."⁶⁹ Bloch comments:

There is no way of determining with certainty Andreas' intent - whether to urge to convince or desist - and ultimately whether he wants us to take literally the warning against love or ourselves to be seduced by the letter. He, and any other author for that matter, performs that which he denounces Eve for having done - seduces, in the words of Tertullian "by mere words," disobeys his own injunctions. The danger of women, according to this reading of misogyny, is that of literature itself.⁷⁰

In addition to those universal aspects of misogyny, Andreas Capellanus illustrates aspects peculiar to the middle ages. His book is the first and most comprehensive treatise on the elaborate code of conduct of courtly love. "All men agree," says Andreas, "that no one does a good or courteous deed in the world unless it is derived from the fount of love. Love will therefore be the origin and cause of all good."⁷¹ Some historians agree to the extent of seeing courtly love as an ennobling and civilising influence on the tough warrior class of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. "Thus in courtly love female approbation offered a new, secular and psychologically very powerful sanction to the secular conventions of the code of courtly virtue and martial honour."⁷²

But it is important to notice the social stratification inherent in the code of courtly love. Andreas carefully distinguishes between the techniques to be used by a commoner⁷³ speaking with a common woman; a commoner speaking with a woman of the nobility; a commoner speaking with a woman of the higher nobility; a nobleman speaking with a common woman; a nobleman speaking with a noblewoman; a man of the higher nobility speaking with a common woman; a man of the higher nobility speaking with a woman of the simple nobility; and a man of the higher nobility speaking with a woman of the higher nobility.⁷⁴ Whatever that may have meant in terms of gentler and more civilised relations between men and women of the aristocracy, it clearly had no beneficial effect upon relations between the gentry and peasant women. Andreas' advice is brutally clear: "If you happen to be attracted by the love of peasant women, be careful to praise them lavishly and then, when you find a convenient place, do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace them by force (et violenter potiri amplexu)."⁷⁵ One must, of course, make due allowance for literary fantasy and convention, but it would seem that for most women of the twelfth century courtly love was little more than socially approved rape.

Nor should courtly love, even among the gentry, be confused with modern notions of romantic love. Courtly love of its nature entails adultery. The love between a husband and wife is not courtly love. Indeed, love cannot properly be said to exist between husband and wife. "It is therefore plain enough that jealousy cannot have its natural place between husband and wife and that therefore love between them must necessarily cease, because these two things always go together."⁷⁶

It would be wrong to reduce the literature of courtly love either to pure eroticism or to a kind of mysticism.

One should agree with the chaplain. Both eroticism and spirituality are overwhelming in troubadour love poetry, so that [it] is impossible to think of this love as pure amicitia spiritualis or as pure libido. It is fruitless, therefore, to create a model of courtly love without considering these two components, and seeing how they relate to each other and assessing the nature of the paradox they create. Andreas' perception of both elements was rather insightful, and his lesson should not be forgotten.⁷⁷

Courtly love is a special aspect of relations between men and women in the twelfth century, but it did not give rise to a special kind of complaint against women. In the poems of Bernard of Morlaix, however, there is a particular element which is not present in universal misogyny. His admonitions are explicitly addressed to his monastic brethren. He is not, like Hesiod or Andreas Capellanus, giving advice to men generally, but to celibate monks in particular. He is warning them to avoid occasions of sin.

So be careful about thoughtlessly looking at feminine beauty. Curb your unruly gaze with the reins of holy restraint ... Control your body with reins, rule it with whips, tie it up with chains.⁷⁸

Bede Jarrett warns that we must judge medieval writing in the context of its genre and the public it was meant to serve.

For example, monastic writers, who were writing for a monastic audience, quite naturally were concerned chiefly with the relation of monks to women, so that, since chastity and virginity were essential to religious life, it was woman as a danger to their vocations who was most frequently described. It would be grossly unscientific to take these monastic writers in their monastic treatises as representative of mediaeval thought on womanhood, for they are not intending to write primarily on women as women, their greatness or littleness, but solely on women as dangers to monastic observance.⁷⁹

Bernard's misogyny was monastic. Jo Ann McNamara suggests that monastic seclusion brought about a denial of the need for women.

Perhaps the creation of a woman-free environment was a necessity before the schoolmen could construct a cosmos and a terrestrial order that firmly supported the natural law of masculine superiority. Men fearful of women frightened women away from them ... Even womanly functions were claimed by men ... Among monks safely segregated from women, perhaps the safest way to restore the gender system was to play both roles and, by implication, deny the need for women in any capacity.⁸⁰

But the misogyny of Bernard of Morlaix goes beyond what might reasonably be expected of advice about avoiding occasions of sin. Even in the Mariale, we find a hint of a more extreme expression of complaint against women. The Mariale is a long poem in honour of the Virgin Mary.⁸¹ It contains the curious statement that Mary spurns the pleasures of this world and urges the control of the flesh, "contrary to the custom of [her] kind."⁸² That hint is developed into a full-blown attack on women in the De contemptu mundi. The following abridgement may give some idea of its content.

My subject now is wicked woman. She herself I regard as good, but I condemn and censure the things she does. She incites men to wicked deeds by her feminine wiles. She delights in encouraging sinful behaviour and in being totally female. No woman is good. It is a contradiction in terms to say that a woman is good. Woman is guilty, lascivious, quick to betray, born and bred to deceive. She is the deepest ditch, the most poisonous viper, beautiful corruption, a slippery path. She is disgracefully common. She is both hunter and prey. She is a dreadful night owl, a public doorway, sweet poison ... No sin is too bad for her. She commits incest with her father, with her grandson. She has always been, she is and she always will be a cesspool of lust ... The wiles of women are craftier than all other wiles. A she-wolf is better than a woman, because its attack is not so fierce. Similarly, dragons and lions are better than women. Nothing is worse than a woman. John the Baptist condemned their wickedness, and he died by the sword. Hippolytus was ruined by a woman, so was Amnon. Because of a woman, Joseph was locked up and Samson had his hair cut off. Reuben got into trouble because of a woman, so did David and Solomon, and so, for the matter of that, did Adam ... Woman is foul. She longs to deceive, she is a flame of frenzy, the chief cause of our destruction, the worst thing that could happen to us. She destroys all decency. Such is her cruel sinfulness, that she expels her own child from her womb, and most wickedly kills her own offspring. Woman is a viper. She is not a human being but a wild beast ... The sins of men are more pious and more pleasing to God than the good deeds of women ...⁸³

Bernard's immediate sources are Juvenal and Catullus and a range of medieval writers, especially Hildebert of Lavardin.⁸⁴ The statement that the sins of men are more pious than the good deeds of women comes from Ecclesiaticus.⁸⁵ His vitriolic attack upon women is more than a hundred lines long. The presentation in one place of so much concentrated venom, with no relief except for the disclaimer in the opening lines, which is immediately contradicted, is remarkable. Nor can translation do it justice. English cannot render the spleen of

Foemina foetida fallere fervida flamma furoris
Prima peremptio, pessima portio, praedo pudoris.⁸⁶

Bede Jarrett's suggestion that such writing is intended to warn monks of the danger which women present to monastic observance does not seem to be an adequate explanation for this extreme vilification of women. An important feature of it is that it presents women as different from men, not only in the relatively trivial biological characteristics which distinguish them, but intellectually, morally and spiritually. "Dragons and lions are better than women. Nothing is worse than a woman ... Woman is a viper. She is not a human being but a wild beast ... The sins of men are more pious and more pleasing to God than the good deeds of women".

It is perhaps possible that this sort of thing was meant to be funny. After one of his quotations from Juvenal's 6th satire,⁸⁷ Bernard says, "Talia mordeo, talia rideo."⁸⁸ Ronald E. Pepin suspects that "in view of the violent diction and strained ornamentations ... and the conscious imitation of satirical conventions, ... the misogynistic poems which flourished in the twelfth century were comic in effect, if not in purpose."⁸⁹ But Ray Petry finds Bernard's attacks on womankind distinctly unfunny and comments that they are "as unwarranted as they are unchristian."⁹⁰ When Bernard says "I satirise and laugh at these things," he does not seem to mean that he is satirising the genre of complaint against women. His references to incest and abortion, for example, make that unlikely; nor is it likely in the context of the De contemptu mundi as a whole. The verses are not funny in that sense. They are funny (if that is the right word) in the sense that Juvenal's sixth satire is funny. Yet there is an important difference. Juvenal says vitriolic things about individual women, real or fictitious, but he does not claim that women are, of their nature, different from men in terms of the things of the mind, as Bernard does.⁹¹

Bede Jarrett maintained that, during the middle ages, "there was no possibility or desire of assigning to woman an inferior place because of her lesser capacity for goodness or divine love, for no one would have admitted this to be true or even possible."⁹² The excerpts from De contemptu mundi quoted above indicate that that is a rash assertion. Nevertheless, it seems probable that Bernard's attitude towards women, though widespread in the twelfth century, was not universal. As Mary Martin McLaughlin points out, "Although Abelard plainly shared certain attitudes towards women of his sex and time and used on occasion the traditional rhetoric of condescension, of the "stronger" sex towards the "weaker," he never spoke the language of contempt and defamation that seems to have come so naturally to many of his clerical and monastic contemporaries."⁹³ Heloise and Hildegard of Bingen,⁹⁴ as well as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and, at least implicitly, Marie de France, expressed acceptance of the view that women were subordinate to men, but for none of them did it entail inferiority in intelligence, morality or spirituality.

The Dominicans played a large part in bringing about a change in attitudes towards women in the thirteenth century, and the most influential of them were Saint Thomas Aquinas and Humbert de Romans. Saint Thomas Aquinas did not regard the subordination of women as entailing intellectual, moral or spiritual inferiority. In his view, the subordination is strictly limited. He maintained that the help God makes for man is not for any sort of work. If it were, other men would be as good as women. It is, he says, "for producing children."⁹⁵ He goes on to explain that "the principal constituent of God's image in man, mind, is found in both male and female human beings, which is why Genesis says, To God's image he created him (namely, mankind); male and female he created them."⁹⁶

Humbert de Romans expressed the relationship between men and women as follows:

Note that God gave women many prerogatives, not only over other living things but even over man himself, and this by nature, by grace and by glory. In the world of nature she excelled man by her origin, for man he made of the vile earth, but woman he made in paradise. Man he formed of the slime, but woman he made of man's rib. She was not made of a lower limb of man - as for example of his foot - lest man should esteem her his servant, but from his midmost part, that he should hold her to be his fellow, as Adam said: "The woman whom thou gavest as my helpmate." In the world of grace she excelled man, for God, who could have taken flesh of a man, did not do so, but took flesh of a woman. Again, we do not read of any man trying to prevent the passion of Our Lord, but we do read of a woman who tried - namely Pilate's wife, who tried to dissuade her husband from so great a crime ... Again, at his resurrection, it was to a woman he first appeared - namely to Mary Magdelen. In the world of glory, for the king in that country is no mere man, but a mere woman is its queen ... nor is anyone who is merely a man as powerful there as is a mere woman. Thus is woman's nature in Our Lady raised above man's in worth and dignity and power."⁹⁷

Dom David Knowles speaks of "the wide and sympathetic humanism which between 1050 and 1150 made its appearance for the first time in Western Europe."⁹⁸ He goes on to discuss Abelard, Heloise and Ailred of Rievaulx as examples of persons of "intense sensibility to emotions," "vivid powers of self-expression," and "reverence and devotion [to] certain great figures of antiquity." They attached great importance to their personal emotions. "So the humanists, but never the schoolmen, found strength in a community of feeling with those who, centuries before, had trodden the same path, and it is this consciousness of the unchanging mind of man that divides the culture of the first Renaissance from the more familiar culture of the later Middle Ages."⁹⁹ The problems of associating general characteristics with the concept of humanism were discussed above, p.134. There are difficulties, too, in Knowles' account of the humanists' "consciousness of the unchanging mind of man." It has been argued that it was precisely their sense of history and of historical difference that enabled fifteenth-century humanists to realise the need to resurrect antiquity. Erwin Panofsky, for example, maintains that the fifteenth century, unlike the ninth and the twelfth, perceived the discontinuity of history. They saw a gap between classical times and their own, while the scholars of the middle ages did not. "The classical world was not [in the middle ages] approached historically but pragmatically, as something far-off yet, in a sense, still alive and, therefore, at once potentially useful and potentially dangerous."¹⁰⁰

But the immediate point is that David Knowles saw such characters as Ailred of Rievaulx and Saint Anselm of Canterbury as representatives of a dawning of humanism in the twelfth century, expressing a "kindly warmth and fragrant geniality" which were lacking in the more intellectually brilliant thirteenth century.¹⁰¹ John Boswell took the same phenomena to indicate an efflorescence of gay culture in the twelfth century.¹⁰² Jo Ann McNamara's analysis of twelfth- century misogyny suggests a different interpretation again. The passionately emotional friendships of so many twelfth century clerics, especially monks, was due neither to the special kind of humanism described by David Knowles, nor to the homosexual attachments envisaged by John Boswell, but to a need to compensate for the exclusion of women; an exclusion which, in the twelfth century, amounted almost to an exclusion from the human race. It was that extreme misogyny which the coming of the friars, and Saint Thomas Aquinas and Humbert de Romans in particular, did so much to undo in the thirteenth century.

Jo Ann McNamara suggests that the twelfth-century monastic reconstruction of the gender system led to the defining of men as human beings and the blotting out of the humanity of women.¹⁰³ It led to precisely the kind of misogyny which regarded women as different from men intellectually, morally and spiritually, the kind of misogyny which Bernard of Morlaix expresses at such length and with such vehemence. It is not simply because they are wicked that Bernard of Morlaix regards women as different from men. In his view, homosexual men are at least as wicked as women, but he does not regard homosexuals as different from other men or as being less than human. Sodomites are simply men who commit serious sin.¹⁰⁴ That is consistent with Jo Ann McNamara's analysis. Women are presented as different because they are to be excluded.

It seems clear that what Bernard of Morlaix is doing is to gather together everything he can find which presents women as evil, in much the same way as he gathers together everything he can find to denigrate the Cistercians.¹⁰⁵ The production of florilegia was, of course, a common pursuit throughout the middle ages, and the study of rhetoric as part of the trivium may have encouraged the presentation of all the points on one side of an argument, to the exclusion of those on the other side. Such a collection of adages pays little attention to consistency. "I am not going to complain about good women, whom I ought to bless,"¹⁰⁶ says Bernard (though he nowhere finds time to bless them). "Her [woman] I regard as good, but her acts I condemn."¹⁰⁷ Yet only a few lines later, he says, "Indeed, no woman is good"¹⁰⁸ and, "You may condemn all her actions, not only the sinful ones, but the good ones."¹⁰⁹ In the Chartula nostra, if it is his, Bernard states that, if they have obeyed God's commandments, "neither men nor women, nor their offspring, will perish," without any suggestion of difference between them.¹¹⁰ Similar contradictions appear in Bernard's complaint about sodomites. He says that they behave like hyenas;¹¹¹ but he also brands their behaviour as unnatural, because animals do not engage in it.¹¹²

William Craven, discussing Coluccio Salutati's late fourteenth century defence of poetry, suggests that he was writing in a genre where it mattered more to have a range of arguments than it did to develop a coherent position, and where many of the arguments would be familiar to readers and expected by them. Salutati's work is riddled with inconsistencies; it is a collection of incompatible arguments from disparate sources, juxtaposed with very little concern for coherence. In the context of that genre, to ascribe to the writer beliefs, values or intellectual allegiances would "be hardly less hazardous than inferring attitudes to monarchy, feudalism or the Church from the way chess-players moved their pieces."¹¹³

Likewise, it would be hazardous to conclude, on the basis of his diatribes against women, that Bernard of Morlaix really believed that the good deeds of women are worse than the sins of men, or that all women are intrinsically evil, or that women are radically different from men intellectually and spiritually. Bernard was writing in a rhetorical genre similar to that of Salutati. His homiletic words were addressed to a monastic audience, at a time when homilies were deliberately and carefully designed to be persuasive to the particular audience to which they were directed.¹¹⁴ What mattered was not consistency or coherence, but the collation of as many of the familiar arguments as possible. In this regard, it is important to note that the sermon of Humbert de Romans, quoted above, was explicitly designed to be delivered to an audience of women.

His comments on Humbert de Romans (p.289-290) are especially relevant. Half a century ago, it was more difficult than it is now to understand the genre of complaint against women. Ernst Curtius, for example, writing in 1948, maintained that Bernard of Morlaix "curses love and womankind ... [he] would extirpate not only vice but also love."¹¹⁵ Even as late as 1964, R. Bultot commented of Bernard:

De quelques desordres que se soient rendues coupables bien des femmes a l'epoque de Bernard le Clusien, il exagere. Sa violence traduit la haine nee de la peur et d'un reflexe de defense courants dans les milieux monastiques du moyen age. De telles attaques, dirons-nous avec un critique, ne sont pas d'un chretien.¹¹⁶

In those days, we believed, however ineffectively, in the equality of the sexes. Dorothy Sayers, for example, complained that she was occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction from the woman's point of view. "To such demands," she said, "one can only say, `Go away and don't be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.'"¹¹⁷ She wanted women to be treated "not as an inferior class and not, I beg and pray all feminists, as a superior class - not, in fact as a class at all, except in a useful context."

"What," men have asked distractedly from the beginning of time, "what on earth do women want?" I do not know that women, as women, want anything in particular, but as human beings they want, my good men, exactly what you want yourselves: interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures, and a sufficient emotional outlet."¹¹⁸

Bernard's treatment of women certainly does not constitute a "useful context" in the sense intended by Dorothy Sayers. Women are not, except in respect of relatively trivial biological characteristics, different from men. Bernard treats them as fundamentally different because women are excluded from the male monastic life; because women constitute a threat to celibacy and chastity; and because monks, having excluded women, find themselves compelled to play both gender roles.

But Dorothy Sayers wrote the words quoted above more than half a century ago. Modern scholars speak with a different voice. The thrust of much modern scholarship is that women are different from men in relation to things of the mind. It is not true that ideas have no sex. In the disciplines of history, the physical sciences, music and logic, for example, masculine models of reality are challenged. There is a feminine angle on an equilateral triangle. Judith Allen claims that in history there are fundamental gender differences.:

In this brief survey I have contended that the professional discipline of history is axiomatically phallocentric. Despite differences between Right and Left-wing historians over their tolerance of "theory," especially marxism, and their empiricist approaches to evidence, both exhibit a commitment to phallocentric
¹¹⁸ibid., p.114. assumptions and masculinist approaches to interpretations of the past. This is not a contingent or provisional feature of the discipline, amenable to some simple reform of content or approach.¹¹⁹

Similarly, E. Fox-Genovese maintains that "women's history challenges mainstream history not to substitute the chronicle of the female subject for that of the male, but rather to restore conflict, ambiguity and tragedy to the centre of historical process."¹²⁰ And Marilyn Lake speaks of transforming the disciplinary paradigm of history "by challenging the masculine model of social reality which underpins it."¹²¹ Jill Matthews proclaims that, "If there is a traditional history, and if it proclaims the ideals of certainty, objectivity and universality, then it is under severe threat of not simply challenge but supersession. Against certainty, feminist history proclaims the relativity of continuous social construction; against objectivity, it proclaims disciplined gendered subjectivity; and against universality it insistently asks, whose universe?"¹²²

Sandra Harding surveys feminist criticisms of science. She points out that "the radical feminist position holds that the epistemologies, metaphysics, ethics, and politics of the dominant forms of science are androcentric and mutually supportive."¹²³ She examines important trends in the feminist critiques of science with the aim of identifying tensions and conflicts between them, in the belief that these feminist science critiques can be shown to have implications at least as revolutionary for modern Western cultural self-images as feminist critiques in the humanities and social sciences have had. She concludes,

When we began theorizing our experiences during the second women's movement a mere decade and a half ago [she is writing in 1986], we knew our task would be a difficult though exciting one. But I doubt that in our wildest dreams we ever imagined we would have to reinvent both science and theorizing itself in order to make sense of women's social experience.¹²⁴

Susan McClary, in her study of music, gender and sexuality, argues that "the theoretical work of feminists in literary and art criticism has cleared a space where women can choose to write music that foregrounds their sexual identities without falling prey to essentialist traps and that departs self- consciously from the assumptions of standard musical procedures."¹²⁵

Even logic is different for women. Andrea Nye, in her feminist reading of the history of logic, says,

Perhaps only a woman would undertake such a project, would do such a thing as try to read logic, a woman uncomfortable in a world of men, ... a woman too intent on emotional commitments to be capable of purely abstract thought. Perhaps only a woman would not make even the pretense of disinterested scholarship, but would admit to believing that involvement and commitment can lead to an understanding that logical analysis bound to consistency and univocality cannot.¹²⁶

Is logic masculine? ... One thing is clear enough: those who have made the history of logic have in fact been men ... The arena of logic was made by men for men; it was expressly founded on the exclusion of what is not male ...¹²⁷

Those writers lack Bernard's vitriolic spleen. More importantly, they have inverted his evaluation of the difference between the sexes. But essentially they are saying, as he did, that women are, in relation to things of the mind, different from men. Bernard's distinction no longer looks as irrational as it did fifty years ago, precisely because of feminist reflection and theorising. We can even find hints of the exclusion of men from a feminine world. Denise Thompson, for example, writes:

I would not argue without qualification that every feminist ought to be a lesbian. What is necessary, however, is that feminism give far more support to and validation of radical lesbianism than it has done so far. The attitude of liberal tolerance which defines lesbianism as "just another sexual orientation" is a comfortable evasion of the issue, comfortable because it threatens nothing. It is a form of depoliticisation, in that it denies the lesbian potential to undermine the male hegemony.¹²⁸

Whether or not there are male and female models of reality, the passages quoted above throw light on the misogyny of Bernard of Morlaix, because they offer examples of a kind of rhetoric not dissimilar to his. They appear to maintain that women are, in intellectual, moral and spiritual terms, different from men, but it would be hazardous to draw any conclusions about the actual beliefs of the writers. Their words are clearly directed towards a particular audience, and they are intended to persuade, not necessarily to be consistent and coherent. Like the celibate monks of the twelfth century, they adopt a policy of separatism.

Separatism has been a dominant theme since the inception of Women's Studies. The biblical injunction to "set yourself apart and be a separate people" describes a time-honoured method for building group solidarity and is undoubtedly an effective way for a minority community to resist assimilation."¹²⁹

But there are other aspects of twelfth-century attitudes toward women. Henrietta Leyser concludes her study of medieval women with the suggestion that medieval attempts to wrestle with problems of gender did not always follow the path of misogyny. "Its literature offered a space for the exploration of sexual differences quite as much as it provided a platform for the airing of prejudice."¹³⁰ Georges Duby, after wrestling for fifteen years with the problem of women in the twelfth century, concluded that their strength was the cause of male denigration of them, and that men's attitudes began to change only towards the end of the century.

... Je les devine, dis-je, fortes, bien plus fortes que je n'imaginais, et pourquoi pas, heureuses, si fortes que les males s'emploient a les affaiblir par les angoisses du peche. D'autre part, il m'a semble pouvoir situer vers 1180, alors que le violent elan de croissance qui emportait l'Europe se trouvait au plus vif de sa vigueur, le moment ou la situation de ces femmes fut quelque peu exhaussee, ou les hommes s'accoutumerent a les traiter comme des personnes ... ¹³¹

An aspect of attitudes towards women in the twelfth century which needs to be examined is the veneration of Mary, the mother of God. Marina Warner, who maintains that "in the very celebration of the perfect human woman, both humanity and women were subtly denigrated,"¹³² nevertheless well expresses the significance of that devotion: "A myth of such dimension is not a story, or a collection of stories, but a magic mirror like the Lady of Shalott's, reflecting a people and the beliefs they produce, recount, and hold. It presents their history in a certain light and in a way that singles them out."¹³³ It is not certain that the Mariale was the work of Bernard of Morlaix, but it will be convenient to use it as a basis for discussion.

Mariale

The Mariale opens with a prologue addressed to divine wisdom, "True light, brightest light, by which the light of days was created, Wisdom, which gives rest and comfort to the weary and which graciously forgives erring souls." The poet asks for grace to preserve him from sin. The prologue concludes with a prayer to Christ, asking for true enlightenment ("veram sophiam"). All except three of the fifteen rhythmi of the poem, and the epilogue, conclude with a doxology. The doxologies vary in form to suit the varying needs of the context in each rhythmus. The final one reads: "Everlasting light, guide us kindly, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, equal in Godhead, one God and three before all time." Most of the rhythmi are addressed to the Blessed Virgin Mary, but some are addressed to the Father and some to the Son, and several which are addressed to Mary conclude with a prayer addressed to the Father or to the Son. Throughout the whole of this very long poem¹³⁴ in praise of Mary, there is constant reference to and emphasis on the Trinity.

The predominant theme of the poem is that we should pray to Mary to ask her to intercede for us, because her intercession is most valuable and important. "Our mediator, from whom the Son of the Supreme father deigned to be born ... ask Christ to lend an ear to those who worship you."¹³⁵ Constantly stressed throughout the poem are the characteristics of Mary as the Mother of God, as both virgin and mother, as the greatest of all creatures and as the Queen of Heaven. She unlocked the gates of heaven, which Eve had closed to us. She is the Star of the Sea, the mediatrix of all grace.¹³⁶

Mediator and saviour of weak souls, favour us through your prayers. Give to the sick the remedy they hope for. Restore sight to the blind and sharpness to the dull. Raise up the oppressed. Help the weary. Give joy to the sad. Comfort the sighs of the poor and the imprisoned. Pray for the welcome homecoming of wanderers and captives. Calm the rough seas and control the violent storms so that joyful sailors may reach the shore. Turn enemies into friends who will wish each other well, so that we may be judged leniently, not severely. Pray to your son for the Jews, despite their guilt, that they may acknowledge him and seek his help.¹³⁷

I carry a great burden, sinking under a great heap of guilt, which is the punishment of a guilty conscience. In hearing and in seeing, in word and in deed, I have destroyed myself and gone astray in many ways. Kind Virgin, I tearfully beseech you to seek forgiveness of all my sins for me.¹³⁸

Awe-inspiring king, defend us from all evils. Restore to their place those who worship blessed Mary. May she assault your ears (aures tuas pulset) with her prayers ...¹³⁹

Approaching Mary as intercessor does not, for the poet, exclude direct prayer to the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit. Nor does it exclude prayer to other saints and to the angels. The Communion of Saints was clearly a familiar doctrine to the author of the Mariale.

You choirs of angels, you who are perpetually singing joyful praises to the Highest Lord, be mindful of the flock [of the Church Militant], which is so far away from you, and help us. You are citizens of the happy land of heaven and you do not experience the evils which beset us on all sides and make our lives miserable. We beg and beseech you, therefore, to cherish and protect your fellow subjects of the King who, with the Father, reigns over us all. May the powerful Senate of the Patriarchs and Prophets, enthroned and bright with crowns and white garments, wash away our sins. May the fellowship of the Holy Apostles govern us with their teaching, cherish us by their governing, listen to our prayers, defend us, their suppliants, and loose our bonds. May the white company of the Holy Innocents, those innocents whom the wrathful king [Herod] ordered to be slain, fearing the loss of his great kingdom, pray for peace. May the Church Triumphant, those who have hoped for glory and conquered the rulers of this world, bring us to share the joy of their triumph with them. May the choir of priests [in heaven], the fellowship of Confessors and all those who have rendered acceptable service to God secure a favourable answer to our prayers. May the company of virgins pray that we may be delivered from present and future ills and that we may be granted what we seek. May the ranks of all the saints who rule in heaven hear our prayers and help us so that we may deserve¹⁴⁰ to enjoy everlasting light. All you chosen ones, who share in the life of happiness, pray to the Lord to give us a happy and peaceful life.¹⁴¹

The poet several times stresses that Mary was descended from Jesse and David. He frequently dwells on her holiness, her wisdom and her beauty. "What woman is as charming, elegant and beautiful as you? What woman is endowed with so many gifts, so many crowns of virtue? You have turtle-dove cheeks, dove-like eyes. You are as beautiful as a dove by a stream of water."¹⁴² The poet saw Mary as the greatest of all creatures, but nevertheless as truly human, a real woman, not a goddess.

You adored and gave suck to God made man, to him who washes us and saves us, pouring out his blood. You comforted him as he cried and sucked at your breast. He was our servant, you were his handmaiden. You were with him as he taught and ate. You watched and knew all about the miracles he performed. You were present and advised him when he blessed the wedding at which he changed six jars of water into wine. You watched what he did and heard what he said, and you were fed with the grace of divine wisdom. What anguish, what torments, your soul experienced when a most wicked people raised their supreme Lord up on the cross ... How happy you were when, on the third day, the powerful king gave proof of the conquest of death ... After all the things he did, which you worthily and deservedly witnessed, you watched your son ascend to his Father's throne.¹⁴³

All these are familiar elements in the Catholic Church's veneration of the Virgin Mary today. The author of the Mariale lays strong emphasis upon two elements which are not prominent in present-day devotions, but which featured in twelfth century devotions. The first is the belief that Mary's physical virginity remained intact before, during and after the birth of Jesus. The belief was held by the Church from very early times¹⁴⁴ but is not adverted to today. The second is the very special devotion to Mary as a nursing mother. "Oh breasts which fed him who caused the earth to bear its fruits and who feeds the whole world."¹⁴⁵ "Nobody who loves him whom you fed at your breast when he was a little baby doubts the effectiveness of your prayers."¹⁴⁶ "How holy and blessed are the mother's breasts which gave milk to her son, her son who rules the stars."¹⁴⁷ This devotion, though neglected in recent times, has excellent Scriptural warrant.¹⁴⁸

On the other hand, there are aspects of present-day devotion to Mary which do not feature in the Mariale. The doctrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven was not defined until 1950,¹⁴⁹ though it was a popular devotion in the twelfth century.¹⁵⁰ The Mariale makes no mention of it.¹⁵¹

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was a matter of controversy among theologians throughout the twelfth century. The Mariale has many references to the sinlessness of Mary. "Loving mother, lacking all stain of corruption."¹⁵² "Wise virgin who, being exempt from the sin of the first woman, bore fruit not begotten by the seed of a man."¹⁵³ "Happy mother, whose womb, free from all stain, sheltered and carried the King who rules the world."¹⁵⁴ "From your first years filled with a great treasury of wisdom, dear to God and innocent of all evil, conquering sex and despising the toils of the flesh ..."¹⁵⁵ But he does not address the precise issue of whether Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin. Although he very frequently refers to Mary's freedom from sin, he does not take a position in relation to her immaculate conception. In this, as in other matters, he occupies the middle ground, neither radical nor conservative, as the following discussion hopes to show.

All of Bernard's poems show a deep conviction of sin. In the Mariale, that conviction has a personal tone which is lacking in the poems which are certainly Bernard's, in which he is more concerned to castigate the vices of others. A conviction of sin is part of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and Bernard seems to have been especially influenced by Saint Paul.¹⁵⁶ It is not, perhaps, entirely clear what Saint Paul means,¹⁵⁷ but it is easy to see how the doctrine of original sin developed from his teaching.

The Greek Fathers had little to say about original sin, and what they said was not very clear. Among the Latin Fathers, Saint Augustine was the first to treat the subject fully.¹⁵⁸ He interpreted Saint Paul to mean that the Fall resulted in a corruption of our human nature.¹⁵⁹ Concupiscence was a consequence of the Fall. It affects all areas of life, but especially sexual intercourse, which cannot be undertaken without lust. The involuntary impulse of lust, which cannot be controlled by the will, was the penalty of Adam’s sin.¹⁶¹

That interpretation has been extraordinarily persistent. In our own times, many non-Catholics, and even some Catholics, suppose that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception refers to the conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary.¹⁶¹ Such a misunderstanding would be possible only if it is further supposed that ordinary conception, entailing sexual intercourse, is in some way maculate or sinful. That was indeed the position taken by Saint Augustine, but it is surprising to find it lurking beneath present-day thinking.

Saint Gregory the Great held a somewhat less stern view, as did Saint Anselm of Canterbury, but an alternative to Saint Augustine’s doctrine was first worked out in detail by Saint Thomas Aquinas. He maintained that the consequence of the Fall was not a corruption of our human nature, but the loss of sanctifying grace. Since grace is a gift from God, freely given, its deprivation does not entail a diminution of our human nature. As for concupiscence, it is “a habitual state in which our sense-appetites are not subject to reason as they were in the original integrated state of man.”¹⁶² Sexual intercourse is not inherently sinful.

The Council of Trent carefully avoided getting involved in the disputes of the theologians, but its definition of original sin followed the Thomist rather than the Augustinian line. It explicitly stated that concupiscence is not to be identified with original sin.¹⁶³

Bernard of Morlaix follows Augustine in regard to sexual intercourse before the Fall. Speaking of the Golden Age, which, in its allegorical sense, refers to mankind before the Fall, he says:

People then were fit, steadfast, noble and austere. They used to marry late in life, and they married not from lust but only from a desire to beget immaculate conception of everybody else." (Evelyn Waugh, The life of Ronald Knox, London, Collins, 1962(Fontana books), p.202.) children. The marriage bond was sacred in those days, and kisses were free from any guilt.¹⁶⁴

But, although he urges chastity upon his celibate audience, and although he nowhere develops the theme of marital chastity, it is clear that he does not regard sexual intercourse in marriage as in any way sinful. He laments the decline of "normal intercourse" because of the prevalence of sodomy.¹⁶⁵ He speaks with approval of "the embraces and sexual intercourse of marriage."¹⁶⁶

Although there is no explicit mention of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in the Mariale or in the In libros Regum, it had long been a popular devotion. Saint Augustine, responding to Pelagius, insisted that all men are born in sin. But he went on to say,

The Blessed Virgin Mary is an exception. When the matter of sins is discussed, out of respect for the Lord, I would not want any question to be raised. For how do we know what extra grace may have been given to her so that she could overcome sin totally ...?¹⁶⁷

That, of course, dodges the issue of immaculate conception, because the extra grace need be no more than that accorded to Saint John the Baptist. Similarly, Saint Anselm, in a dialogue with Boso, makes a case for the sinlessness of Mary, but cannot accept the Immaculate Conception:

Boso: ... For although the very conception of this individual human nature [of Christ] is free from the sin of bodily pleasure, the Virgin herself from whom it was taken was nevertheless conceived in iniquities and her mother had conceived her in sins and she was born with original sin, since even she sinned in Adam in whom all have sinned.¹⁶⁸

Anselm: ... But that virgin from whom this man [Christ] of whom we are speaking was born, was among those who before his birth were cleansed from sin through Him and He was taken from the virgin in this state of purity.¹⁶⁹

Nevertheless, popular devotion to the Immaculate Conception in the twelfth century was such that Saint Bernard of Clairvaux felt obliged to write a long letter to the canons of Lyons, protesting because they were proposing to introduce the feast of the Conception of Mary on 8 December in their diocese. He makes it perfectly clear that, in his view, the doctrine is false because the conception of Mary entailed ordinary sexual intercourse between Joachim and Anne. Since sexual intercourse necessarily entails sin, and is the means by which original sin is transmitted, Mary cannot have been exempt from original sin from the time of her conception.

How could it be the case, either that the holiness [of the Immaculate Conception] was achieved without the sanctifying Spirit, or that the Holy Spirit aided and abetted a sinful act? How could there not be sin, where there was lust?¹⁷⁰

Even saint Thomas Aquinas, whose theory of original sin would have rebutted Saint Bernard's objection, did not believe that Mary was sanctified from the moment of her conception. "If Mary's soul was never infected with inherited sin that would prejudice the dignity of Christ as the saviour of all mankind."¹⁷¹ In Saint Thomas' day, the general opinion of theologians was opposed to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The Franciscan Duns Scotus gives his opinion in favour of the doctrine with a timidity which clearly betrays his consciousness that he is in a minority. He maintains that God might, had he so chosen, have exempted Mary from original sin, and might on the other hand have allowed her to remain under it for a time, and then purified her. He adds that "God knows" which of these possible ways was actually taken. "But if it is not contrary to the authority of the Church or of the saints, it seems commendable to attribute that which is more excellent to Mary."¹⁷² Scotus died in 1308 and it was not until after his death that his views became generally accepted, to the extent that when the Dominican John Montesono denied the Immaculate Conception in 1387, he was condemned by the University of Paris and the Bishop of Paris.¹⁷³

But in an unsophisticated form, the doctrine seems to have been popular with the generality of the faithful in the twelfth century. The belief was not founded in subtleties or scholastic arguments, but simply in a conviction that the Mother of God must have been totally free of any stain of sin, original or actual.¹⁷⁴ The naivety and depth of the devotion is well expressed by Eadmer of Canterbury, a disciple of Anselm's, but holding different views about this doctrine. In his Liber de excellentia Beatae Mariae, he writes:

The Blessed Virgin Mary pleased God excellently in every possible way. We hold that doctrine, after all (ab omni), as a matter of faith. I am quite unable to believe, for any reason whatsoever, that she could be so pleasing to him if there was in her any slightest stain either of original or of actual sin ...¹⁷⁵

Anybody who says that you [Mary] could not possibly have evaded the law of original sin, to which everybody else is subject, even though before the birth of your blessed son you were exempted from the death of the body, is quite wrong, and not worth answering. How could God have pre-ordained you the be the Mother of God, if he had not led you also to this [exemption from original sin]? ... Therefore the children of Holy Church ought to venerate the very beginning of your creation [your conception], if they believe that you are holy and chaste and free from that stain of corruption and sin. Let those who feel otherwise believe what they think best. I, for my part, most holy Lady, I am your servant in all ways, and I know, I believe and I proclaim ...¹⁷⁶

Eadmer's enthusiastic defence both of the feast of the Conception of Mary and of belief in her Immaculate Conception ignores completely the arguments of the theologians, and he makes no attempt to reply to their objections. It is the earliest written defence of the doctrine that we have, but it probably represents both the emotional strength and the unsophisticated character of a popular devotion which had existed for many years. The author of the Mariale avoids both the enthusiasm of Eadmer's extreme on the one hand, and the almost Manichean extreme of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux on the other.

Eadmer takes for granted a belief that Mary was exempt from the death of the body. Strictly speaking, the Assumption does not necessarily entail a belief that Mary did not die. That matter is left open in Pius XII's definition of the doctrine.¹⁷⁷ The early legends of the last days of Mary never mention her death. In medieval tradition, she seems, in this respect, to have been regarded as comparable to Enoch,¹⁷⁸ Moses,¹⁷⁹ Elijah¹⁸⁰ and Saint John.¹⁸¹ In that form, belief in the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary has great antiquity. As in the case of the Immaculate Conception, so in the case of Mary's exemption from bodily death and her assumption into heaven, the Mariale takes no extreme position.

Various scholars have argued that, in the twelfth century, the theocentric traditions of Christendom were weakened by devotion to Mary. Henry Adams, for example, maintained that "In the Western Church the Virgin had always been highly honoured, but it was not until the crusades that she began to overshadow the Trinity itself."¹⁸² D. Schaff argued that she was given a "dignity equal to or superior to that of Christ"¹⁸³ and G.G. Coulton that she was exalted "practically into a fourth person of the Trinity."¹⁸⁴ The Mariale does not support these views of twelfth century devotion to Our Lady. The major theme of the Mariale is that we should pray to Mary to help us to resist temptation and to ask her to intercede for us for mercy from her son. But there is no suggestion that she is "a semi-divine intercessor."¹⁸⁵ Christ is also seen as a person to whom prayers should be addressed and as an intercessor for us with the Father. But Christ is the second Person of the Trinity and, even more to the point, it is Christ who will come again to judge the living and the dead. Mary is our most valuable intercessor precisely because she is not divine. Mary Vincentine Gripkey, in a study of Latin and Old French miracula prior to the fourteenth century, concluded that "the miracles of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries do not differ in the matter of theocentrism from those of the preceding centuries; no collection has been found which does not present the Blessed Virgin in the secondary role as suppliant, dependent upon the will of God for the favor she wishes to bestow upon a client."¹⁸⁶ That is true also of the Mariale and of Bernard's reflections on Mary in the In libros Regum..

The Mariale is devotional rather than homiletic, and its deeply personal consciousness of sin complements the satirical and admonitory emphasis of the De contemptu mundi and the De octo vitiis. It also puts Bernard's misogyny in a somewhat different light, as also does the hymn of praise to Mary which is found in the In libros Regum.¹⁸⁷ Bernard appears to have been representative of his time in relation to reverence for Mary, the mother of God, siding neither with the conservatives, like his namesake of Clairvaux, nor with the radicals like Eadmer. That is consistent with his belief in mediocritas aurea, an important part of his inheritance from the Latin literary tradition, which is examined in the next chapter.

¹G.G.Coulton, Five centuries of religion, volume 4, The last days of medieval monachism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1950 (Cambridge studies in medieval life and thought), p.691.
²David Knowles, The religious orders in England, Volume 3, The Tudor age, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1959, p.295.
³ibid., p.296-297.
⁴Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage, Sexual practices and the medieval church, Buffalo, Prometheus Books, 1982, p.66.
⁵Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian tradition, Hamden, Archon, 1975 (first published Longmans, 1955), p.1-28.
⁶PL 145,161. Alii siquidem secum, alii aliorum manibus, alii inter femora, alii denique consummato actu contra naturam delinqunt; et in his ita per gradus ascendutur, ut quaeque posteriora praecedentibus graviora judicentur ..."
⁷2a2ae,154,11.
⁸A catechism of Christian doctrine, approved by the archbishops and bishops of England and Wales and directed to be used in all their dioceses, revised edition, London, Catholic Truth Society, 1953, p.57.
⁹Canon 2357-2359.
¹⁰Catechism of the Catholic Church, official edition for Australia and New Zealand, Homebush, St. Pauls, 1994, p.566.
¹¹Several aspects and cultures are explored in Homosexuality in the ancient world, edited by Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson, New York, Garland, 1992 (Studies in homosexuality, 1).
¹²Horace is the obvious example. "Mollibus in pueris aut in puellis urere" (Epodes, 11,4), "Mille puellarum, puerorum mille furores" (Satires, 2,3,325). Jasper Griffin discusses the issue in Latin poets and Roman life, London, Duckworth, 1985, p.25. "The evidence collected by Kroll, and indeed by Nisbet and Hubbard, strongly suggests that relations with boys, provided they were not ingenui, were both very common and very lightly viewed."
¹³The relevance of Juno is clear; she was the wife of Jupiter, displaced by Ganymede. Petronilla was an early Roman virgin and martyr. Legend has it that she was a daughter of Saint Peter. Perhaps Bernard was looking simply for an example of goodness and purity, and Petronilla met his need for a rhyme with "illa."
¹⁴The first three are clearly intended as examples of unnatural female lust. For Lycisca, see Juvenal, 6,122-124. It is interesting that Bernard does not offer an example of a lesbian.
¹⁵De contemptu mundi, 3,181-216.
¹⁶Horace, Epistles, 1,2,69-70.
¹⁷"Patici Sodomite."
¹⁸"Gaudent feda pati qui sunt ut agant generati."
¹⁹De octo vitiis, 930-979.
²⁰Yet he compares sodomites to hyenas, which were supposed, in medieval bestiary lore, to practise sodomy. Vern L. Bullough's "The sin against nature and homosexuality" is a a useful study of the medieval concept that certain sexual activities were against nature (Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage, Sexual practices and the medieval church, Buffalo, Prometheus books, 1982, p.55-71.)
²¹Presumably, if male prostitutes are conditioned to their trade by early training, their responsibility is somewhat diminished; but Bernard does not consider that.
²²De contemptu mundi, 3,196-197.
²³John Boswell, Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality; gay people in western Europe from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980, p.232-233.
²⁴ibid., p.235.
²⁵ibid., p.216.
²⁶ibid., p.243-266.
²⁷ibid., p.222. He quotes Aelred's De institutione inclusarum: "Quam miser ego tunc qui meam pudicitiam perdidi, tam beata tu [his sister] cuius virginitatem gratia divina protexit."
²⁸ibid., p.218.
²⁹ibid., p.218.
³⁰ibid., p.44.
³¹ibid., p.222-223.
³²ibid., p.133.
³³ibid., p.238.
³⁴And, in modern times, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Big Ears and Noddy.
³⁵Carmina de Trinitate, 405.
³⁶"Si tamen audemus de parvis et prope nullis/ Conjectare, quod est summum summeque colendum." Carmina de Trinitate, 407-408.
³⁷Ovid, Tristia, 4,4,72. Ovid is referring to Orestes and Pylades.
³⁸Horace, Odes, 1,3,8.
³⁹Carmina de Trinitate, 412-420.
⁴⁰Similar problems of interpretation of friendships between persons of the same sex present themselves in Boswell's Same-sex unions in premodern Europe, New York, Villard Books, 1994.
⁴¹De contemptu mundi, Prologus.
⁴²C.S. Lewis, The allegory of love; a study in medieval tradition, London, Oxford University Press, 1936, p.225.
⁴³Boswell, Christianity, p.220.
⁴⁴Peter the Venerable, The letters of Peter the Venerable, edited, with an introduction and notes by Giles Constable, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1967, 2v. (Harvard historical studies, 78), v.1., p.52.
⁴⁵Boswell, Christianity, p.237.
⁴⁶Cum peteret puerum Saturninus, Iphis Iantha, Coetus ait superum: "Scelus est." Illud voco culpam. Quo prohibente nefas, ludum ridente virorum. Altera fit juvenis, fit femina neuter eorum. Si scelus esset idem, sententia coelicolarum Alterutrum transformaret, neutramve duarum.
⁴⁷Boswell, Christianity, p.44
⁴⁸ibid., p.253.
⁴⁹Jo Ann McNamara, "The Herrenfrage; the restructuring of the gender system, 1050-1150", in Medieval masculinities; regarding men in the middle ages, Clare A. Lees, editor, with the assistance of Thelma Fenster and Jo Ann McNamara, Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 1994 (Medieval cultures 7) p.19-20.
⁵⁰ibid., p.3.
⁵¹Boswell, Christianity, p.218.
⁵²Henrietta Leyser points out that it is in the twelfth century that homophobia first appears in vernacular literature. (Medieval women, a social history of women in England, 450-1500, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995, p.256.
⁵³Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou; Cathars and Catholics in a French village 1294-1324, translated by Barbara Bray, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1980, p.144-149.
⁵⁴Michael Goodich, The unmentionable vice; homosexuality in the later medieval period, Santa Barbara, ABC- Clio, 1979, p.89-123.
⁵⁵Boswell, Christianity, p.285-286, 401-402.
⁵⁶ibid., p.269-270.
⁵⁷Ladurie, Montaillou, p.148.
⁵⁸Goodrich, The unmentionable vice, p.91
⁵⁹Works and days, 373-375.
⁶⁰Theogony, 561-612.
⁶¹R. Howard Bloch, "Medieval misogyny," in Misogyny, misandry and misanthropy, edited by R. Howard Bloch and Frances Ferguson, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989, p.20.
⁶²Genesis 2,23.
⁶³See also below, p.206.
⁶⁴De octo vitiis, 674-693.
⁶⁵Chartula nostra, 81-88.
⁶⁶Andreas Capellanus, De amore libri tres, recensuit E. Trojel, 2nd ed., Munich, Eidos, 1964, p.340-341.
⁶⁷De amore, p.314.
⁶⁸ibid., p.346.
⁶⁹ibid., p.349.
⁷⁰Bloch, "Medieval misogyny," p.20.
⁷¹De amore, p.28-29.
⁷²Maurice Keen, Chivalry, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984, p.30. See also discussion by C.S. Lewis, Allegory of love, p.41-42.
⁷³"Plebeius ad plebeiam." It is clear from the dialogue between the commoner and the noblewoman that the commoner is a city businessman. Peasants are not included among commoners.
⁷⁴De amore, p.19-219.
⁷⁵ibid., p.236.
⁷⁶ibid., p.146.
⁷⁷Paolo Cherchi, Andreas and the ambiguity of courtly love, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994, p.40.
⁷⁸De octo vitiis, 728-731.
⁷⁹Bede Jarrett, Social theories of the middle ages, London, Cass, 1926, p.69.
⁸⁰Jo Ann McNamara, "The Herrenfrage," p.19-20.
⁸¹See below, p.227 ff.
⁸²Mariale, 8,12. Mundi florem contra morem Tui spernens generis Carnis curam et naturam Cohibendam suggeris.
⁸³De contemptu mundi, 2,451-520, with many omissions. The diatribe against women continues to line 562.
⁸⁴PL 171, 1428-1430.
⁸⁵Ecclus. 42,14: "melior est iniquitas viri quam benefaciens mulier."
⁸⁶De contemptu mundi, 2,509-510.
⁸⁷"Rara, rarior haec avis." De contemptu mundi, 2,537-538. "Rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno." Juvenal 6,165.
⁸⁸De contemptu mundi, 2,539.
⁸⁹Ronald E. Pepin, "The dire diction of medieval misogyny," Speculum 52(1993):663.
⁹⁰R.C. Petry, "Medieval eschatology and social responsibility in Bernard of Morval's De contemptu mundi," Speculum 24(1949):209.
⁹¹"The poem [the sixth satire of Juvenal] is sometimes called a satire on the female sex ... It is not. It is a satire on marriage: it is a denunciation of wives, and in particular of rich wives ... " (Gilbert Highet, Juvenal the satirist; a study, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1954, p.91.)
⁹²Jarrett, Social theories in the middle ages, p.73
⁹³Mary Martin MacLaughlin, "Peter Abelard and the dignity of women", Pierre Abelard, Pierre le Venerable; les courants philosophiques, litteraires et artistiques en occident au milieu du XIIe siecle, Paris, Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975 (Colloques internationaux du Centre 546), p.310.
⁹⁴Hildegard writes, "Oh woman, what a splendid being you are! For you have set your foundation in the sun and have conquered the world" (Letter 116, PL 197, 336-338). Yet she castigates her own time by calling it "a womanish time" (tempus muliebre - Letter 13, PL 197, 167) and she regularly refers to herself as only a poor little woman.
⁹⁵Summa theologiae, 1a,92,1.
⁹⁶ibid., 1a,93,1.
⁹⁷Sermon 94, Ad omnes mulieres, Quoted in Jarrett, Social theories in the middle ages, p.71-72.
⁹⁸David Knowles, The historian and character and other essays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1963, p.17.
⁹⁹ibid., p.30.
¹⁰⁰Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and renascences in Western art, New York, Harper and Row, 1972 (first published 1969), p.110-111.
¹⁰¹Knowles, The historian and character, p.16-30.
¹⁰²John Boswell, Christianity, passim.
¹⁰³McNamara, "The Herenfrage", p.22.
¹⁰⁴See above, p.184ff.
¹⁰⁵See above, p.176ff.
¹⁰⁶De contemptu mundi, 2,449.
¹⁰⁷ibid., 2,452.
¹⁰⁸ibid., 2,455.
¹⁰⁹ibid., 2,485.
¹¹⁰Chartula nostra, 213-214.
¹¹¹De contemptu mundi, 3,184.

¹¹²ibid., 3,208; 3,215ff.
¹¹³William G. Craven, "Coluccio Salutati's defence of poetry," Renaissance studies 10(1996):29-30.
¹¹⁴Harry Caplan, "Rhetorical invention in some medieval tractates on preaching," Speculum 2(1927):284-295.
¹¹⁵Curtius, European literature and the Latin middle ages, p.122.
¹¹⁶R. Bultot, "La doctrine du mepris du monde chez Bernard le Clusien (suite et fin)," Moyen age 70(1964):358-359. The critic is R.C. Petry.
¹¹⁷Dorothy L. Sayers, Unpopular opinions, London, Gollancz, 1946, p.113.
¹¹⁹Judith Allen, "Evidence and silence; feminism and the limits of history," in Feminist challenge; social and political theory, edited by Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1986, p.187.
¹²⁰E. Fox-Genovese, "Placing women's history in history," New Left review 133(May-June 1982):29.
¹²¹Marilyn Lake, "Women, gender and history," Australian feminist studies 7-8(1988):9.
¹²²Jill Matthews, "Feminist history," Labour history 50(1986):153.
¹²³Sandra Harding, The science question in feminism, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1986, p.9.
¹²⁴ibid., p.251.
¹²⁵Susan McClary, Feminine endings; music, gender and sexuality, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p.33.
¹²⁶Andrea Nye, Words of power; a feminist reading of the history of thought, New York, Routledge, 1990, p.5.
¹²⁷ibid., p.176-177.
¹²⁸Denise Thompson, Reading between the lines; a lesbian feminist critique of feminist accounts of sexuality. Sydney, Gorgon's Head Press, 1991, p.25.
¹²⁹Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing feminism; cautionary tales from the strange world of women's studies, New York, Basic books, 1994, p.5.
¹³⁰Henrietta Leyser, Medieval women, a social history of women in England, 450-1500. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995, p.256.
¹³¹Georges Duby, Dames du XIIe siecle, [Paris] Gallimard, 1995-1996, 3v., v. 3, p.218.
¹³²Marina Warner, Alone of all her sex; the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary. London, Pan books, 1985 (Picador), p.xxi.
¹³³ibid., p.xxiii.
¹³⁴The prologue consists of forty-nine leonine lines. The fifteen rhythmi average thirty-six stanzas of four lines each and the epilogue has sixteen stanzas of four lines each.
¹³⁵Mariale, 14,2-3.
¹³⁶The concept of Mary as the channel of all grace and the gateway to heaven occurs throughout the Mariale (for example, 6,20: "Ex qua manat, qui nos sanat, fons caelestis gratiae.") Mary is nowhere explicitly said to be co-redemptrix with Christ, but Bernard's language suggests that the concept would not be repugnant to him (for example, 13,13: "Per Mariam, dum Messiam, eius natum, sequimur, immortales et aequales angelis efficimur.") For the definition of these doctrines, see Henricus Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 31st ed., Barcelona, Herder, 1960, p. 541-2 and 558.
¹³⁷Mariale, 12,13-18.
¹³⁸Mariale, 13,20-22.
¹³⁹Mariale, 10,38-39.
¹⁴⁰Reading "mereamur" for Dreves' "mereantur."
¹⁴¹Mariale, Epilogue, 4-14.
¹⁴²Mariale, 8,30-31.
¹⁴³Mariale, 5,14-32.
¹⁴⁴Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, p.45.
¹⁴⁵Mariale, 8,38.
¹⁴⁶Mariale, 12,9.
¹⁴⁷Mariale, 13,10.
¹⁴⁸"Beatus venter qui te portavit et ubera quae suxisti." Luke, 11,27.
¹⁴⁹Denzinger Enchiridion symbolorum, p.714-716.
¹⁵⁰See discussion of Eadmer, below, p.239.
¹⁵¹It might be thought to be implied, perhaps, in 5,33-35: "Now, raised to the greatest height, you live with your son ... " But that falls short of a clear reference to a belief in the Assumption.
¹⁵²Mariale, 6,3.
¹⁵³Mariale, 8,3.
¹⁵⁴Mariale, 9,5.
¹⁵⁵Mariale, 11,19-20.
¹⁵⁶In the first two chapters of Romans, Paul argues that everything in the world, even sin, follows from God's will. All human beings are trapped in sin in order to lead to salvation of all mankind and all creation through Christ. In the fifth chapter of Romans and elsewhere he states a connection between the sin of Adam and the bondage of mankind to sin.
¹⁵⁷C.K. Barrett translates the crucial passage: "as through one man sin entered the world (and through sin came that man's death), so also death came to all men, because they all sinned." (A commentary on the epistle to the Romans, 2nd ed., London, Black, 1991, p.103.)
¹⁵⁸A Catholic dictionary, by William E. Addis and Thomas Arnold, 5th ed., London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1897, p.686.
¹⁵⁹City of God, XIII,3.
¹⁶⁰ibid., XIII,17 and 18.
¹⁶¹ When Arnold Bennett said he did not believe in the Immaculate Conception, Ronald Knox commented that his “statement lacks, perhaps, scientific precision. Does Mr Bennett believe in original sin? I imagine not; and if he does not believe in original sin, then he believes in the Immaculate Conception; not merely in the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady but in the immaculate conception of everybody else.” (Evelyn Waugh, The life of Ronald Knox, London, Collins, 1962(Fontana books), p.202.)
¹⁶²Summa theologiae, 1a2ae, 82, 3-4.
¹⁶³Decretum super peccato originali, Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, p.281-283.
¹⁶⁴De contemptu mundi, 2,47-50.
¹⁶⁵De contemptu mundi, 3,207.
¹⁶⁶De octo vitiis, 948.
¹⁶⁷De natura et gratia, PL 44,267.
¹⁶⁸Marina Warner wrongly takes this to be a statement of Anselm's belief. (Alone of all her sex; the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary. London, Pan books, 1985 (Picador), p.241.)
¹⁶⁹Cur Deus homo, 2,16. PL 158,416-419.
¹⁷⁰PL 182, 335.
¹⁷¹Summa theologiae, 3a, 27, 1-2.
¹⁷²Catholic dictionary, p.470-471. See also New Catholic encyclopedia, v.7, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1967, p.380-381.
¹⁷³Catholic dictionary, p.471.
¹⁷⁴Marina Warner recounts a joke that W. H. Auden was fond of: "When the woman taken in adultery was brought to Jesus, he said, `Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.' All was silence and the Pharisees began drifting away in shame, when suddenly a stone whizzed past Jesus' ear. Without turning, and in a tone of deep irritation, Jesus cried out: `Mother!'" (Alone of all her sex, p.383)
¹⁷⁵PL 159, 561.
¹⁷⁶Tractatus de conceptione B. Mariae Virginis, PL 159, 309. Migne prints this in his appendix of spurious works of Saint Anselm, but it is attributed to Eadmer, with a date of 1123 or 1139 (New Catholic encyclopaedia, v.7., p.380).
¹⁷⁷"Expleto terrestris vitae cursu." Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, p.716.
¹⁷⁸Genesis, 5,24; Hebrews 11,5.
¹⁷⁹Deuteronomy, 34,6.
¹⁸⁰2 Kings, 2,11 (Vulgate 4 Kings 2,11)
¹⁸¹John, 21,23.
¹⁸²Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, with an introduction by Ralph Adams Cram, London, Constable, 1950, p.90.
¹⁸³D. Schaff, History of the Christian Church, New York, 1907, vol 5, part 1, p.833.
¹⁸⁴G.G. Coulton, Five centuries of religion, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1923-1958, vol.1, p.139.
¹⁸⁵G.G.Coulton, Medieval panorama; the English scene from Conquest to Reformation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1949, p.623.
¹⁸⁶Mary Vincente Gripkey, The Blessed Virgin Mary as mediatrix in the Latin and Old French legend prior to the fourteenth century, Washington, Catholic University of America, 1938, p.219.
¹⁸⁷In libros Regum, 918 ff. See also below, p.355.