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Lavinia’s love for Aeneas began with her mother’s murderous threat
Way back in ancient history, Aeneas and Turnus prepared to fight in single combat for the privilege of marrying Lavinia and thus becoming king of the Latins in Italy. Lavinia’s mother Queen Amata...
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Eracle’s annunciation to Athenaïs in relational and cultural context
In the twelfth-century Old French romance Eracle, a thousand beautiful young women competed in a bride-show to select the emperor’s wife. The divinely perceptive imperial advisor Eracle determined that...
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Lysistrata leads men’s strike: “Not while I’m bleeding.”
Joe: Hail, most manly of all women {χαῖρ᾿, ὦ πασῶν ἀνδρειοτάτη}. Lysistrata, you’re the last hope for men and for the whole world. Please help us! Lysistrata: You ignorant hater, sometimes I think you...
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madly in love: fool for Gallus love lacked Eracle’s Christian wisdom
Over two millennia ago, the Roman poet and military leader Cornelius Gallus figured insane love and love as war. The enormity of these love figures in defining love norms within subsequent European...
View Articleold men’s sexual difficulties: all-encompassing medieval perspectives
Classical Latin literature recognized the epic disaster of men’s impotence. According to medieval European authorities, heterosexuality is divinely commanded. One of Peter of Blois’s twelfth-century...
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Abishag & David: Guillaume de Machaut’s Voir Dit shows possibilities
The aged King David felt cold in bed. On their own initiative, his retainers undertook a wide-ranging search for a young, beautiful, woman to keep him warm. Abishag the Shunammite was victorious in...
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Walahfrid followed Sedulius in Christian literary gardening
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment philosopher-hero Voltaire ended his picaresque novel Candide with the wisdom, “We must cultivate our garden {Il faut cultiver notre jardin}.”...
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Amours & Machaut’s Voir Dit: failed medieval gender revolution
Marginalized medieval French literature depicts strong, independent women who initiated amorous relationships with men. These weren’t unattractive, self-centered women merely seeking someone, anyone...
View Articlemedieval insight: what prevents hate amid gender injustices
With worldly authorities coldly indifferent to men’s sufferings, men endure harsh gender injustices of love and hate. These gender injustices might drive men themselves to hate. Yet men express...
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Ovid as walnut tree: men’s despair supports castration culture
Men today are attacked for having testicles — nuts containing “toxic masculinity.” Appreciation for men’s seminal fruitfulness can help to raise men’s status. Nonetheless, more than two millennia ago,...
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gendered love-quests contradict classical symmetry of Aristaenetus
If a man desires a woman’s love, he has long been required to seek it and win it. This love-quest pattern has been elaborated in countless romances from medieval times to our more repressive age....
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Machaut’s Jugement dou Roy de Navarre: farce of gendered justice
Guillaume de Machaut’s poem The Judgement of the King of Navarre {Le Jugement dou Roy de Navarre}, which he probably wrote shortly after the terrible plague of 1349, depicts a farce of gendered...
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lai of Argentille & Haveloc protested gender in medieval marriage
Political scheming caused Princess Argentille to be married to the kitchen scullion Haveloc in the Anglo-Norman lai Haveloc written about the year 1200. Like the seventh-century English nobles...
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medieval literature describes men’s passionate desire for many women
Agents of ignorance and bigotry have created a myth of medieval European sexual repression, and even worse, misogyny. In fact, medieval literature describes men’s passionate desire for women and the...
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Marie de France depicted medieval women’s generous love for men
In her twelfth-century lai Guildeluëc and Guilliadun, or Eliduc {Guildeluëc et Guilliadun, ou Eliduc}, the great medieval writer Marie de France has the woman Guilliadun angrily declare to the woman...
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