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Sir Gawain’s courtly manners & sexual dynamism transcend gyno-idolatry
Men tend to idolize women. So it was for Sir Gawain and Sir Kay when they, along with Bishop Baldwin, found themselves spending a cold, rainy night in the Carle of Carlisle’s castle in Inglewood...
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Lombard risked life against wife’s advice for epic victory over snail
Walking around the field that he had assiduously cultivated and plowed, a Lombard joyfully observed his abundant crops. Then, unexpectedly, a snail appeared. The Lombard didn’t know what it was....
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Juturna’s love for her brother Turnus no match for Juno’s hate
In the ending book of Virgil’s epic Aeneid, Turnus proposed to engage in single combat against Aeneas rather than many men dying in mass fighting between the Italian and Trojan men. Both Turnus and...
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Semele incinerated after wanting it all from Jupiter
Why can’t women have it all? This question attracts enormous public concern, much more so than why men can’t have it all. Difficulties with women having it all have been addressed in literary history...
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BBC & Mary Beard remove fig leaf obscuring castration culture
Dominant authorities have long trivialized the castration culture deeply entrenched in Western civilization. Rather than listening to its victims, believing them, and expressing compassion for their...
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Catullus to Secundus, then fall to ignorance, bigotry & intolerance
Nearly 2100 years ago within the Roman Republic, the Veronese poet Catullus wrote passionate Latin poems of incarnated love. Writing in Latin about 1535 in Spain, the young Dutch poet Janus Secundus...
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queen consorts: 9th-century Eadburh didn’t affect 11th-century Emma
To support the myth of women’s historical powerlessness, modern historians distinguish between queens regnant and queen consorts. A queen regnant is formally the realm’s ruler. A queen consort is...
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beauty contests: De tribus puellis no judgment of Paris
In the ancient account of the judgment of Paris, the noble shepherd Paris judged a beauty contest between the goddesses Juno, Athena, and Venus. For choosing her, Venus promised Paris the love of the...
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Juno’s hate sent Allecto to inflame Amata, Turnus, and bitches
In the Aeneid that Virgil wrote more than two thousand years ago, the ruling goddess of the cosmos Juno bitterly resented that Venus was judged more beautiful than she. Juno was furious at her husband...
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rustic & elite: appreciating men’s unity in diversity
As the brilliant twelfth-century poem About Three Young Women {De tribus puellis} indicates, medieval Latin literature appreciated men as distinctively male human beings. The most learned and...
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lai Conseil elevated Latin rhetoric of De nuntio sagaci into French
The Old French lai Advice {Conseil}, probably written in the second decade of the thirteen century, emphasizes in its meta-comments that it’s a translation into French. That probably isn’t literally...
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Aeneid against Rhome & Trojan women burning ships to found Rome
The Aeneid, Virgil’s Latin epic of Trojan survivors establishing a new kingdom in central Italy, has been central to Rome’s imaginative foundation for more than two thousand years. The Aeneid draws...
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Lienor overcame injustice with false accusation of rape in medieval romance
Jean Renart’s early thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose or of Guillaume de Dole {Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole} shows justice done with deception. This innovative medieval romance assumes...
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medieval men cursed in response to being sexually abused & raped
Deeply entrenched castration culture supports castration of men as well as men being sexually abused and raped. Within gynocentric society, men’s sufferings are cruelly marginalized. Yet prior to...
View ArticleVersus Eporedienses playfully mythologized Pavia’s lovely women
In their ardent love for women, men commonly proclaim that the women of their place are more lovely than women anywhere else. Late in the eleventh century near Pavia, a learned cleric apparently made...
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reveling in men’s sexuality: Alda & Pyrrhus beyond Spurca & Spurius
The form and sexual action of men’s penises has engendered prevalent figures of the penis as weapon and brutalizing representations of men’s sexuality. Moreover, men historically have been commonly...
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Helen, Laodamia, Lesbia: dispelling men’s myths about women
What man today would wish to be married to Helen of Troy? According to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, millennia ago King Menelaus of Sparta was married to Helen. They had serious difficulties in their...
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Narcissus & Lai de l’Ombre: putting men into their gynocentric place
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the prophet Tiresias declares that the infant Narcissus would live to an old age “if he would not know himself {si se non noverit}.” That prophecy contradicts famous ancient...
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sex & gender trouble addressed with medieval creativity and tolerance
Adults now teach children the complexities of properly identifying girls and boys. That’s a crucial life skill, because if you wrongly gender a person today, you could be demonized and ostracized...
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