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Pyramus & Thisbe from Ovid’s gender subtlety to polarized Chaucer
The ancient Greek tale Hero and Leander tells of two young lovers who died for love of each other. While gender symmetry characterizes ancient Greek romance, Hero and Leander is starkly...
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living classics: Amphitryon cuckolded & Geta duped via book learning
Mighty abstractions, when connected to ordinary life, tend to lead to folly. In the twelfth century, the Latin comedy Geta appropriated Plautus’s classical Roman comedy Amphitryon to challenge the...
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Chastelaine de Vergi: the tragedy of men’s subservience to women
In the influential thirteenth-century romance Chastelaine de Vergi, the lady (chastelaine) holding the important castle at Vergi in Burgundy granted her love to a brave and bold knight. She stipulated...
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Babio, courtly lover to his step-daughter, cuckolded & castrated
In the twelfth-century Latin comedy Babio, Babio is an “old man in love {senex amans}.” That’s an unfair classical figure of ridicule. Old men, just like old women, can love well. But Babio wasn’t in...
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Béroul’s Tristan narrates evil persons’ lies vs. good ones’ truth
In Béroul’s twelfth-century romance, evil dwarfs and malicious barons repeatedly told King Mark of his vassal-nephew Tristan having sex with Mark’s wife Iseut. The evil dwarfs and malicious barons were...
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no medieval romance: queens sexually harass Graelent & Guingamor
Social-scientific surveys indicate that women rape men about as often as men rape women. Nonetheless, public concern about women raping men lags far behind public concern about persons uttering...
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marriage encomium in dialog with Lidia in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale
The Merchant’s Tale in Chaucer’s late-fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales includes a lengthy encomium to marriage. Neither the marriage-seeking knight January, nor the woefully married merchant, nor...
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Marie de France’s Equitan on self-abasing men & women who kill men
Marie de France’s twelfth-century lai Equitan tells of equity and the man Equitan, judge and king of Nantes in Brittany. Equitan “delighted in pleasure and love-service {deduit amout e druerie}.” While...
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You can subscribe to purple motes for free by email or through its RSS feed. Subscribe to get artifacts to help you imagine more! The provider of the purple motes subscription services will be...
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lais Cor & Mantel: men’s solidarity in being cuckolded
Parental knowledge is a fundamental gender inequality. Women know for certain when they have biological children. Without the benefit of modern DNA testing, men don’t know. Rather than seeking to...
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Miles Gloriosus from Plautus to Arnulf of Orléans
In literature throughout history, men have been disparaged, abused, castrated, and sometimes even killed. More than 2200 years ago, the Roman playwright Plautus depicted a soldier as a stupid, lustful...
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Floire et Blancheflor: roman idyllique from ancient Greek romance
Sexual symmetry distinguishes ancient Greek romance from other classical literature. For example, Longus’s ancient Greek romance Daphnis and Chloe tells of two adolescents who grow up together and come...
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Matthew of Vendôme’s Milo: poetic justice for low-status men
According to mythic medievalism, a medieval lord had the right to sleep with any woman in his realm before any other man did. That’s known as the “right of the first night {jus primae noctis},” “right...
View Articledomineering, barking wives not worth their wealth in Plautus’s plays
As presented by Plautus in Rome about the year 206 BGC, Periplectomenus was a fifty-four year-old man who had never married. He had a lively mind, was in good health, and owned his own house. He also...
View Articleequality activists seize US Capitol & decree full equality
Near the US Capitol, cis-gender equality student-activist Praxagora emerges from her Volvo. Her thumb presses furiously on her iPhone 11. She stares at her phone intently for a long time. Then she...
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sanctifying Desiré’s sexual relationship with a fairy
In a lai from thirteenth-century France, Desiré was a young, handsome, passionate knight. He was the son of the King of Scotland and lived in Calder. To demonstrated his worth, for seven years he...
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Baucis et Traso: can’t make a whore into a virgin
Men tend to be romantically simple. Many men just want to have sex with a woman thrilled with the joy of her first experience of the masculine sexual gift. Unfortunately, sophisticated women can...
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faithful, baby-saving dog Saint Guinefort was male
Throughout the written record of Eurasia, one of the most pervasive stories is that of a faithful animal who saves a baby, yet is unjustly punished for that action. The earliest evidence of this story...
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De uxore cerdonis depicts beautiful & violent medieval woman
Medieval women tend to be romantically imagined as damsels in distress or ladies cheering on knights as they engage in brutal violence against men. Most medieval women, however, engaged in the rough...
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Tyolet and Tydorel underscore Perceval’s devastating father-death
Both Perceval in Chrétien de Troyes’s late-twelfth-century French romance Perceval and Tyolet in an early thirteenth-century lai Tyolet grew up in the woods with their mothers after their fathers...
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