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great Saint Alexander Akimetes’s wicked rationalizing
According to a story that Goscelin of Saint-Bertin heard in the middle of the eleventh century, the anchorite Alexander was highly virtuous. Humble persons understand the risk of temptations and pray...
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natural and mechanical figures against gyno-idolatry
From the perspective of monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, idolatry is a terrible failing. Men nonetheless are prone to gyno-idolatry. The great classical Roman dispeller of...
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wine song and peace in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas
About the year 1200, shortly before the Fourth Crusade, Jean Bodel’s Play of Saint Nicolas {Jeu de Saint Nicolas} highlighted violence against men and possibilities for peace. Fairly arbitrated...
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the male gaze desires to see a woman’s face
When men gaze upon an attractive woman, they aren’t just looking at her body as a sexual object. Men want to see a woman’s face. A man gazes upon a beautiful woman’s face with a sense for her...
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courtly love learning led to student’s humiliation
For more than a century, students of medieval literature have been studying courtly love. Students have been taught that men-abasing courtly love ennobles men. That’s literally sadistic. Even worse,...
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men will love: Jerome desired chorus girls in the desert
Saint Jerome is a revered early church father. His translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin has shaped biblical understanding right up to the present day. When he was about thirty...
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Le Jeu de Robin et Marion shows enduring gender norms
In service to the Count of Artois, Adam de la Halle about the year 1283 wrote The Play of Robin and Marion {Le Jeu de Robin et Marion}. This play is the first surviving secular musical drama in a...
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women-fairies in the madness of Le Jeu de la feuillée
Reading through Adam de la Halle’s Le Jeu de la feuillée, Douglas was appalled at this medieval play. All the men are mean and foolish. He felt that he must be mean and foolish too, since he’s a man....
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medieval feminine power: divine to demonic in elite discourse
Christine de Pizan presented her lengthy defense of women, The Book of the City of Ladies {Le Livre de la Cité des Dames}, to Queen Isabel of France in 1414. Christine presenting her luxurious book to...
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the loneliness of Christine de Pizan in narrow-mindedness
While not an institutional leader nor as learned as the great medieval woman authors Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, Hildegard of Bingen, and Heloise of the Paraclete, Christine de Pizan is probably now...
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men to their health’s peril work only for beautiful women
According to classical myth, the goddess Discordia wasn’t invited to the wedding of Thetis and Peleus. Outraged by that insult, Discordia comes uninvited: She makes something to grieve rich and...
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gender equality and paradise in Le jeu d’Adam
Elaborating upon the biblical account of Eve and Adam, the mid-twelfth-century dramatic masterpiece The Play of Adam {Le jeu d’Adam} represents love, obedience, and gender equality in a highly...
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demon won’t bring home bacon for marriage worse than Hell
The raucous and outrageous medieval literature of men’s sexed protest witnesses to women’s dominance of medieval society. In relatively liberal and tolerant medieval Europe, exasperated men were...
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parrot promotes incarnate love in medieval lyric
The ancient Sanskrit masterpiece Seventy Tales of the Parrot {Shuka Saptati} features a parrot shrewd enough to deter a passionate wife from pursuing adultery in her husband’s absence. The parrot, who...
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medieval men’s ardent, unlimited love for women
Authoritative rhetoric experts now preach wordy social constructions of the human body, sex, sexuality, romantic love, and all of reality. Such social constructions are socially constructed in line...
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Saint Jerome’s sophisticated communication
Massive investments in public education haven’t produced masses of sophisticated readers. Instead many persons now understand words like simpletons. It’s not just that they believe in “bad” words...
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Psychomachia gender-transformed epic into fight for new life
The Iliad and the Aeneid, the most influential epics in western Eurasian literature, ring with horrific violence against men. Violence against men has been normalized as simply violence. It’s seldom...
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medieval romance: Melior led Partonopeu into rape and marriage
Urgently seeking a husband to solidify her rule, the Byzantine Empress Melior traveled to France. She loved Partonopeu of Blois merely from reports of his charm and worth. He, a nephew of King Clovis...
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Lucretius’s atomic theory lacks bodily penetration & immortality
With his atomic understanding of human bodies, the classical Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius regarded sexual reproduction abstractly. He also argued that the soul expired with the body’s death. Given...
View Articleovercoming disparagement of men’s sexuality in ancient Greek poetry
Men have long been disparaged as being sexually like dogs. In ancient Greece, men’s sexuality was disparaged and harshly regulated. Yet across about 500 years — from an epigram of Dioscorides in the...
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