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musa iocosa: vital medieval poetic medicine for pedestalizing women
In response to Dante Alighieri’s Beatrice-pedestalizing Vita Nuova, Giovanni Boccaccio offered the public the powerful poetic medicine of his Corbaccio. Unfortunately, from medieval times to the...
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bird-brains engage in scholarly debate: The Owl and the Nightingale
The Owl and the Nightingale, a Middle English poem dating probably to about 1200, provides under-appreciated insight into the social positions of women and men. An owl and a nightingale throughout the...
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strong medieval women: Sibylla of Acerra & Constance of Hauteville
In contrast to gender stereotypes, strong, independent, highly privileged women have governed men throughout history. These women were accustomed to having men do whatever they wished. They understood...
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medieval lesson in winning women’s love: aloofness, not groveling
Many men today think that they can gain women’s love by showing intense interest in female gender gaps. Self-centered women won’t object to men denouncing men’s crimes and men striving to reduce the...
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ancient Exeter riddles highlight contradictions of men’s sexuality
The Exeter Book, an Anglo-Saxon (Old English) manuscript surviving from the tenth century, includes about ninety five riddles. These riddles describe a wide variety of objects and phenomena. The Exeter...
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men’s unruly sexual imagination: a beauty white as whale’s bone
Hear me! I to you will tell of such anxious distress in which I dwell. There’s no fire so hot in Hell reserved for a man who loves secretly and dares not tell what he cannot understand. I wish I were...
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Alliterative Morte Arthure: sexual violence against men & cuckolding
When King Arthur landed in Normandy, a man came forward. This man was a member of the Knights Templar, a military order of men founded to protect the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the women and men...
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repugnant puer senex results from child without father’s seed
The figure of the puer senex — the youth mature beyond his years, the boy as wise as an old man — for millennia has been used in rhetoric of praise. Virgil deployed such a figure to praise a youth....
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traditional thoughts: adultery with Helen of Troy barren & devastating
Paris, the very beautiful son of the Trojan king, set out to abduct the most valued person in Sparta. That person was Helen, a very beautiful woman and the wife of the Spartan king. While men’s...
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Wynnere and Wastoure: reject gender subordination to be a winner
Wynnere and Wastoure {Winner and Waster}, an alliterative Middle English poem written in the 1350s, features the personifications Winner and Waster in debate. Their debate encompasses husbands’ gender...
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Paul condemned gyno-idolators along with fornicators & adulterers
While men-abasing “courtly love” became a highly refined form of oppression in medieval Europe, its constituents gyno-idolatory and gynocentrism have been prevalent throughout history. The man enslaved...
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punctuation poems subtly subvert dominant social order with lineation
Challenging the ideology of the dominant social order tends to anger persons entrenched in it. That’s dangerous for dissidents. Creative poets, however, developed means to pass under orthodoxy while...
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medieval men regarded themselves as inferior to women
The women-are-wonderful effect has been scientifically established only in recent decades. Yet men have long regarded themselves as inferior to women. Medieval men rightly recognized that women as...
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Luke’s diptych of Zechariah & Mary shows men’s weakness
After its dedicatory preface to Theophilus (literally, “lover of God”), the Gospel of Luke presents a diptych of birth narratives in which Zechariah and Mary have sharply contrasting positions....
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pious man’s hypocrisy exposed him to being raped by woman
Introducing a story about “a certain blessed Paul {Paulo cuidam Beato}” who lived in Pisa, the eminent medieval church official Poggio Bracciolini declared: The hypocrite is, of all types, the worst...
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