In twelfth-century France, two women wrote extraordinary texts on sex and marriage: Heloise and Marie de France. Despite their positions of subservience to men, Heloise and Marie de France used text to instruct as well as to receive instruction.In their works, men and women enter into dialogue with each other.During the twelfth century, women were encouraged by priests to be preachers to their husbands, since it was assumed that wives could influence their husbands in ways that priests could not.In their texts, however, Marie de France and Heloise became teachers on the nature of marriage and sex rather than preachers of the gospel as interpreted by the Church.
The medieval period in Europe was an age of intense and persistent misogyny, due in part to accepted interpretations of the biblical Genesis myth, in which all the sins and sufferings of mankind are blamed on Eve, the archetypal woman and mother, for having presented the Apple of Knowledge to the unquestioning Adam. As a result of this and other factors, women were belittled, mistrusted, sequestered, and even hated by the men upon whom they were forced to depend for their livelihoods. Elite women were brought up for one purpose only: marriages, usually at great expense in the form of the dowry, to men selected for them by their families so that subsequent child-bearing might produce male heirs. Since the woman’s role in elite society did not require intellectual abilities, few women were educated. Consequently, most documents from the medieval period were authored by men. This makes the works of Marie de France and Heloise so intriguing — they offer an extremely rare glimpse into the female experience in medieval France from the perspective of a woman.
Heloise, a scholar in her own right, was a student of Peter Abelard, who studied philosophy and dialectic. Both were famous in France for their intellectual merits and for their torrid love affair. As a result of their affair, Heloise became pregnant, and, following the birth of their son Astralabe, secretly married Abelard.
In his Historia calamitatum, a letter written in 1132, Abelard relates his courtship of Heloise as a game of sorts, stating that he “decided she was the one to bring to my bed, confident that I should have an easy success,” and claiming that every detail of his employment in her uncle Fulbert’s house was calculated to ensure his success in bedding Heloise. Upon Heloise’s delivery, he attempted to placate Fulbert with clandestine marriage. According to his letters, Heloise argued against such a marriage because she knew that it would fail to appease her uncle, and because it would be disastrous for Abelard’s reputation. Abelard’s removal of Heloise to an abbey following the secret marriage, which Fulbert interpreted as abandonment or divorce, resulted in Abelard’s castration. At the time of the writing of the Historia, Abelard was at the abbey of St. Gildas in Brittany, and had become a supporter of clerical celibacy, writing that “this is the practice today through love of God of those among us who truly deserve the name of monks,” and does not refer to Heloise in his letters to her as his wife. Heloise, however, while said to have objected to the marriage, seems to have embraced it following the vows.
Between 1133 and 1138, Abelard and Heloise exchanged seven letters total, of which Heloise wrote three. Abelard had returned to Paris to teach, and had given the convent of the Paraclete, which he established, to Heloise and her nuns. Heloise’s first letter was a response to the Historia calamitatum, and it begins the dialogue between the two writers. The salutations of the first four personal letters display the difference between Abelard’s and Heloise’s view of their relationship to each other. In Letter 2, Heloise addresses Abelard as, “her lord, or rather father; to her husband, or rather brother; from his handmaid, or rather daughter; from his wife, or rather sister: to Abelard, from Heloise.” In each pair of titles, the first, sexualized title is preferred by Heloise and the second by Abelard, as is made clear in Abelard’s letters. In Letter 3, Abelard addresses Heloise in a familial, unsexual manner: “To Heloise, his dearly beloved sister in Christ, from Abelard her brother in Him.” Despite widespread instances of aristocratic marriages between cousins, the Church stance at this time was that marriage and kinship were necessarily opposite; until 1215 canon law stated that Christians were forbidden marriage within seven degrees of blood kinship. Heloise’s salutations question the nature of a sexual, matrimonial relationship which has also become a kinship in Christ. Abelard, however, rhetorically dissolves the marriage—ironically conforming to Heloise’s earlier advice, but also committing another act not condoned by canon law, the attempted dissolution of a marriage that has been consented to and consummated.
If Heloise was against Abelard’s marriage proposal at the time he proposed it, but afterward insisted on being known as his wife, what was Heloise’s understanding of marriage, canon law, and the dynamic between women and men? In her letters, Heloise’s stated purpose for corresponding is to ask Abelard a question or for advice, but the major part of each letter expresses her opinion on whatever topic she introduces, and gives Abelard unsolicited advice. Heloise quotes patristic sources and Biblical passages as lessons to Abelard as frequently as he does to her. She also insists firmly that their separation does not dissolve their marriage: “you are bound to me by an obligation which is all the greater for the further close tie of the marriage sacrament uniting us, and are the deeper in my debt because of the love I have always borne you.” The love that Heloise is referring to is the consensus animorum of Gratian and, later, Flamborough; this is the love that constitutes marriage and obliges a man to care for and attend to his wife.
Heloise adopts the role of preacher to her former husband Abelard by quoting a variety of classical and Biblical sources as lessons. However, she also shifts immediately into an even bolder role for a woman: she instructs him on love, marriage, and how he ought to treat her. Because Abelard does not write to her enough, Heloise writes in Letter 2 that “[l]etters from absent friends are welcome indeed, as Seneca himself shows us by his own example when he writes these words in a passage of a letter to his friend Lucilius” followed by the passage. The implication is that if friends, such as the one identified as the recipient of Abelard’s Historia calamitatum, deserve correspondence, a wife must be even more deserving. Of the abbey at Paraclete, which was established by Abelard and where Heloise was abbess, she writes, “[y]ou have built nothing here upon another man’s foundation. Everything here is your own creation.” Since Heloise and the other nuns followed the Rule of Saint Benedict in organizing the abbey, it is illogical to say that everything at Paraclete is Abelard’s creation—probably a great deal was not. If, however, Heloise is really speaking not about the abbey but on how she became its abbess and therefore on why she and Abelard are separated and miserable, then this passage is actually chastising Abelard for his sins and mistakes.
Indeed, Heloise compares herself to a secular instructor rather than a preacher, reinforcing her points about marriage by quoting those of Aspasia, a celibate female philosopher in classical Greece, to Xenophon and his wife. In possibly the most remarkable passage of the letters, from a feminist standpoint, Heloise does more than prove her command of the classics and her mastery of rhetorical technique. In reminding Abelard of an episode in which a female philosopher instructs a man as she instructs him, Heloise constructs a female tradition in philosophy and claims her right to teach the greatest male philosopher of her century about marriage and sex.
Heloise further elevates Aspasia and therefore her own similarity to Aspasia as a now-celibate female philosopher by describing Aspasia’s advice as “saintly words which are more than philosophic; indeed, they deserve the name of wisdom, not philosophy.” In quoting Aspasia’s advice as support for her own, which is more or less the same, Heloise is rhetorically placing herself above the realm of philosophy, into the realm of sainthood. This is important in two ways. First, since Abelard was a professional philosopher, this means that in the discourse contained in the letter, Heloise, by quoting “saintly” advice, is of higher intellectual and moral status than Abelard, and is therefore entitled to instruct him. Second, if Abelard can be seen as a martyr for physical love because of his castration and loss of worldly position, then Heloise can be seen as a martyr for spiritual love, consensus animorum, because she accepted the loneliness of monastic life at Paraclete and maintained her attitude of trust and affection for Abelard, though she suspects that he has not maintained the same attitude towards her. Certainly spiritual love seems more worthy of being martyred for than physical love, and more saintly, which places Heloise in a position to demand that Abelard treat her as a husband should treat a wife by teaching him about the nature of marriage as a holy state.
The rhetoric of teaching which Heloise applied to her letters is also central to the Romance stories of Mare de France. Marie adopts a didactic tone towards her male audience from the first line of the Prologue, explaining how to use knowledge well, how to avoid vice, and how her collection of stories is evidence of her mastery of both. The first lai, “Guigemar,” opens with the following introductory speech from Marie herself:
Hear, my lords, the words of Marie, who, when she has the opportunity, does not squander her talents. Those who gain a good reputation should be commended, but when there exists in a country a man or woman of great renown, people who are envious of their abilities frequently speak insultingly of them in order to damage this reputation. Thus they start acting like a vicious, cowardly, treacherous dog which will bite others out of malice. But just because spiteful tittle-tattlers attempt to find fault with me I do not intend to give up.
Marie was writing after the deaths of Abelard and Heloise, and it is difficult not to imagine that her comments on the treatment of men and women of great renown do not cast a sidelong glance at their story. Marie invokes the Biblical parable of the talents, which was interpreted to mean that it is each person’s responsibility to use whatever gifts he or she has for maximum gain, in order to justify her writing. Writing was considered presumptuous on the part of women, so explanation of this sort was probably necessary for Marie. The choice to use the Bible as a source of justification for one’s words, however, is the usual rhetorical trademark of preachers; here again a woman is not only preaching to men, but teaching them about sex and marriage from her point of view.
The story of “Guigemar,” which includes the introductory paragraph in which Marie asserts her authorship, tells the story of a knight who cannot love, and who is given a wound that can only be healed through a lady’s love. In other words, this is the story of a knight whose masculine independence is no longer viable, and who must learn how to trust a woman. When Guigemar first meets his lady, he says, “Fair lady, I beg you in God’s name, please help me, for I do not know where to go, or how to steer the ship.” Navigation and sailing are male occupations, but Guigemar has lost his ability to participate in them, as well as his physical strength. In addition, he lacks wisdom: he does not know what to do. In a sense, Guigemar is unable to guide himself, and is forced to recognize his need to obtain help from another, a woman. This places the lady in the position of teacher, and it is she who proposes the solution by which the lovers are ultimately reunited at the end of the story. The lady is the only intellectual force at work in “Guigemar,” the first of Marie’s many arguments about women. Although the lady and Guigemar do not marry at the end of the lai, it is through their sexual relationship that Guigemar is able to accept the advice of a woman and cure his wound—that which prevents him from being “whole.”
“Les Deus Amanz” also portrays a man who depends upon the help of a woman to reach his goal, although he fails due to his own pride and unwillingness to use the woman’s help. “Les Deus Amanz,” or “the two lovers,” is a story of a girl whose father would not let her marry any man, unless he could carry her up a mountain without stopping. The girl’s lover carries her to the summit, but declines to drink a health potion and dies; the woman also dies from grief. In this lai, elopement is suggested by the man, but denied by the woman, who wishes to defeat her over-protective father at his own game and have her lover win her lawfully. One can glimpse a connection with Heloise’s opposition to marriage in Historia calamitatum, which is that a secret marriage is worse for both parties than either public marriage or concubinage.
The unusual behavior on the part of the overprotective, jealous father, who will not consent to a lawful marriage, is coupled with his insistence that the consent of his daughter and her intended husband is not enough to initiate marriage. This indicates that non-compliance with the marital procedure prescribed in Gratian’s Decretum, which absolutely requires only consent of the married and consummation, could be seen in as odd a light as a father’s over-closeness to his daughter; his desire to exert this kind of control over her sexual future arguably borders on incestuous desire. The father in “Les Deus Amanz” does not treat his daughter as property and is not merely looking for the most lucrative marital alliance; he does not want any man to have his daughter other than himself.
The girl nonetheless finds a lover whom she wishes to marry. Her lover suggests elopement, a sinful and cowardly response to the challenge at hand. The girl, instead, directs him to visit her aunt in Salerno: “I have a relative…a rich woman with a large income…who has practised the art of physic so much that she is well-versed in medicines. She knows much about herbs and roots that if you go to her, taking with you a letter from me…she will give you…such potions as will revive you and increase your strength.” This is presumably an independent woman, with money, knowledge, and no mention of a husband, who has the ability to defeat the girl’s father’s best-laid plan—she is a symbol of feminine power whose abilities border on magic but which are termed as medicine. Although the young man accepts her gift of potion, he refuses to drink it while climbing the mountain with the girl in his arms. This turn of events in the story defies logic: a young man travels from Normandy to Salerno in order to obtain a potion, which he then refuses to drink, and then dies in his endeavor. The fact that the potion is the product of a woman’s study contains the key to comprehending the tale: it is a reverse Genesis myth, in which not consuming the offering of the women is dangerous and leads to loss. Eschewing the fruits of a woman’s labor is foolishness on the part of the man, and causes him to lose his lady, his life, and his triumph over his challenger in his sexual quest.
“Yonec” tells the story of a woman given in marriage against her will to a rich old man, obviously in order to bolster her family’s fortunes, and the magical lover, Muldumarec, who comes in hawk-form to comfort and avenge her. Marie refers to the lawful older husband as “the villain” of the story, and shows the girl lamenting her arranged marriage, something that does not happen in male-generated tales. The girl’s words are bitter: “Cursed by my parents and all those who gave me to this jealous man and married me to his person. I pull and tug on a strong rope! He well never die. When he should have been baptized, he was plunged into the river of Hell…” The girl then asks God for a lover, who appears. Following an outburst in which a girl wishes death on her husband and family and declares her desire for a lover, the epitome of improper behavior for a young girl in the medieval period, God’s apparent agreement in granting the wish for a lover utterly subverts patriarchal notions of God and the family. There is a certain chance that Muldamarec’s appearance is coincidental and that the girl misinterprets his presence as a divine gift in the context of her own words, but given what follows, it is apparent that Marie de France uses the contemporary debate on marriage practices to critique attitudes about women in general.
The hawk-lover flies through the tower window and turns into the knight Muldamarec, who professes his love to the girl. The girl regards him skeptically and asks if he believes in God, an argument against the assumption that women were lustful, impulsive, and unintelligent. Muldamarec’s response is Marie’s greatest declaration of contempt for misogynist religious teachings, and for the attitudes which derive from them. Muldamarec answers, “I do believe in the Creator who set us free from the sorrow in which our ancestor Adam put us by biting the bitter apple.” Just as in “Les Deus Amanz,” Marie turns the Eden myth around, this time in order to refute the claim that Eve was responsible for original sin, and instead to implicate Adam, who blamed his wife for his own unquestioning action. In this passage Marie demonstrates her command of the Bible, since the text of Genesis states merely that “she [Eve] took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband [Adam] with her; and he did eat.” There is no indication that Eve tricked Adam, and only Eve is shown arguing with the serpent. Adam acts without thinking, as the knights in romances have a tendency to do. That a man, Muldamarec, phrases the Genesis myth in this way acts almost as a male confession. Marie thereby instructs her male audience in a less misogynist and more textually-correct reading of the Genesis myth, showing in her story that the hero wins his lady’s heart through his unwillingness to adopt the common attitude toward her as a woman.
Following the knight’s statement, the couple lie in bed naked together, albeit chastely, echoing the state of grace in Eden prior to the eating of the apple, in which Adam and Eve were free from shame, desire, or consciousness of their nakedness. The first encounter of Muldamarec and the girl is presented as an image of holy innocence, set “free from sorrow” by God. Since it is implied that Muldamarec himself is sent by God to answer the girl’s prayers, this amounts to a story of forgiveness of all women, a cancellation of the Eden myth, and therefore a refutation of the attitudes held by the men in Marie’s audience. This, coupled with the condemnation of coerced marriage in the text, demands that men follow the example of God, and show mercy to and faith in women. In other words, the behavior of elite men in forcing their daughters into marriages, withholding education, and considering women to be a lesser class of being is not merely offensive to Marie; she teaches with her text that this behavior is ungodly and even sinful.
Since the purpose of marriage was the birth of heirs, constructing conventional noble marriage as an evil practice in which girls were sexually sacrificed to bed men in order to impregnate them subverts the entire notion of the family. In this situation there is no consensus animorum, no joining of souls, no affection and trust. Just as the legacy of Adam was sorrow, the legacy of coerced marriage—which was, according to the decretists, invalid—would be children that in a spiritual sense were illegitimate. In “Yonec,” however, the girl becomes pregnant with Muldamarec’s child, Yonec, who slays his mother’s old husband and is crowned king of Caerleon, his father Muldamarec’s kingdom. Even though Yonec is born as a result of adultery, the claim posed by the text is that the “marriage” of Muldamarec and the girl is more valid than the marriage of the girl and the old man she did not consent to marry. Therefore Yonec is presented as a legitimate heir to a kingdom, whose parents’ marriage was condoned by God, making human recognition of the union irrelevant. Yonec is the legacy of holy practices and tolerant attitudes toward women; his father’s barren marriage is the legacy of the noble practice of marriage in Marie’s time. Marie’s lesson for her male audience is half an endorsement of the decretist view of marriage, and half a refutation of Church-informed male opinions on women generally.
Heloise’s letters to Abelard display the wit and academic achievement of a woman in a period in which women were seldom educated in any respect. She chastised a leading intellectual figure for his crimes against God and against her, while simultaneously proclaiming her own value judgments about men and religion. Marie de France managed to reach a wider audience with her tales. She becomes a teacher, and allows her audience to be taught while enjoying an evening pastime. In this way, Marie preaches not just to one husband, but to a multitude of European noblemen, enticing them with tales of martial men in order to teach them the plight of women.
Works Cited:
Abelard, Peter, and Heloise. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Trans. Betty Radice. London: Penguin, 2003.
Brundage, James Arthur. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Brundage, James Arthur. “Sex and Canon Law.” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage. New York: Garland, 1996.
Finke, Laurie A. “Sexuality in Medieval French Literature.” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage. New York: Garland, 1996.
France, Marie de. The Lais of Marie de France. Trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby. London: Penguin, 1999.
“Genesis 3.” The Holy Bible, King James Version. New York: American Bible Society: 1999; Bartleby.com, 2000. [on-line]; available from http://www.bartleby.com/108/01/3.html; Internet; accessed 21 November 2007.
Sheehan, Michael. Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Williams, Bernadette. “Cursed be my Parents; A View of Marriage from the ‘Lais’ of Marie de France.” The Fragility of Her Sex? Medieval Irishwomen in Their European Context. Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996. 73-86.
Bibliography:
Abelard, Peter, and Heloise. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Trans. Betty Radice. London: Penguin, 2003.
Brundage, James Arthur. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Brundage, James Arthur. “Sex and Canon Law.” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage. New York: Garland, 1996.
Duby, Georges. Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages. Trans. Jane Dunnett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Duby, Georges. “The Counts of Guines.” The Knight the Lady and the Priest: the Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Pantheon, 1983.
Finke, Laurie A. “Sexuality in Medieval French Literature.” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage. New York: Garland, 1996.
France, Marie de. The Lais of Marie de France. Trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby. London: Penguin, 1999.
Gaunt, Simon. “The Knight Meets his Match: Romance.” Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
“Genesis 3.” The Holy Bible, King James Version. New York: American Bible Society: 1999; Bartleby.com, 2000. [on-line]; available from http://www.bartleby.com/108/01/3.html; Internet; accessed 21 November 2007.
Sheehan, Michael. Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Troyes, Chrétien de. Arthurian Romances. Trans. William W. Kibler. London: Penguin, 1991.
Williams, Bernadette. “Cursed be my Parents; A View of Marriage from the ‘Lais’ of Marie de France.” The Fragility of Her Sex? Medieval Irishwomen in Their European Context. Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996. 73-86.
Peter Abelard, “Historia Calamitatum,” The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice. (London: Penguin, 2003), 10.
Heloise. “Personal Letters,” The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice. (London: Penguin, 2003), 47.
Brundage, “Sex and Canon Law,” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, (New York: Garland, 1996), 38
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