Busby, 'Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200', Bryn Mawr Medieval Review 9505
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmmr/bmmr-9505-busby-language
@@@@95.5.8, Baldwin, The Language of Sex
John W. Baldwin. The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France
around 1200. Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1994. xxviii + 331 pp.
$37.50. ISBN 0226036138.
Reviewed by Keith Busby -- University of Oklahoma
This is a quite remarkable book. John Baldwin, the Charles Homer
Haskins Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University, has written
a study that deserves henceforth to figure on the basic reading lists of
all scholars and students in literature and cultural history whose
interests include the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By a careful
examination of the primary sources, John Baldwin makes five distinct
voices emerge and speak to us regarding views on sexuality in the high
Middle Ages and encourages them to partake in what is a revealing and
subtly shifting debate. The five voices are: Pierre the Chanter (Petrus
Cantor Parisiensis), speaking for Augustine's theology; The Prose
Salernitan Questions, for Galen's medical theories; Andre the Chaplain
(Andreas Capellanus), for the Ovidian tradition of the schools; Jean
Renart, for contemporary romance; and Jean Bodel, for the fabliaux.
Having identified his major protagonists, John Baldwin broadens his
definitions somewhat so as to include related material, such as works by
the Chanter's disciples, other materia medica that treats
sexuality, the Latin Facetus, and a range of vernacular romances
and fabliaux produced in broadly similar cultural circles to those
of Jean Renart and Jean Bodel; the predominantly masculine voices are
tempered by consideration of the Lais of Marie de France and a Latin life
of Marie d'Oignies. Interpreting the debate with his habitual sensitivity,
John Baldwin is able to offer new insights into our understanding of
sexual and social reality of the period which both utilize and complement
studies by such scholars as James Brundage and the late John Boswell.
In the Introduction (xiii-xxviii), Baldwin situates his own work in
relation to existing studies on medieval sexuality, briefly indicates the
nature of the five voices, and exposes his theoretical and practical
stances. Following mercifully without dogmatism some fundamental
principles of modern feminism, Baldwin underscores the centrality of
discourse as a means of access to the past, the discordant heterogeneity
of the five voices, and the nature of sexuality and gender as
non-essentialist social constructs which determine the particular alterity
of the voices. Baldwin is aware that his surface interpretation of
literary works may not do justice to their aesthetic charm and beauty, but
his is not a literary study. Equally aware that literary discourse must be
read through the mimetic prism, he maintains that information transmitted
by literature is not necessarily off limits to careful historians.
Chapter One (1-42) is a more detailed presentation of the five
discourses which provide the core of the book. No-one knows the work of
Pierre the Chanter better than Baldwin, author of the now standard work on
Pierre and his circle (1970). By the end of the twelfth century, a model
of marriage applicable to the laity had been developed by clerics such as
the Chanter, his pupils Robert of Courson and Thomas of Chobham, and
Jacques de Vitry, author of the life of Marie d'Oignies (later
incorporated by Vincent of Beauvais in his influential Speculum
Historiale). Conflicts inevitably developed as to the jurisdiction of
the Church in lay matters, the controversial marriage of Philip Augustus
and Ingeborg of Denmark being something of a test-case. The Prose
Salernitan Questions, compiled from various sources around the year
1200, in a sense represent the last stage in the development of Galen's
influence, and date from just before the transformations that take place
in the scientific world of the thirteenth century as a result of the
rediscovery of Aristotle and his Arabic interpreters. The importance of
this text lies especially in its combination of theological and
physiological explanations of sexuality. Andre the Chaplain is a familiar
figure to literary scholars, and his De amore (after 1174) has
become a notorious text for many reasons. The De amore is cited
variously as a treatise outlining the theory of courtly love, as an aid to
the intrepretation of Chretien de Troyes's Lancelot, and as an
obscene parody of courtly convention. Its modern celebrity is in part due
to use made of it by Gaston Paris and C. S. Lewis. John Baldwin shows how
Andre's work forms a bridge between the Ovidian tradition of the schools
and the court, where it not only influenced Chretien and Marie de France,
but was also translated into the vernacular. The paradox of Andre is
succintly put by Baldwin: How could a hedonistic manual for seducers,
which so vigorously recommended sex and adultery, be taught in the Middle
Ages, an era when ecclesiastics closely linked sexual desire with sin and
unequivocally condemned sexual activity outside of marriage (p. 23)? The
aristocratic courts were both the setting and origin of the romances of
Jean Renart and Chretien de Troyes, the Tristan stories, and the
Lais of Marie de France. While their authors are aware of Andre
and the Ovidian tradition, the romances are intended almost solely for
court audiences; their presentation of sexuality is characterized by
elegant euphemism and discretion, unlike that to be found in the
fabliaux. If not the inventor of the genre, Jean Bodel certainly
played a major part in its genesis, and John Baldwin supplements his voice
by that from other fabliaux. Many of these tales are urban
productions, but Baldwin understands that they must have been performed to
courtly, perhaps even clerical, audiences as well. Their overt eroticism
and scandalous vulgarity would have been shocking to the Chanter and the
authors of romance alike.
Having revealed the voices, John Baldwin goes on in Chapter Two
(43-87) to construct what he calls (p. 43) a sociology of sexuality.
Physiological parameters were strictly defined, and such practises as
homosexuality, masturbation, extra-vaginal and pre-pubescent sex are
generally proscribed in all discourses. The traditional medieval division
of society into the three orders is reflected in Andre's dialogues between
men and women from different classes. Class and gender perception is
largely responsible for determining the manner in which the interlocutors
respond to each other and for their willingness or unwillingness to
welcome sexual advances. The fabliaux confirm Andre's conviction
that the vilains are incapable of love and the romances, the
importance of class, and the dangers of mesalliance. Clerical
lovers inevitably attempt to seduce the wives and daughters of peasants or
merchants, rarely noblewomen. Interestingly, Pierre the Chanter made a
plea, in vain, for the lower clergy to be permitted to marry; the Church
prevailed in the matter of clerical celibacy. The romances often provide
solutions to the moral dilemma of adultery, although as a theme it is by
no means as universal as Marie de Champagne's celebrated dictum about the
incompatibility of love and marriage might suggest. They also resolve
issues that in reality often led to divorce and the dissolution of
marriages, in direct contradiction to the teachings of the Church. The
centrality of marriage also stressed extremes on the periphery: total
abstention, as we have seen, and the promiscuity of prostitutes. The
Ovidian tradition acknowledges the existence of prostitution, but the
romances hardly mention them at all; they do play a minor role in the
fabliaux, as might be expected, but most attention was paid them by
physicians as the only available subjects for gynecological study.
Prostitution in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was still
unorganized, becoming regulated only in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries in Western Europe.
In Chapter Three (88-115), John Baldwin turns his attention to the
sexual body, examining first medical and theological views of the pudenda
and the process of insemination. While the Galenic tradition generally
described the female by reference to the male and was not always concerned
with proving male superiority, the theologians are remarkable for the lack
of attention they pay the sexual organs. Ovidian discourse is a
titillating combination of the revealed and the concealed; descriptions of
feminine beauty often conclude with a remark such as what further
particulars need I relate? Aristocratic women in the romances are often
deshabillees, decolletees, but suggestively and never
full-frontally naked; jewelry and other adornments work to the same end.
Breasts could be shown, but not thighs or pudenda. The notable exceptions
(such as Iseut's appearance in Beroul) evoke incongruity and point in the
direction of the fabliaux, where, as Baldwin puts it, authors are
fixated on the body below the belt (p. 112). The openness of the
fabliau vocabulary is seen as a challenge to both Augustinian
modesty and the discretion of the romances.
Chapter Four (116-72) deals with the topic of sexual desire.
According to the theologians, even desire within marriage is tainted with
concupiscence because of its association with Original Sin. Desire within
marriage is justifiable because the end is procreation, but the solutions
proposed are all somewhat uneasy and there seems to be a good deal of
fudging. The Chanter and his circle played down the sinfulness of sexual
desire for purposes of procreation, rendering the marital debt, and
restraining incontinence, considering only true lust a mortal sin. His
views were this geared to reducing the oppressiveness of the burden
imposed on the laity by the Augustinian tradition. The Prose Salernitan
Questions provided physiological and psychological alternatives to the
theological theories, arguing that the delights of intercourse are caused
by the discharge of superfluities, replenishment of bodily parts, and
psychological fulfilment of desire. Maintaining that only the male
produces seed, which is passively received by the female, the Augustinians
and Aristotelians managed to disassociate female desire and reproduction,
thereby removing female delight from the equation. Andre the Chaplain was
familiar with both theological and medical views of sexual desire. For
him, passio was an imperfect expression of a higher form of love formed in
the mind; it could be both healthy and unhealthy, although, as Baldwin
points out, he devoted disproportionate attention to the ills of love (p.
142). The romance tradition transforms Ovidian passio into
joie, delit, deduit or solas, articulated
around an axis of joy and anguish. John Baldwin offers readings of
Thomas's Tristan, Chretien's Cliges, and the works of Jean Renart which
show how each individual romance explores a different modulation of the
joie-dolor theme; such mental and physical anguish is quite absent
from the fabliaux, where sexual desire is not in the least
threatening or destructive. The romances also refuse to name and describe
the final, fifth stage of the quinque lineae amoris, so manifest in
the fabliaux. An alternative path is suggested by works in the
tradition of the Song of Songs, where the love and possession of
God become the object of desire.
In Chapter Five (173-205) John Baldwin examines the differing
descriptions of the sexual act, coitus, offered by the five voices. The
desire for coitus, stimulated according to the physicians by the humors
and according to the romancers by the seasons, was roundly condemned by
the churchmen and proscribed on a whole series of feast-days, although by
the late twelfth century these restrictions were beginning to lapse. The
theologians also turned to Ovid, and against Andre, in associating the
desire for coitus with food and drink; the association is made very clear
in the fabliaux. Sexual activity is regarded as healthful for the
male by both the Chanter and by Andre, but not for the female; chastity,
however, is justified primarily on theological, not physiological,
grounds. The linguistic treatment of coitus by the five voices closely
parallels that accorded the body and described above. The medical
theorists use metonymic expressions such as coniunctio,
commixtio, and concubitus, while the Ovidian tradition of
Andre, taken up in the romances, is one of discreet euphemism
(solatium, solaz, sorplus, etc.); the
fabliaux, to say the least, are somewhat blunt in this regard. The
same is true of discussion of sexual techniques: largely ignored by Latin
authors, it finds free expression in the fabliaux, but where it is
by and large limited to natural genital practices. Rape is generally
treated as a crime, especially in Chretien's romances, although it is
accepted in Andre and the pastourelles when male aristocrats force
sex upon female peasants.
Logically, Chapter Six (206-24), deals with the views of children
(the final outcome of coitus) and reproduction. In essence, ancient
medical theories of hot and cold, which supposedly determine the movement
of sperm and the fetus, are reproduced in the Prose Salernitan
Questions. There are few references to childbirth in the work of the
theologians or in vernacular literature. The use of procreation to justify
sexual intercourse meant that all means of contraception and birth control
were forbidden, and abortion was specifically said by Thomas of Chobham to
be homicide. Mutually agreed continence and the frequentation of
prostitutes were the only acceptable means of contraception for the
theologians, despite the many and detailed discussions found in medical
writings which often drew on Arabic material. In the fabliaux, very
few children result from the widespread fornication, and in the romances,
fertility is often linked to the question of lineage and politics; the
most attention paid to children in vernacular literature is to be found in
the work of the one woman author, Marie de France.
In his Conclusions (225-45), John Baldwin argues that the views of
the theologians was generally resisted by the other four voices. Not
unexpectedly, the beginning of the thirteenth century is seen as
transmitting a variety of attitudes towards sexuality, but which are
mostly generated by the search for gender symmetry. Such symmetry and
equilibrium is sometimes portrayed, especially in the romances and Marie's
Lais, but it is soon imperilled by the renewed popularity of
Aristotle's writing in the West. Discourse, concludes Baldwin, remains the
major source of evidence for the study of human sex in any age. Three
Appendices (239-54) present relevant texts by Pierre the Chanter and
Robert of Courson. The Bibliography (255- 66) is followed by indispensable
and copious notes (267-323) and an Index (325-31).
Specialists in theology, the history of medicine, and medieval
Latin and French literature will no doubt cavil at details in The
Language of Sex, but I will refrain from concluding with the
reviewer's customary churlishness. John Baldwin has read and intrepreted
all of his sources with both sensitivity and commonsense, from the
abstract reasonings of the theologians to the joyous vulgarity of the
fabliaux. He has made the five voices speak to us in a language
that is at one and the same time familiar and alien in its resonance and
accents. This is a truly exceptional book, interdisciplinary in the real
sense of the word, which is surely destined to become a landmark in
medieval studies.