SERIOUS OR NOT?
This book includes a series of chapters on satiric advice on women (in particular, sexual involvement with women) and marriage. If the distinctions made between satire against women and satire against marriage (or perhaps against married women) often seem blurred, that is because they are so often blurred in satire. Susanna Morton Braund, in her essay in this book (chap. 3), shows how marriage, particularly to dowered wives (who retain a power of control over their husbands), is often the butt of jokes in Roman comedy. Married women in comedy are spendthrifts and full of complaints. This charge is spotlighted in Juvenal's sixth satire, which adds a host of other complaints against wives, while husbands are implicitly criticized for their passivity. Juvenal's satire implies a criticism of the institution of marriage itself for its negative effect on both partners. The Christian anti-marriage satire of St. Jerome adds a new twist, extolling celibacy itself as an ideal state, in imitation of the celibacy of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and arguing that celibacy has always been the preferred state of right-thinking people, whether Jew, pagan, or Christian.
SATIRIC TWIST
Roman satirists, including Petronius and Apuleius in prose as well as Horace and Juvenal, go to an opposite extreme from the impersonality of Homer. They make the force of their personalities immediately felt. Indeed, their ostensible personal eccentricities quickly become part of the critical debate. The satirists, or their narrative personae, seem anxious to introduce themselves, to drag us into their world, with an earnestness that can have both absurd and disturbing overtones even as it succeeds in involving us emotionally. The satirists are immediately caught up in their subject; they take a stance, and, as defined by Horace in his program satire Sermones (1.4, 1.10, 2.1), they follow the tradition—going back to Old Comedy—of censuring vice with a smile (multa cum libertate notabant, Serm. 1.4.5). Supposedly, this Aristophanic tradition was taken up by Lucilius and refined and followed by Horace, though Horace and the other Roman satirists never went so far as to emulate Aristophanes' lampoons of prominent public figures. The personality of the satirist complicates the issue. Satirists have a perspective that, despite their show of objectivity and effort to appear as blunt, plainspoken speakers, is often flawed or exaggerated.
As far as actual autobiography is concerned, the trend in classical satire seems to have been away from the personal. In Old Comedy, one of satire's spiritual ancestors (see Horace Serm. 1.4.1-6), real historical personae (e.g., Cleon, Pericles, and Socrates) were impersonated and ridiculed by name, and the poet him/herself or his/her representative addressed the audience in the parados (song with which the chorus entered the theater). Some early Roman writers, such as Naevius, experimented with this kind of direct attack on contemporary political figures and were punished for it; already Plautus and Terence camouflage their Roman satiric targets under foreign and exotic names and give the plays foreign settings, although both Roman playwrights often use a prologus (speaker of a prologue) to address the audience and often refer to the playwright himself in the third person—while calling for silence, providing a plot summary, or expressing the relationship between the play at hand and its Greek model or models. The personal stamp took longer to die in the case of satire itself, where the individual personality of the narrator always leaves its mark even though the individual victims are not often singled out by name. We have Horace's word for it (Serm. 2.1.30-33) that Lucilius, one of the early masters of the genre, used his writings as a kind of confessional and, indeed, unfolds his whole life (vita senis [the old man's life], 2.1.34) in his satires. Horace himself takes or appears to take anecdotes from his personal experiences and uses his own misadventures—such as his uncomfortable trip to Brun disium (Serm. 1.5), his assault by an office seeker on the Via Sacra (1.9), or the verbal attack on him by his slave Davus (2.7)—to raise a laugh.
The two later verse satirists Persius and Juvenal are much more circumspect about introducing personal details (though Persius, uniquely in his third satire, seems to introduce himself as a character in his own skit, playing the role of a derelict schoolboy; cf. findor in line 9 and Smith 1969). Juvenal in particular teases the reader with what seems to be a promise to talk primarily about himself in his program satire (ego, the second word of the opening line of his first satire, teases us with false expectations, in a way that is matched by the enigmatic ego in the identical position in the opening paragraph of Apuleius's satiric novel The Golden Ass). In the long run, however, Juvenal gives us almost no information about his life except by implication, but he indirectly reveals much about his prejudices and feelings, as he turns our attention away from his pain to the issue at hand that is causing him such outrage. Where the situation seems to require more personal information, as in Satires 3 or 9, he retreats to the background or becomes the “straight man” as he introduces other characters as victims and chief complainers. Even in Satire 6, where the poet's personal fear and loathing of women seem so much in evidence, Juvenal still stays away from any personal experiences and avoids describing himself in any detail as a victim; instead, that poem either pushes forward as examples other actual or potential long-suffering husbands (Postumus at line 28, Claudius at line 115) or, by use of the second person singular, brings the male reader himself into the picture as potential victim, forcing him to imagine himself as exploited in various ways by his hypothetical wife (76, 201, 231, and passim).
DIATRIBE SATIRE, RHETORIC, AND MISOGYNY
Susanna Morton Braund (among others) has argued for the pervasive influence of the schools of declamation on both the “choice of subject and the framing of ideas”1 in Latin satire. A favorite topic of the Controversiae of the elder Seneca is the suspected adultery of women.2 Senecan Controversiae are often preceded by abstract headings that list the general law or principle around which the case is being judged (e.g., Contr. 1.1: “Children must support their parents, or be imprisoned”; 2.2: “A priestess must be chaste and of chaste parents, pure and of pure parents”). That principle is then debated by a variety of speakers using clever and pointed arguments and is tested against some peculiar or bizarre circumstance where its application is questionable. Like their rhetorical models, Latin satires often imply an arrangement around abstract topics like “Ought a man to marry?” or “Is the life of a parasite profitable?” with the satiric exempla drawn heavily from examples of bad conduct. The satirist is not merely taking a snapshot of contemporary life but has a point to make, often one of dissuasio, and he piles up all his powers of persuasion, paints lurid scenes, and presents evidence selectively to ensure that he wins the debate. The implied presence of a second voice, a rival or hostile interlocutor, adds to the picture of a rhetorical contest (cf. the explicit admission of Persius at Sat. 1.44 that he “has created someone to argue on the other side”). The resulting debate is passionate and involved, and the satiric persona takes a firmly defined stand that is almost bound to involve hyperbole and inconsistency, to the extent that the reader (at least the modern reader who imagines that he or she is attuned to nuances of narrative point of view) may well have doubts as to whether the author “really means” some of the more outrageous positions voiced by the narrator.3
Even given that they share some common sources of inspiration, such as the declamation schools, classical and medieval diatribes against women and marriage are of various kinds and with varied purpose. First of all, they are, almost all of them, written by men, and the misogynistic slant is almost a given, a topos. To make a sharp distinction between misogamy and misogyny in most cases is difficult and may be unhelpful;4 arguments against marriage almost inevitably place a strong emphasis on the inferiority of women as partners due to supposed defects in the female sex. Though Braund, for example, persuasively argues that Juvenal 6 is a rhetorically based argument against marriage rather than a “catalogue of abominable women,” she also argues that the narrator of that satire is an extreme—even obsessed—misogynist,5 thereby seeming tacitly to concede the blending of the two themes. Elaborate explanations were devised by medical writers to account for the inferiority of the female physiology and temperament. Galen is part of a tradition of writers who relegated women to the status of “failed males”6 whose sex was determined by the inadequacy of body heat their fetuses had received in the womb and who were consequently clammy, cold, and formless. Medieval writers sometimes connected women's supposed excess in body fluid with a greater tendency to lust: Guillaume de Conches, for example, argued that since a woman is cold and wet, the fire (of lust) is harder to start but burns longer.7
Women were also considered less able to exercise restraints over their greed and sexuality. Uncontrolled sexuality on the part of women is treated by Roman authors as if it were symptomatic of a general breakdown of order8 and as if it had precipitated the downfall of the Republic. Women are seen as easily going out of control, as subject to sexual, emotional, and religious excesses, not to mention alcoholism. It is the wives who take the first plunge into frenzy, dragging their husbands along with them: the husbands in Juvenal's sixth satire are regularly seen as victims, a caricature of restraint to the point of seeming catatonic as their wives cavort in front of them.
SELF-REFERENTIAL ATTACKS
Many of the attacks against women, particularly those by Latin writers, must be understood as influenced by the peculiar slant of the self-referential genre of satire. The satiric spirit or intention is usually disclosed by a peculiar level of emotional intensity, such as is associated with rhetorical diatribe. Few issues are more highly emotionally charged than sex and marriage, and while the satirist ostensibly (even desperately) may try to turn the reader's attention away from the satirist's self-pity by inviting the reader to share in the indignation at the outrage at hand, the self-pity seems to keep gaining the upper hand and causes the satirist's suffering to seem exaggerated and absurd; the satirist almost inevitably becomes, at least in part, the butt of his/her own joke. The tendency is irresistible, in some scholarship, to regard chauvinistic attacks on women as suspect, as though they encouraged a judgment on the misogynistic speaker as well as one on his target; thus, for example, on Juvenal's sixth satire, the conclusion of Wilson and Makowski is representative: “how can the reader trust the observations of a person who repeatedly exposes himself as absurd, sensational, petty, and fanatical … ?”9 This negative criticism, which finds the narrative point of view inconsistent or otherwise suspect, reverses the older view that the satirist (who is identified as the author himself) plays a serious role of moralist, flailing vice with the zeal and efficiency of a Sunday school teacher. The reliability of the satiric voice has been called into question by recent writers on satire, such as W. S. Anderson and Braund, who insist on distinguishing the view of the unreliable “satirist” from the author's own point of view.10
Roman writers have a tendency to preach, to take a moral stance or appear to do so, and moralistic passages have a tendency to insert themselves into surprising contexts; there is also a Roman tendency to link together various vices (e.g., licentiousness, drunkenness, and gluttony) in a kind of guilt by association, making the implication that where one is found, many others will be close behind.11 In some instances, satirical passages that attack women or marriage have the impression of being inserted into their context as an afterthought, a compulsion that the author could not resist despite its lack of logic. For example, the digression on sex in De rerum natura 4.1037-287 seems to throw the detached tone of the main argument off track; the passage interjects into the argument the humor of a rhetorical diatribe and gives the appearance that Lucretius has been tempted for the moment to lose sight of his priorities as a philosopher and try his hand as a satirist. There is a related phenomenon in Juvenal's Satire 6, the diatribe against women, where there is a sense that the original basic theme of the poem has become inflated and has pulled the poet in too many directions; the diatribes take on a life and energy of their own, as the comic exaggerations pile up. Complicating the narrator's stance in satire even further is the “pattern of apology” that E. J. Kenney has detected in the program pieces of the Roman verse satirists (Horace Serm. 2.1; Persius Sat. 1; Juvenal Sat. 1).
First, a pronouncement, lofty to the point of bombast, of the satirist's high purpose and mission. Second, a warning by the friend or the poet's alter ego of the voice of prudence—call it what you will. Third, an appeal by the satirist to the great voice of Lucilius. Fourth, a renewed warning. Fifth and last, evasion, retraction, equivocation.12
The reason for such equivocation by satirists is variously given; thus Kenney argues that no Roman writer ever thought he/she had the right to completely free speech, while Courtney argues that satirists wanted to associate themselves with Lucilius while simultaneously distancing themselves from his aggressiveness. But the pattern that Kenney detected can, I have argued elsewhere, be detected at many points in various genres of Latin literature, including the key elements with the exception of the reference to Lucilius: bold assertion, rebuttal by an interlocutor, and defensive reaction followed by equivocation or backing down by the narrator.13 Particularly relevant are the aggressive stances against women and marriage adopted in such Latin writers as Lucretius and Jerome, where the narrator in many instances ends his diatribe by eventually compromising or retreating from the extreme position with which he had begun. It is perhaps all part of a satiric ploy, but the net thrown by satire is wide indeed.
Marriage at least had the potential of enhancing a man's economic status. In actual fact, or in “real life,” to find a potential wife with a large dowry was considered by the Romans a socially acceptable motive for marriage, more acceptable, for example, than seeking a wife for her voluptuous charms.14 But in popular essays and in comedy, this motive is often stood on its head, and a large dowry is seen as having a negative influence on the bride, giving her unrealistic expectations and encouraging her to overspend;15 thus there is the common saying—probably with hypocritical overtones, yet eagerly picked up later by Christian writers—that wives ought to be adorned by virtue and modesty rather than by precious jewelry and clothing (Plutarch Moralia 141D-E).
In New Comedy, a fear of dowried—and hence independent-minded— wives is a common topos expressed by middle-aged bachelors, men of the world who have already made some money and are afraid of losing it; they are shown avoiding wealthy brides who will expect to be maintained in high style. Susanna Morton Braund points out in chapter 3 in this volume that in Roman comedy especially, marriage is a universal telos for young people, but once they have experienced it firsthand, all complain about it and wish to escape it. Middle-aged bachelors, who have a wider perspective on the issue, fear in particular a bride who will make financial demands, a variation on a fear of the wife taking the sexual initiative away from the husband. Similar is the diatribe of the bachelor Periplectomenus in the Miles gloriosus (680-714), who sees dowried wives as potential “yappers” barking after his money; brides should be selected by their virtue and modesty rather than by precious jewelry and clothing (cf. also Plutarch Moralia 141D-E). This view is not restricted to comedy; in Plutarch's Dialogue on Love (Moralia 752F), Pisias argues that excessive wealth makes women “frivolous, haughty, inconstant, and vain” and “often … elates them so much that they fly away.”
SHOULD A PHILOSOPHER MARRY?
Marriage and philosophy are often seen as incompatible, as in the following anecdote sometimes quoted in the medieval period.
Cicero post repudium Terentie uxorari noluit, dicens se pariter et uxori et philosophoie operam dare non posse.
[Cicero refused to marry again after divorcing Terentia, saying that he could not spare time at once for a wife and for philosophy.]16
“Philosophical misogamy,” as discussed by Wilson and Makowski, uses arguments against marriage that are based not on the moral inferiority of the wife but on the inconveniences of marriage, which “impedes the philosopher's freedom to think and study.”17 The antipathy between philosophers and marriage is not necessarily a natural or inevitable one in all periods or literary genres. Aristotle writes in Nicomachean Ethics 8.12.7 that the friendship between husband and wife appears to be a natural instinct and is based on a combination of utility and pleasure. Philosophers, however, often are seen as falling under a special category, because due to their devotion to abstract reasoning, they may be remote from the problems of the real world and find a special difficulty in seeing what is good for them; thus Aristotle can say of Anaxagoras and Thales that people applaud their wisdom but find it to be useless in application, “because it is not human good that they seek” (Nic. Ethics 6.7=11416, Ross). Such impracticality might easily lead philosophers to choose undesirable partners. In later antiquity, as Foucault points out,18 there was in fact considerable disagreement among the philosophers on the desirability of marriage, with Cynics and Epicureans tending to oppose marriage, while Stoics tended to see marriage as a universal duty. However, when Epictetus describes marriage as creating a distraction for the ideal Cynic philosopher (Discourses 3.22.67-82), the warning is made not on the basis of any defect in women but on the idealistic ground that the responsibilities of a household would prevent the philosopher from fulfilling his/her obligations to the rest of humanity. Seneca, in his lost work On Marriage, apparently argued that “philosophers should marry and that there were sound reasons for marriage,”19 though Jerome, in Against Jovinian 1.49, groups Seneca with Aristotle and Plutarch among those who cautioned against the effects of excessive love.
The power of sexual attraction and the unpredictability inherent in intimacy easily give rise to incongruity and humor in stories about the private lives of thinkers and ascetics. Since the start of philosophy, there have been widespread anecdotes about men lost in contemplation who, despite all their wisdom and ability to reason and argue, were exposed as physically inept or inadequate or were otherwise bested by their own wives or mistresses or by other women; the recurring irony highlighted by such stories is that these men could advise others well with abstract theory but could not keep their own houses in order when it came to real-life situations. An attractive servant girl mocked Thales for falling into a well while he was observing the stars (Plato Theatetus 174A). Lucretius himself, in a well-known anecdote reported by Jerome,20 was driven insane by an aphrodisiac that, according to later tradition, was administered by his wife (she is perhaps intended as the “Lucilia” in Walter Map's De nugis curialium 4.3). The nagging and abuse of Socrates by his shrewish wife Xanthippe are often reported—one of those making good use of it is Jerome (Against Jovinian 1.48), who adds the nagging of a second wife, Myron. A story about Aristotle, widely repeated in the Middle Ages and often depicted in painting and sculpture, has the great philosopher equally humbled by a woman. Supposedly he was tricked by “Phyllis,” either the wife or mistress of Alexander the Great, Aristotle's pupil, into allowing himself to be mounted by her and ridden about like a horse, much to the amusement of Alexander. According to Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240), who used this story in a sermon,
If indeed the malice and cunning of the woman so prevailed that she deceived and held an old man captive, the most prudent of all mortals, … how much more power she might have over you, (whom she could much more easily) deceive, allure, and defraud. …21
Another popular story in the Middle Ages, when Virgil was often regarded as a sage, had the ascetic author of the Aeneid falling in love with the daughter of the emperor of Rome—in real life, according to the ancient Vita of Suetonius, Virgil had little interest in women and was called Parthenias for his fastidiousness (et ore et animo tarn probum, Vita 11). In the medieval tale, the lady tricks Virgil into entering a basket, which she then raises halfway to her window, suspending him there so that he may be mocked by the people of Rome the next day (according to one version of the story, he gets revenge on her the next day by requiring the townspeople to rekindle their fires by touching brands to her genitals). These humiliations of two famous sages were sometimes juxtaposed in art, wonderfully emblematic of the synthesis in satire of grave moralism and slapstick farce.22
According to the reasoning of Lucretius in De rerum natura, once a woman sets her designs on a man, he is trapped; the man may initially find a way to eventually resist the attraction of the woman, but she can find some way to break him down, to wrest his power away from him, like the ocean slowly succeeding in wearing down rocks by beating against them. Time is on the side of a persistent woman (cf. consuetudo concinnat amorem [custom paves the way for love], DRN 4.1283). For all his elaborate efforts to remain detached, the eligible man will eventually succumb to the woman, to the extent that she is able to emerge as an independently thinking and acting person able to assert her own needs and seize control of the courtship.
ANTI-SEX, ANTI-WOMEN, ANTI-MARRIAGE: SELF-DEFEATING VEHEMENCE?
The attacks of such major and influential satires as Juvenal's Satire 6 or Jerome's Against Jovinian rise to great heights in their rhetorical indignation but seem to collapse, at the end, under the weight of the powerful feelings they have aroused. The readiness of the satirists to acquiesce in defeat (cf. the backing down of Juvenal's narrator at the end of Sat.1.171-72) reflects the notion of the lyric poets (going back to Sappho) who record and lament the incredible and invincible power of love. The satirist eventually is forced to admit defeat against the power of women and sexual attraction—or at least ultimately to admit that in the conflict between men and women, the odds are heavily stacked against men.
The sometimes astonishing vehemence of the anti-marriage literature—the single-minded, concentrated, and obsessive tone of many of the attacks—requires some explanation going beyond literary intention and touching on the psychology of the male satirist. One kind of answer comes from anthropology. As Susan Treggiari says, “ ‘Wife jokes,’ like mother-in-law jokes, are only funny if there is some degree of male insecurity.”23
Part of the explanation for such insecurity in the case of the Roman satirists may be sought in the fear that women, in moving upward socially, may usurp the sexual and economic rights of men, a fear that stands out clearly in the second century and is certainly a factor in the nearly pathological obsession of the sixth satire of Juvenal and in the epigrams of his contemporary Martial.24 A variation on such fear—namely, the fear of sex with old women (cf. Horace Epodes 3, 8)—is explained by Amy Richlin as a possible “apotropaic satire that attempts to belittle and control the power of old women, pitting the phallus against the threat of sterility, death, and the chthonic forces.”25 In such ridicule, we have not moral indignation but loathing of the ugly and aged. But the old woman, as Richlin admits, is also seen as a sexual predator, particularly in her incarnation as a nymphomaniac witch, as in the case of Apuleius's Meroe in Golden Ass 1.13. In general the boundary violation that the satirists believe is perpetuated by sexually aroused women is well explained by an anthropologist. Mary Douglas, in her innovative study Purity and Danger, writes about the fear of sexual intercourse among primitive tribes, using language that can shed light on many of the authors considered in the present study. At issue is the idea of sexual attraction and intercourse as involving a boundary violation.
Female pollution in a society of this type is largely related to the attempt to treat women simultaneously as persons and as the currency of male transactions. Males and females are set off as belonging to distinct, mutually hostile species. Sexual antagonism inevitably results and this is reflected in the idea that each sex constitutes a danger to the other…. Indeed the story of the Garden of Eden touched a deep chord of sympathy in Lele male breasts. Once told by the missionaries, it was told and retold round pagan hearths with smug relish.26
This male fear of boundary violation by women comes out clearly in the myth of Pandora. As Froma Zeitlin notes, in this story “woman remains a separate and alien being, whose presence in the household he [the husband] both requires and resents.”27 In the economically conservative worldview of Hesiod, the presence of a woman in the household is that of a drone who reaps the toil of others into her own belly (Theog. 599). In the famous comparison by Semonides of Amorgus to various animals, the luxurious mare is the wife who drains away household expenses (70).
Closely related to the fear of boundary violation is the idea that for men, sexual intercourse can in certain cases (according to Galen) hasten the onset of disease28 or can bring about a diminution of virility. Peter Brown writes:
A powerful “fantasy of the loss of vital spirit” lay at the root of many late classical attitudes toward the male body. It is one of the many notions that gave male continence a firm foothold in the folk wisdom of the world in which Christian celibacy would soon be preached. The most virile man was the one who kept most of his vital spirit—the one, that is, who lost little or no seed.29
OVID: PUTTING A HARNESS ON THE ILLOGICAL
Ovid presents his Ars amatoria as a guidebook to courtship, attempting or pretending, in a series of precepts, to show the reader how lovemaking can be regulated. A central presupposition of his work is that amor is capable of being taught and learned, just as chariot driving or lyre playing can be taught: he maintains that arte regendus amor [love must be controlled by skill] (AA 1.4). That such a precept seems almost an oxymoron does not deter the poet but simply adds to his zeal. By demonstrating how it is possible for the suitor to influence the behavior of women by manipulating them, Ovid picks up on a theme from Lucretius De rerum natura 4. Yet where Lucretius teaches how to drive seductive women away, Ovid aims at seduction performed with the proper flair: as Karla Pollmann says (in chap. 5 of the present volume), the Ars “intends to teach how to refine, cultivate, and control a natural force.” At the start of the Ars (1.31-32), Ovid seeks to discourage noble women motivated by pudor from reading his book, maintaining that his target is only women of lower station. Yet despite this attempt by Ovid to excuse himself, it is clear that the satirical thrust of the Ars centers in part on its vision of the replacement or enhancement of marriage with illicit relationships. Thus this work was guaranteed to win the displeasure of the emperor Augustus, who wanted to strengthen family ties.
Ovid, who is seemingly the most happily heterosexual of Roman writers, tends to speak disparagingly of homosexuality (cf. AA 1.524, which jibes at the man of “doubtful sex” [male vir], who wants to have a man); he celebrates the love of man and woman in much of his poetry and has a genuine interest in the psychology of women. As Pollmann discusses in her contribution to this volume (chap. 5), the third book of the Ars is aimed at women in order to redress the imbalance of men getting all the good advice. This is an even-handed and even innovative strategy, which takes for granted the equal sexual desire and needs of women. Furthermore, “Ovid demands that women should not be stereotyped according to prejudices,”30 and he maintains that courtship requires the mastery of an ars precisely because the female psyche is a complex and subtle mechanism.
However, in a concession with wide implications for the antimatrimonial literature, Ovid also acknowledges the negative and dangerous side of love. In his Remedia amoris, he goes back to the imagery of Greek lyric poetry and tragedy when he speaks of love with the wrong partner as driving many to suicide (17-22). As the title of the poem suggests, the Remedia sees love as a “disease” (at least for the unhappy lover) whose wicked seeds must be crushed (81). For such imagery, Ovid could find a precedent not only in such Greek poets as Sappho (frags. 31, 47) and Euripides (the illness of Phaedra in Hippolytus) but also in such Latin love poets as Catullus, who bewails his own love as a sickness (taetrum hunc deponere morbum, 76), and especially Propertius (who describes the illness in his program piece, 1.1). Ovid the love doctor turns such lessons to his own prescription for a systematic remedy. However, he warns that trying to turn aside love after it has already begun is like calling in a doctor when it is too late to save the patient or trying to pull up a tree after it has already sunk its roots. Ovid's acknowledgment of a negative side of love, structurally balanced in a separate book against the positive advice of the Ars, was to have an important influence on such medieval writers as Marbod of Rennes and Andreas Capellanus, who balanced “good against bad” women in successive poems (Marbod) or books of essays (Andreas).
JUVENAL: LOSING CONTROL
Juvenal's sixth satire has been called “probably the most horrifying of all catalogues of female vices.”31 It has been convincingly argued by Braund that this satire “is best understood not as a general diatribe against women but as a dissuasion from marriage.”32 But while Braund's general point remains, the sixth satire is a good example of how difficult it is to separate misogamy from misogyny as a literary theme. The highly rhetorical components of the argument have long been noted: these include a debate with a fictitious reader, rhetorical questions, hyperbole, and reasoning by gradation.33 In an attempt to dissuade his friend Postumus from marrying, the narrator presents a slide show of horrors perpetuated by various hypothetical wives. Meanwhile, in a grim litany of over six hundred lines, Postumus seems to be imagined as actually entering into a marriage and undergoing various indignities, until he is finally enfeebled by a love philter (612) and murdered (659-60).
Juvenal includes many of the themes prominent in earlier antifeminist literature, especially female drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, and, above all, woman's exercise of power as a domina who wants to enslave, belittle, and enfeeble her male partner.34 All such vices are shown as subverting her marriage. Indeed, abuse of power is an important underlying theme of Juvenal's sixth satire, the result of a husband's being compelled to submit to the yoke of a wife who will dominate his life (ferre potes dominam, 30). A Roman wife is supposed to enter the manus, or control, of her husband; and part of the injunction made by the pronuba (matron who escorted one bride to her chamber) to the bride in the Roman wedding ceremony was apparently that she should remain morigera (compliant) to her husband—her property was given to him as a dowry.35 But the husbands envisioned by Juvenal have lost that control over their wives—and indeed over their own lives. Their wives have learned how to exercise imperium over them (imperat ergo viro, 224)—the same paradox deplored by Plautus in his Casina (409). Suicide is presented as a preferable alternative to submitting to a domina. Juvenal's husbands are passive to the point of cowardice, and their bold wives win out by their persistence (as Lucretius finally admits at the end of DRN 4) and by their increasingly bold behavior, which can lead to their murder of their husbands— Clytemnestra-style (i.e., by ax) if the men learn to fortify themselves against poison (Sat. 6.659-61).
Above all, Juvenal's approach is monolithic, meant to impress by its sheer size and repetition, in contrast with the complexity of Ovid. One point of view is hammered home, in the manner of rhetorical diatribe.
ENTER CHRISTIAN LITERATURE: NEW OPPORTUNITIES, NEW ATTACKS
The advent of Christianity appeared at first to open up new social opportunities for women. Several factors contributed to this change. Not only did Christians venerate the Virgin Mary as one of their primary patron saints; they pursued a cult of equality that broke down social, racial, and economic distinctions to the extent of seeming at times to put women on an equal footing with men before Christ.36 Indeed, already in the Gospels, women have a place of relative honor. Jesus, ignoring the surprise of his own disciples at his forwardness (John 4:27), spoke with women naturally and casually, seemingly without self-consciousness about their difference in sex; he had female followers, notably Mary Magdalene; in John 4, his first revelation of himself as the Messiah is made to the Samaritan woman at the well; and women are the first witnesses of the resurrection (Mark 16:1-8; John 20:1-18).
St. Paul, in his letters, adopts a serious tone on the subject of male-female relationships and becomes a kind of intermediary between Hellenism and Judaism. As Barbara Feichtinger argues in this volume (chap. 9), Paul displays “an eschatological indifference toward marriage as the institution of a transitory world.” Paul at times seems to imply that for those who had undergone baptism, the rite of entry into the church—the significance of social and sexual distinctions—has been wiped out by the Gospel of Christ and by the coming end of the world. Thus he makes the startling proclamation, “There is no longer Jew and Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Jesus Christ.”37 Now it was possible to become a child of Abraham merely by baptism, without being born a Jew or undergoing circumcision. Membership in the church—not belonging to a particular ethnic group and not membership in a particular city or nation— became the fundamental relationship between human beings.
Paul sees the “freedom” claimed by the Greek polis as an error, a mere self-indulgence, a wandering from the truth, which carries with it an enslavement to sin and brings its own punishment.38 In this he carries over some of the assumptions of Juvenal (especially in the third and sixth satires), who sees the Greeks as introducing outlandish Eastern customs (3.60-66), effeminacy (“you would think it's a woman speaking, not a mask,” 3.95-96), and immorality (6.191). The Christian freedom under the New Covenant is the alternative to the Hellenic licentiousness; it is in a new category, freedom from sin and the Law (Gal. 4:26; Romans 7:3) and enslavement to the will of God (Romans 6:22). In the diatribe against idolatry and sexual immorality that begins in Romans 1:18, Paul gives special prominence to the actions of homosexuals and lesbians, whom he finds revolting because they reverse the usual role of their sex. Both groups, especially the men, were frequent targets of the Roman satirists.39 Paul's diatribe in Romans 1-2 has the style of a rhetorician-satirist turned up at loudest volume, making use of proverbial sayings (1:18), paradoxical sententiae (“claiming to be wise, they became fools,” 1:22; “ … served the creature rather than the Creator,” 1:25), antitheses (“Invisible things … are seen,” 1:20; “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie,” 1:25), alliteration, asyndeton (1:29-31), and repetition of the same phrase leading to rhetorical climax (“God gave them up,” 1:24, 26, 28).40 Telling also are the rhetorician-satirist's direct engagement with the reader (“Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are …” 2:1; this recalls the satirist's repeated debate with Postumus in Juvenal's sixth satire) and posing of a series of insistent and indignant questions (2:1-4). The style of this biblical passage is common to declamatory satire (cf., e.g., Juvenal Sat. 6.37, 42, 44, 59, 75, 104, 105). Such a passage, by its effective use of exaggeration and by sweeping the reader away with its display of clever effects, sets the rhetorical stage for the diatribes of Tertullian and Jerome. The view of the Greek world as bankrupt and obsolete, as degenerate with a tendency toward self-indulgence, is an attitude that Paul shares with Juvenal. The Greeks, in this view, are not the giants of the classical world but degenerate tricksters and libertines whose libertine attitude is corrupting the traveler to their land.
If the rite of baptism breaks down national distinctions and makes us all children of Abraham through Jesus Christ, so the breaking down of distinctions must extend to the body and further blur distinctions between male and female. This is made explicit by Paul in the triumphant declaration that unites Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female in Jesus Christ (Gal. 3:28).
In some respects, early Christianity gave a push to women, starting them on the road to equality with men; marriage was even exalted as symbolically representing the love of Christ and the church. For the first time, women were offered a personal choice between marriage and celibacy. Moreover, the pro-celibacy Christian literature often sought to influence this choice by discouraging them from the bearing of children, the function that probably most dramatically distinguishes them from men. Those women who removed themselves from marriage and childbearing, according to reasoning in the early church, went even further toward social equality, and “a celibate woman thus became, in moral terms, a man.”41
In New Testament Scripture, we find a condemnation of adultery, divorce, fornication, and homosexuality that reflects and, in the case of divorce, even goes beyond the conservatism of Jewish Scripture.42 St. Paul does allow fornication within marriage, and he sees it as a normal part of that relationship (1 Cor. 7:3-5); elsewhere, he goes further, exalting the love of husband for wife by comparing it with that of Christ and the church (Eph. 5:25). The influential early Christian writing The Shepherd of Hermas (early second century A.D.) follows Paul in seeing Christian marriage as a way to avoid temptations to immorality (Shepherd, chap. 29). Though marriage may bring this negative benefit of preventing sexual immorality, Paul does not consistently ascribe any inherent positive value to marriage, and he would prefer that all stay unmarried, as he is (1 Cor. 7:7-8). An important subtext for Paul's judgment on social issues is that he sees the world as rapidly coming to an end, so new commitments or changes in relationships are discouraged.43 In the Gospels, too, the commitment to the married state, along with other family relationships, is subordinated to the commitment to the kingdom of God (Luke 12:51-53; cf. Matt. 19:27-30), and those who marry and are given in marriage are typed as “children of this world” (Luke 20:23-26). Thus Paul's position on the issue of celibacy is moderate and conciliatory, if occasionally ambivalent, as is the message of the Gospels. However, regardless of how biblical discussions of marriage were interpreted, the virginity of Mary and the presumed virginity of Jesus himself were there to be held up as examples; a growing asceticism is seen already in the later first century in the exaltation of virgins in the passage (unusual for the Bible) at Revelation 14:4, where the 144,000 who have been redeemed from the earth are “virgins who have not defiled themselves with women.”
In postbiblical Christian writing, such as The Acts of Paul and Thecla (perhaps as early as the second century A.D.), the slanting of Scripture toward chastity has begun full force. Paul has become a fervid advocate of chastity; his version of the Beatitudes begins, “Blessed are the poor in heart, for they shall see God; blessed are those who keep the flesh chaste, for they shall become a temple of God; blessed are the continent, for God shall speak with them….” (Acts of Paul and Thecla 5), and he urges that those who have wives be as those not having them. Thecla, who hears Paul's message, abandons her fiancé and travels with Paul, much as Paula and Eustochium were to do with St. Jerome centuries later: “The Fathers begin to vie with one another in exalting the state of virginity.”44
The story of the Fall is often interpreted as casting a more negative light on women than on men, and the implications of this lesson were worked out by the earliest commentators. Philo of Alexandria had already argued at length in his Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis II that Adam represents the mind (nous) while Eve represents sense perception (aisthesis), the latter of which is bound to the corporeal.45 The serpent, according to Philo, stands for pleasure, with which Eve is closely allied (Philo 2.71-74). Philo's lead is often picked up in Christian discussions of the Fall. The deutero-Pauline 1 Timothy 14 has already shifted the blame for the Fall away from the man: “and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (cf. Romans 5:18-19). St. Ambrose found “an allegory in the Fall, whereby the serpent is ‘a type of the pleasures of the body,’ woman ‘stands for our senses,’ and the man ‘for our minds.’ ”46
PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN SYNTHESIS
For a scholar such as Augustine, the Bible became the basis for a new Christian culture, a treasure house of stories and knowledge rivaling the old pagan classics, and a book that one could easily study alone from boyhood to old age without exhausting its riches.47 What was not so clear was whether the Bible really preached a homogenous message on, for example, the subject of marriage and virginity. While it remained difficult to turn to Scripture for a clear precedent in the exaltation of virginity as an ideal state for humankind, early biblical commentators sought ways to find allegories and warnings about women in the stories, as part of an ongoing effort to harmonize or explain away differences between the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions. In his treatises On the Good of Marriage and On Holy Virginity, Augustine took the decisive step of arguing that virginity could be praised without denigrating marriage, extolling the goodness of conception and birth against the extreme asceticism put forth by Jerome and others. He extolled the goodness of the sexual act, if only when used for reproduction.48
Misogynistic overtones in the Bible were sought out, exaggerated, and distorted by medieval Christian commentators, who tended also to see such Old Testament characters as Samson, David, and Solomon as providing negative lessons against marriage by exemplifying the dangers of coming under the power of a woman.49 From the second century onward, there were groups of Christians who preached that Christ had come to earth to deliver mankind from sexuality and marriage.50 It was claimed that Jesus had taught Salome that death would hold sway “as long as you women bear children” (cf. Matt. 20:20-22, Gospel of Thomas 61:2-5). St. Jerome (at least in his satiric writing) did not hesitate to interpret out of context Matthew 24:19, “woe to them that are with child and to them that give suck in those days,” as “a condemnation … of the swelling womb and wailing infancy, the fruit as well as the work of marriage” (Against Jovinian 1.12; cf. On the Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary 23). Augustine, Jerome, and their successors found it easy not only to include pagan and classical exempla in the same treatise but to put them side by side and seamlessly move from one to the other. A single example from the French literature of the High Middle Ages will demonstrate this vividly. If we open the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose to Jean de Meung's remonstration on women as spoken by the jealous husband (9079-360), we find, in the space of a few lines, the deceitfulness of women as proved by citations from Juvenal's sixth satire, followed closely by Hercules and Samson cited together as examples of husbands dominated by their wives.
TERTULLIAN: THE LOATHING OF SEX
Tertullian, among the earliest of the Latin fathers and “the first of the great Christian misogynists,”51 is an important transitional figure between the pagan and Christian tradition. Christopher Dawson describes him as thoroughly “Roman in his thought and his ideals” and as “the last representative of the great Roman moralists, like Lucretius and Juvenal and Tacitus.” According to Dawson, Tertullian's “moral indignation” made him “the champion of the Christian faith against the corruption of the pagan world.”52
Women are an important focus of Tertullian's moral indignation. He is capable of addressing women as “the devil's gate, surrender of that tree, first to violate divine law” (De cultu feminarum 1). His treatises on women, sexuality, and marriage (including De cultu feminarum, Ad uxorem, De exhortatione castitatis, De virginibus velandis, De monogamia, and De pudicitia) display the results of his legal and rhetorical training. Consider a passage like De monogamia 3.2:
Yes, you say, but the right to marry still remains. True, it does remain, …. it is already partially abrogated, however, in so far as continence is said to be preferable, It is good, he says, for a man not to touch a woman. Therefore, it is bad to touch one. For nothing is opposed to the “good” except the “bad.”
Here we see the characteristic devices of the diatribe satirists in miniature, including engagement with the reader, pointed antithesis, and inexorable logic that quotes phrases out of context and admits to no compromise; the only allowable answers involve extremes.
Tertullian strengthens and exaggerates to the point of caricature Paul's preference for celibacy, since even marriage, he says, “in the shameful act which constitutes its essence, is the same as fornication” (De exh. castitatis 9.4). Tertullian's pro-celibacy views were of great influence in the early church, not least because his writings concerning marriage and chastity were extensively used as a source (usually without acknowledgment) by St. Jerome. Jerome, in his controversial but highly influential pamphlet Against Jovinian, copied many of the ideas and rhetorical flourishes from Tertullian for his refutation of the “heresies” of the monk Jovinian. It is as a satirist that Jerome, as Peter Brown cuttingly remarks, “placed the sayings of Jesus Christ on the same footing as the authors of Roman Comedy.”53
JEROME: THE OPPOSITE OF SEX
Using all his rhetorical skills, Jerome, in Against Jovinian, turns to the views on marriage by St. Paul. Jerome espouses these views with enthusiasm but sometimes turns with impatience against Paul, when, in Jerome's view, Paul has failed to follow his arguments through to their logical conclusion.
Thus, on the whole, we get in Jerome's treatise a perspective that is remarkably rich and varied in its sources but whose point of view is also varied to the point of incoherence. Women are at times denounced as inferior partners, but faithful women are held up as examples to prove the superiority of virginity (or fidelity or chastity). Part of the reason for the confusion, certainly, is Jerome's inability to decide whether his primary target is marriage itself (from which both men and women must be dissuaded; thus he would be assuming a mixed audience) or the female sex (in which case he would be assuming only a male audience and attempting to polarize the men against women). By choosing such a wide target—by attempting to reconcile pagans and Christians, Old and New Testament, passages in favor of marriage with those against it or neutral—he achieves a narrative tone that is now reasoned, now hysterical, and finally rather sad and isolated, as the old churchman laments the enormous task of wiping out sin and watches the events of history sweep past him. Despite Jerome's extreme—even sometimes hysterical—views of female lechery and the perils of marriage, he himself, it can be argued, actually elevates the debate about male-female relations by his allowance of women into the audience and by offering them some of the benefits of celibacy that in the pagan world had only been available to men—namely, the ability to pursue spiritual goals through detachment from the cares of a sexual relationship, by remaining in one's room alone and reading Scripture (Jerome Ep. 22, Letter to Eustochium 24-25).
The voices of Jerome and Tertullian were ultimately not the definitive and final word in the church's position on marriage; their authority was overridden by the treatises of St. Augustine, which, while continuing to exalt the state of celibacy, attempt to elevate marriage to the special position it often occupies in Scripture, starting with God's admonition in Genesis 1:28 to “be fruitful and multiply.” While marriage was acceptable, virginity was preferable: “‘Honorable is marriage in all, and the bed undefiled.’ And this we do not so call a good, as that it is a good in comparison of fornication. … Therefore marriage and fornication are not two evils, whereof the second is worse; but marriage and continence are two goods, whereof the second is better” (De bono conjugali 8). Marriage was good not merely for the sake of the begetting of children but because it provides natural society between the sexes (De bono conjugali 3). Yet chastity is a higher good; indeed, if it were somehow possible that all marriages would entirely cease, “much more speedily would the City of God be filled, and the end of the world hastened” (De bono conjugali 10). Augustine's concession to the good of marriage provided an important corrective to Jerome's extreme position that not only seemed to imply a moral equation between marriage and fornication but even condemned the begetting of children, which Augustine listed at the forefront of the benefits of marriage.54
FOR AND AGAINST
Among the priesthood or those intending a career in the priesthood (which theoretically required celibacy), there was a constant circulation and reworking of misogynistic material, partly as a show of learning and partly as part of a campaign by the church “to establish a fully celibate priesthood.55 In his Liber decem capitulorum, Marbod of Rennes (ca. 1035-1123) displays some of the ambiguity of Jerome (and repeats many of Jerome's examples from Against Jovinian) by writing successive chapters on bad and good woman (De meretrice and De matrona). In the earlier work, woman's evil is almost cosmic, the greatest of “the traps that the scheming enemy has set through the world's paths and plains,” and the examples given are balanced between the Bible (Eve, Lot's daughters, Delilah, Salome) and classical literature, especially Ovid (Eriphyle, Clytemnestra, Procne, Helen of Troy). Jerome's sailing metaphor is picked up in section 84, but now the ship is a bizarre blending of the church and of the ship of Odysseus; the passenger must stay fastened to the timber (the cross) and block up his ears with “sound doctrine” in order to avoid being shipwrecked by the alluring songs of the Sirens.
The second treatise by Marbod, De matrona, praises the constancy, modesty, and chastity of women; this positive picture, contradicting the view of the earlier treatise, is formally parallel to the antithesis of Ovid's tour de force (Ars amatoria balanced by Remedia amoris) but is also matched by Jerome, even if unconsciously so, in that part of Jerome's Against Jovinian (1.41-44) in which examples of female constancy, bravery, and chastity seem oddly juxtaposed with negative examples of women.
In the twelfth century, Hugh Primas of Orleans, in his three Oxford poems against harlots (poems 6-8), presents himself or his satiric persona as one who has been wronged by a harlot, Flora (Witke 1970, 200-232). In poem 6, Flora has abandoned him for another man and mocks him in his grief (Set tu mendosa rides me flente dolosa [while I weep you laugh, full of lies and tricks], 28). This theme widens in poem 7, where the greed and fickleness of women is decried. In a kind of mock consolation, the reader is advised to be sapiens (wise), to face adversity with pectore forti (a brave heart, 7), and to endure the vicissitudes of fate with patience; he is warned that women will stick by him only so long as his money holds out. Poem 8 contrasts the sordid home life of a meretrix with the elegance she affects when she is with a young client. The poems alternate between self-pity and mock consolation for a narrator who has trusted a whore. Their realism, their worldly cynicism, and the frank admission by the narrator of his personal experience in the lifestyle against which he is warning make these poems memorable for their “subjectivism and self-pity”56 and their combination of lyricism with satiric bite at the heartlessness of women.
CAPELLANUS S COMPLEX POINT OF VIEW
Andreas Capellanus was certainly influenced by Ovid (whom he frequently quotes) in the structure of his De amore.57 His three-book plan seems to have as its model the three books of Ovid's Ars amatoria (except that Andreas's third book corresponds more naturally to Ovid's Remedia amoris). Andreas's work is a remarkable example of the complexity that can result from the influence of Ovid (as opposed to the more monolithic approach, say, of Jerome): he attempts to see courtship from a woman's perspective and offers a balancing of views and a series of dialogues between men and women of varying social stations. The third book of De amore is a diatribe against love (like Ovid's Remedia amoris), teaching the reader reasons for falling out of the love into which he has been enticed by the earlier books. Using scriptural as well as classical authority, Andreas's third book argues, in the old tradition that opposes philosophy and love, that the sapiens should renounce all acts of love (3.3) and that the lover cannot concentrate because of constant fear and jealousy (3.14-16). As so often occurs in the anti-sex literature, Andreas makes an easy transition from the arguments against passion itself (3.1-64)—arguments that might be applicable to either sex—to passages denouncing the supposed evil of women in particular (3.65-112). Then, after listing in detail stock feminine vices (inconstancy, drunkenness, lechery, and jealousy are only a few), he finally concludes, with a broad stroke that manages to combine echoes both of Juvenal's sixth satire (nullane … tibi digna videtur? 6.161) and of the Bible (Ecclesiastes 7.28), femina nulla bona (3.109).
MAP: PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN WITTILY COMBINED
After Jerome, the writer having the most widespread influence among all the medieval satirists against marriage was Walter Map, a diplomat of the twelfth century and at one time archdeacon of Oxford.58 He wrote (perhaps in the 1170s) A Dissuasion of Valerius to Rufinus the Philosopher, that He Should Not Take a Wife. This treatise originally circulated separately and had a life of its own but was eventually incorporated by Map into his De nugis curialium (Courtiers' trifles), becoming the most finished and crafted part of that work. The Dissuasio is alluded to, for example, under the name of “Valerie,” in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's prologue (672). Two important sources of this work are Ovid's Metamorphoses and Jerome's Against Jovinian (it was sometimes considered a part of the latter and copied along with texts of Jerome), but as the treatise's recent editors have argued, Map juggles a variety of other sources as well; for example, the dramatic form of the work (an address to a marrying friend) recalls the situation of Juvenal's Satire 6. In the final section of Map's essay, he “bounces back and forth between Christian and classical argumentation,” and “mythological references alternate with passages redolent with biblical diction.”59 As was the case with Jerome, Map seeks to arrive not so much at a specifically Christian truth as at a set of principles universal for all humankind, pagan as well as Christian. With wonderfully mixed metaphors, Map argues that marriage is the honeyed poison served by the cupbearers of Babel, which goes down sweetly but “at last will bite like an adder and inflict a wound that no antidote can cure.”60
Walter Map's Dissuasion, though unconventional as a piece of Christian moralizing, exerted a wide influence on clerics; it ends on a note that is already familiar to us from Jerome—that the reader should learn to imitate the lifestyle of virtuous pagans, especially philosophers who trained themselves to abstain from marriage. But again like Jerome, Map seems very doubtful of the efficacy of his own advice. He points out sadly that few things are impossible to a woman, and he concludes with a prayer that Rufinus may not be deceived by the deceits of the “Almighty Female.”61
CHAUCER AND THE MARRIAGE DEBATE
In the character of the Wife of Bath, Chaucer grapples with the anti-marriage views of St. Jerome and Map and perhaps also responds to other antifeminist tirades closer to Chaucer's time, such as the Corbaccio of his older contemporary Boccaccio.62 Much of the prologue to the “Wife of Bath's Tale” engages in a close debate with Jerome, particularly on the issue of biblical interpretation of marriage and the role of women. The debate continues and seems to reach a resolution in the “Franklin's Tale,” where Against Jovinian is again an important source, in this case for Dorigen's lament.
Nearly a century ago, in his famous essay “Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage,” George Kittredge described how the “Franklin's Tale” provides a resolution for Chaucer's marriage debate. In particular, Kittredge believed that the Franklin finds a solution for the demand to dominate made so often by the wives of the satirical anti-marriage literature.
It was the regular theory of the Middle Ages that the highest type of chivalric love was incompatible with marriage, since marriage brings in mastery, and mastery and love cannot abide together. This view the Franklin boldly challenges. Love can be consistent with marriage, he declares. Indeed, without love (and perfect gentle love) marriage is sure to be a failure. The difficulty about mastery vanishes when mutual love and forbearance are made the guiding principles of the relation between husband and wife.63
Chaucer's use of Jerome's anti-marriage treatise (particularly in the Wife of Bath's prologue—as I argue in chapter 12 in this volume—and in the “Franklin's Tale”) comes to grips with his arguments in a devastating way, correcting and moving beyond them to a higher concept of the equality between partners and the validity of marriage.
REFORMATION: FAITH AND WORKS
Chaucer begins to see in marriage a possible alternative to the specter of domination by wives that is so effectively raised by Jerome. However, in the Reformation, with its vast new perspective on the nature and limitations of a Christian life, theorists developed ideas on the subject of chastity and marriage that were intended to blunt the polarizing effect of Jerome's theories. Erasmus minimized Jerome's attacks on marriage by pointing out that they were written before marriage had become one of the seven sacraments of the church. Erasmus believed that the Christian church had to be renewed by a return to its sources, which included the early patristic writers as well as the Bible. He stressed the example for Christians of Jerome's scholarship and learning and ranked Jerome's moral teachings of secondary importance.
The Protestants, in contrast, found less to praise in Jerome. Luther, in his lectures on 1 Corinthians 7, which Jerome notoriously had read as a warning against marriage, naturally defends the advice of “better to marry than to burn” and types Jerome as one who stresses works rather than faith.
St. Jerome, who glorifies chastity and praises it most solemnly, confesses that he was unable to subdue his flesh with fasts or wakes, so that his chastity became for him an unimaginable plague. Oh how much precious time he must have wasted with carnal thoughts! … You see, the man lay in heat and should have taken a wife. There you see what “aflame with passion” means. For he was of the number that belong in marriage, and he wronged himself and caused himself much trouble by not marrying.64
Elsewhere, Luther goes even further, arguing that Jerome should not be numbered among the doctors of the church and saying: “I know no writer whom I hate as much as I do Jerome. All he writes about is fasting and virginity.”65 As the debate on marriage and virginity begins to enter the modern world, the emotional and intellectual level of the discussion begins to sound more reasoned, less desperate; the stridency of the old satirists begins to soften and take on a lighter humor.
Notes
1. Braund 1996, 44. See also Richlin 1983, 81, 143.
2. De Decker (1913, 23) refers to his “critique general des moeurs feminines.”
3. E.g., Mason (1968, 127) writes on Juvenal, “The total effect … is to diminish our concern for the reality of what he is saying.” On role-playing in satire, see Braund 1996, esp. 1-9, “The Masks of Satire.”
4. This is argued in Hanna and Lawler 1997, 6 n. 14.
5. Braund 1992, 72, 82.
6. P. Brown 1988, 10.
7. See Ferrante [1975] 1985, 7.
8. See Edwards 1993, 43.
9. Wilson and Makowski 1990, 34.
10. Braund 1992, 72, 82, and Anderson 1982, esp. 293-361, “Lascivia vs. Ira: Martial and Juvenal.”
11. See Edwards 1993, 5.
12. Kenney 1962, 36.
13. See Smith-Werner 1996; the examples given there include Catullus 10 and the trickster scene from Plautus's Trinummus (843ff).
14. See Treggiari 1991, 96.
15. Cf. G. Williams 1958, 18.
16. Walter Map De nugis curialium 4.3 (Hanna and Lawler 1997, 135); cf. Jerome Ad. lav. 1.48.
17. Wilson and Makowski 1990, 5.
18. Foucault 1986, 150-64.
19. Treggiari 1991, 218.
20. Jerome Eusebii Pamphili Chronia Cañones; see Kenney [1971] 1994, 6-9.
21. Quoted in S. Smith 1995, 76.
22. See S. Smith 1995, 156.
23. Treggiari 1991, 210 n. 25.
24. See Sullivan 1991, 206; Rudd 1986, 204.
25. Richlin 1983, 113.
26. Douglas 1966, 152-53.
27. Zeitlin 1995, 59.
28. See Foucault 1986, 119.
29. P. Brown 1988, 19.
30. Pollmann, chap. 5 in this volume.
31. Rogers 1966, 38.
32. Braund 1992, 85.
33. See De Decker 1913, 112.
34. See W. S. Smith 1980 for my analysis of the sixth satire as a kind of dramatic skit, passing through the stages of courtship, disillusionment, enfeeblement, and murder.
35. See Treggiari 1991, 29.
36. See, e.g., McLeod 1991, 36.
37. Galatians 3:28. Cf. P. Brown 1988, 49-50.
38. Romans 1:27. See also Van Leeuwen 1964, 140.
39. On the rare attacks on lesbians in the ancient literature, see Richlin 1983, 134.
40. For a list of such devices, see De Decker 1913, 154-72.
41. McLeod 1991, 38.
42. See Grant 1970, 270.
43. See, e.g., 1 Cor. 15:24; Wilson and Makowski 1990, 36.
44. Giordani 1944, 219.
45. See Bloch 1991, 29-30.
46. Blamires, Pratt, and Marx 1992, 3.
47. See P. Brown 1967, 263.
48. See Clark 1991.
49. See Rogers 1966, 5.
50. See P. Brown 1988, 85.
51. F. F Church in Scholer 1993, 200.
52. Dawson 1967, 112. Translations of Tertullian in this chapter are from Le Saint 1951.
53. P. Brown 1988, 376. Cf. Jerome Ep. 54.9; Adv. Iov. 1.1.
54. This position is argued at length in W. S. Smith 1997. Translations from Augustine's De bono conjugali are by C. L. Cornish (1994).
55. Blamires, Pratt, and Marx 1992, 4.
56. Witke 1970, 225.
57. See Parry [1941] 1969, 18.
58. See Hanna and Lawler 1997, 44.
59. Hanna and Lawler 1997, 51.
60. Hanna and Lawler 1997, 123.
61. Hanna and Lawler 1997, 147.
62. See the translation and essay on Boccaccio's Corbaccio by A. Cassell (1975).
63. Kittredge 1911-12, 467.
64. Quoted in Oswald 1955, 28:28.
65. Quoted in Rice 1985, 62.